America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Mollie Hemingway, Ed. ·
May 27, 2011 at 6:24am
Gallup is out with a new polling showing that "Americans perceive that there is a large U.S. gay population -- one far larger than is likely reality."
It's almost absurd. No, it's completely absurd. While the actual population that identifies as gay or lesbian represents around 2% of the total population, Americans estimate that some one in four are gay -- and young people and females think it's close to one in three!
Why is this? Is this a failure of the preachy culture (Glee), the mainstream media (constant editorializing against traditional marriage), or an education system that systematically removes rational abilities from the students? Or what? How could this poll show such absurd results?
- Comment (42)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (6)
Comments :
Mar '11
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
I blame Kenneth.
Jan '11
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
The media controls the political and cultural agenda, but it's not an honest broker. It can be manipulated. It can be captured by focused minorities to promote their minority agenda as if that agenda was really the majority.
Every Public Relations department in every organization is dedicated to manipulating the media to its advantage.
Bluntly, the general public measures the importance of an issue, including the scope, with the amount of media attention focused on it. But that's because it trusts the media to broker the national agenda impartially.
This is proof that the media isn't impartial.
Jun '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Yesterday I had to endure a day of jury duty. If my panel was representative of our population as a whole, I can tell you that most people simply lack critical thinking skills. And they are lazy. I was the only one of twelve who took the time to examine medical data offered to us by the defense attorney. The numbers, which were generated by diagnostic computer, were unimpeachable. Machines don't lie. Still, five idiots went with the prosecuting attorney for a 7 to 5 hung jury.
May '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
I vaguely recall being taught in a college class that something like 10% of people are gay. I've heard the same repeated by many gay advocates.
But most of the blame lies with TV and movie producers, who feel a need to include gays in as many scripts as possible. One of the reasons I stopped watching TV almost entirely (Netflix selections being the exceptions) is because it's hard to find anything on TV these days that doesn't push liberal politics, with the "Yay, gays!" stuff being the most prominent.
Jun '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Pop culture is top heavy with gay performers. Virtually every sitcom or tv show has the stock witty gay character. I'm not surprised that young people overestimate the number of gays.
Also take into account the school systems. Look at the literature choices. Artful, skilled writing is no longer the requirement for inclusion in a survey of literature. It's all agenda driven, with careful diversity quotas, designed to show examle after example of how America oppresses gays, latinos, immigrants, the poor, veterans, etc.
Is there a high school in America that doesn't have a gay/lesbian/bi/transgendered club? With the mission to raise awareness of their discrimination? Probably not.
Jan '11
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
We have Dr. Kinsey to blame for a lot of it. His "scientific" surveys in the 40s and 50s where he used prison populations as his "representative" sample of the American public generated the 10% number Aaron refers to. That number was run with by people with a subversive, misguided agenda without examination and inflation has taken hold since it seems.
Jul '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
I wouldn't be surprised if the same respondents estimated that anywhere from 50%-90% of the population aren't gay.
It's tough to estimate if you can't perform basic calculations.
Aug '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
I think it just has something to do with how people think about numbers. This may be related to the availability heuristic, which would be consistent with media prominence but also with the marked (i.e., we don't assume it as the default) nature of the identity. You can also find surveys where respondents give wildly inflated estimates for the black population or Jewish population.
Jul '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
You can even find journalists that give wildly inflated estimates for the terrorist population amongst Muslims.
Dec '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
All of the above. People tend to be statistically ignorant, which the Left then exploits in the name of science -- /all genuflect. "Your risk of cancer is doubled if you eat conventionally grown produce!" "Atmospheric CO2 levels have increased xx% since the Industrial Revolution." "Second-hand smoke causes 50,000 deaths a year!" Whatever.
But mostly it is explained by the lefty culture/media in which we're stewed. Speaking from my own experience, I'd say females believe one in three people are gay because they're watching HGTV. Not only is the designer host gay -- every third couple he works for is same-sex. I'm only surprised the number isn't two in three.
Hugh Hewitt spoke with the author of Your Teacher Said What? yesterday. He wrote the book with his 5th grade daughter to try to teach her the virtues of capitalism. Hewitt and the author spoke about what I've noticed for years; children's movies are almost uniformly anti-capitalist and anti-human (Wall-E is the perfect example). When will we conservatives learn, it's the culture, stupid.
Nov '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Not only all of the above, but we also have a society that encourages us to act on every idle feeling, and the confusion of love and lust, and attractiveness. For example, a young man might notice something attractive in another male. In the past, he might try to emulate that attractive thing in himself as something he wants to be, or he would repress that thought as something inappropriate, and never think on it again. Now, though, that attractive thing would be instantly linked, in the twisted mind of today, with that male himself being attractive. And if he finds males attractive, they must be sexually attractive. And if males are sexually attractive to this young man, then he must be homosexual (or at the very least bi), and he must act upon this impulse.
Also, the common thought among young libs is that if one is "homophobic," it's most likely a cover for latent homosexuality. Since they perceive a lot of homophobia, that must mean there's a proportionate amount of (closet) homosexuals.
May '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Humza Ahmad
You can even find journalists that give wildly inflated estimates for the terrorist population amongst Muslims.
If you include people who verbally and materially support terrorists, that estimate might not be so far-fetched. Perhaps it's only poor, oppressed peoples being suckered in by state-controlled media and thugs, but there seems no shortage of terrorist sympathizers in the OIC nations. How many support driving Israeli Jews into the sea?
I don't want to derail Mollie's thread, but I didn't want to let that go unaddressed.
Apr '11
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
There's a lot of statistical cluelessness out there. People also think that foreign aid makes up a quarter of the U.S. budget and that rich people have a lower tax rate than poor people.
May '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
I blame the Jews. That's only partly a joke, and Potato Gal is right. Like Jews, gays are more prominent in entertainment and pop culture. They punch above their demographic weight in highly visible fields. We see them on screen a lot. So they're assumed to be a large portion of the population. Which they aren't, except in certain smallish geographical areas that can be measured in blocks.
Does this count as a conspiracy theory?
I'm cool with gay marriage. But don't care. It's the single most trivial issue facing the nation, on both sides, as it affects nobody's life except their self-image. Which I don't care about.
May '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
In a similar vein, I assume most women are hot and adept with firearms.
Sep '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
A mathematician (!) I know once put that figure on his Facebook page. When I questioned its accuracy and sourcing, he admitted that he wasn't sure about either but it was "for a good cause." Really.
It's propaganda, often spread by people who should (and really do) know better.
Aug '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Humza Ahmad
You can even find journalists that give wildly inflated estimates for the terrorist population amongst Muslims. · May 27 at 7:33am
Exactly. I'd similarly bet that if you asked people what proportion of commercial flights originating and/or landing in the US are hijacked or bombed by terrorists that you'd get a lot of people saying something like 1% whereas the true answer is probably closer to 1 in 10 million.
I say again, this has less to do with any kind of bias in the media than with biases in our own cognition.
Jul '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
Aaron Miller
Humza Ahmad
You can even find journalists that give wildly inflated estimates for the terrorist population amongst Muslims.
If you include people who verbally and materially support terrorists, that estimate might not be so far-fetched. Perhaps it's only poor, oppressed peoples being suckered in by state-controlled media and thugs, but there seems no shortage of terrorist sympathizers in the OIC nations. How many support driving Israeli Jews into the sea?
I don't want to derail Mollie's thread, but I didn't want to let that go unaddressed. · May 27 at 8:26am
Aaron, my comment wasn't about the definition of terrorist, but about the fact that Beck clearly pulled the 10% number out of thin air, much like most liberals pull the percentage of homosexuals in the US population out of thin air.
Aug '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
dogsbody
A mathematician (!) I know once put that figure on his Facebook page. When I questioned its accuracy and sourcing, he admitted that he wasn't sure about either but it was "for a good cause." Really.
It's propaganda, often spread by people who should (and really do) know better. · May 27 at 9:06am
This would be scarier if your friend was a demographer or sociologist.
Mathematics is an analytic field not an empirical field --- they know logic not facts. Not only that, but they aren't necessarily very good at ordinary arithmetic. There are (perhaps apocryphal) stories about mathematicians taking several minutes to figure out how to split a check.
Aug '10
Re: America Loses Touch With Reality, Gay Edition
It wouldn't surprise me if in another generation a quarter of the population did turn out to be gay, or at least bisexual. It's always been obvious to me that a tiny number of people, probably under 1% (mostly women), are biologically homosexual, but that it's possible to steer many other people (mostly men) either way through social influences. Since liberals have chosen homosexuals as the mascots of their own superior tolerance and enlightenment, being gay has come to be considered by a large chunk of the culture as positively cool. Feminism doesn't help, either, given its perpetual haranguing of heterosexuals for their stone-age attitudes about gender differences, and given the diminution of opposite-sex attraction that results from the active suppression of gender differences.