OR WERE THEY NEVER REALLY THERE?

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GAY POPULATION COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET

As we all know by now, the traditional marriage amendments on the ballots of eleven states helped generate one of the largest turnouts in American history. The opponents of gay marriage triumphed in all eleven states, from 56% in Oregon to better than 80% in Mississippi. The moral traditionalists, it seems clear, were quite concerned about this issue, and they came out to say so.

Speaking of "coming out," there's an interesting bit of data buried in the piles of post-election information that has been made available. See if you spot it:

Are you [the voter] gay, lesbian, or bisexual? (4% Y; 96% N)

YES -- Bush 23% Kerry 77%
NO -- Bush 53% Kerry 46%

Yeah, yeah, we knew Bush wasn't going to get this vote. It's no surprise that Kerry got 77% of the gay vote.

But, wait.

The percentage of gays in the ELECTORATE is--what? Four percent? FOUR?

How many zillions of times have we heard it. "Ten percent of all Americans are gay. And they are from all walks of life, from every income level, every race, in every region of the country…."

If that's actually TRUE, then ten percent of the VOTERS should be gay, as well.

Instead, we have a percentage much, much closer to the estimate usually offered by pro-family groups--3% of women, 5% of men. The ten percent figure, they contend, is an artifact of the skewed data collection methods used by the originator of the claim, Alfred Kinsey. Because his data over-sampled imprisoned child molesters, the incidence of homosexuality in the population is overstated in the Kinsey data.

Thus, we have a puzzle. Given the importance of the gay marriage amendments, and given the desperate desire of pro-gay and pro-choice activists to get rid of this president, one would have expected a disproportionate turnout of such voters (of course, that's just anecdotal evidence, derived from the speakers' lists of the many anti-Bush protests, rallies, and descents of various kinds on Washington.)

Yet, if they are ten percent of the population and 40% of the electorate, one has to conclude that they are less concerned about the election than the population as a whole, which produced a turnout of just under 60%.

And if, as gay rights activists insist, gays are distributed throughout the population, with no non-ideological characteristics to distinguish them, this data indicates they constitute a mere four percent of the population--four times the percent of Nader voters, sure, but not nearly enough of a constituency to justify the attention that has heretofore been lavished on them by the press, the culture, and the political establishment.

Facts are stubborn things. And sometimes they tell secrets.