KINSEY SICKS

Marcus, Michele Bachmann Lowball The Number Of Gays—And They’re Right

A news video went live on CNN, Huffington Post and numerous other outlets that showed Michele and Marcus Bachmann dismissing the statistic that 10% of the population is gay as “a myth.”

The loving couple met up with Kathy Schnell at a campaign stop in Iowa, where Schnell asked them to autograph her “gay-friendly Iowan” sign. “I wonder if you’re aware that 10% of the population is gay,” Schnell then said. “And if you have 28 children, then 2.8 of those kids are very likely gay.”

“Well, that’s according to the Kinsey Report,” Michele replied. “Your facts are wrong,” chimed in Marcus.

“That not valid?” Schnell asked.

“No, it’s not at all. That’s been a myth for many years,” Marcus replied.

As much as we want to believe everything that comes out of the Bachmanns’ mouths is horse manure, they’ve got their facts right this time.

Kinsey’s “10%” figure has been widely discredited or described as a misinterpretation.

BoxTurtleBulletin, a LGBT news site, explains:

In fact, [Kinsey’s] findings weren’t so clean and straightforward, partly because Kinsey himself disapproved of using clean, dichotomous categories like homosexual or heterosexual to describe individuals. His only concern was sexual behavior, the only measure that he felt was reliable. To help define this behavior, Kinsey created what has become known as the Kinsey scale, which ranked sexual behavior from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual. X’s were assigned to those who were asexual or sexually inexperienced.

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey reported that 37% of the men had at least one homosexual experience. As for the famous “ten percent” figure, it was only one of several statistics that Kinsey cited on the incidence of homosexuality.

Those stats include that 13% of the population has more homosexual leanings than heterosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.

10% of the males are more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. (Gee, interview inmates and you find out they’ve had almost exclusively gay sex for at least three years. Shocking!)

8% of the males are exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.

4% of the white males are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after the onset of adolescence.

While it’s still groundbreaking for putting forth the idea that sexuality was a perfectly acceptable subject to conduct credible scientific research on, Kinsey’s report used sampling and reporting methods that were severely flawed. (He was a entomologist, after all, not a pollster.) His pool of interviewees draw heavily from Indiana, for example, and he favored professionals age 35 and under. Given the uptight era he was working in, Kinsey had to seek out gays—at Mattachine Society meetings, gay bars and prisons. Not exactly a random sample.

So the Bachmanns know their Kinsey. That doesn’t give them license to discriminate against the LGBT community. Human rights is not a numbers game: Even using the most conservative estimates, there are more gays and lesbians in America than Jews. Should Jews not be allowed to marry, serve in the military or teach in schools? (We’re afraid to even ask that question to some people in the Bachmann camp.)

Most perplexing, though, is why the Bachmanns are trying to downplay the number of gay people. Without plenty of us, how else will Bachmann line his coffers treat confused souls at his reparative therapy center?

 

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