gay population

Source: The American Culture

A scientific study commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has found that only 1.4 percent of people are homosexual. I suppose that that must surprise you.

The first thing I thought of when I read  Michael Medved’s article about the study was how different the facts are from what the contemporary culture tells us. When watching television, after all, it seems as if 50 percent of the population is homosexual. It’s evident that a tiny minority of Americans have enormous power in Hollywood, the entertainment capital of the world.

Similarly, our cultural elites in media and education unanimously profess to believe that sexual orientation is not a choice but as innate as skin color; that has indeed become the dominant cultural message about this issue.

In light of such an onslaught, is it any wonder that so many young people are reported as struggling with their sexuality? I have an example.

My daughter grew up with a friend, a boy, who danced with her for the nine years she was involved in a local park district dance company. They even had a bit of a romantic involvement early in high school, and until he went away to college he was fully an opposite-sex kind of guy. He ended up attending an arts school of some kind, to attend their dance program. After a year of being surrounded by homosexual young men and an environment that forces the dominant, elite cultural understanding of homosexuality, he came to the conclusion that he was a homosexual.

When at first he “came out” to my daughter, he was confident and bold in his announcement. My daughter didn’t believe it, having known him all those years, and knowing the kind of environment he was in as a male dancer. She also knows young people such as her friend have no way to challenge the current homosexual zeitgeist absent engaged parents. So it was clear to her that when doubts arose about his sexual proclivities—resulting, obviously, at least in great part from the intense pressure from his peers to fit in—and the environment encouraged it, he took the plunge and embraced what he now believed to be  his true self.

But this confidence in his so-called orientation hasn’t lasted. In discussions with my daughter, who shares my Christian convictions about human sexuality, he has expressed doubts about whether he is doing the right thing. This rather tragic situation is illustrates one of the points in the Medved article, where he indicates  how dishonest those pushing the homosexual rights agenda are. For them, changing sexuality is a one-way street:

Gay pride advocates applaud the courage of those who “come out,” discovering their true nature as homosexual after many years of heterosexual experience. But enlightened opinion denies a similar possibility of change in the other direction, deriding anyone who claims straight orientation after even the briefest interlude of homosexual behavior and insisting they are phony and self-deluding. By this logic, heterosexual orientation among those with past gay relationships is always the product of repression and denial, but homosexual commitment after a straight background is invariably natural and healthy. In fact, numbers show huge majorities of those who “ever had same sex sexual contact” do not identify long-term as gay.

The numbers cited in the study indicate that there are only approximately 420,000 people in all of the United States who are actually committed homosexuals. Our cultural elites want us to believe that homosexuality is ubiquitous, yet the day-to-day experience of the average American belies this, despite what we see on TV. This study confirms what our eyes have seen.

As Medved points out, being a very small portion of the American public doesn’t mean that homosexuals should be discriminated against as they were decades past (and being against same-sex marriage doesn’t count as discrimination, despite what its proponents assert). What it does mean is that we all ought to be extremely wary of this and other secular leftist shibboleths such as global warming, socialism, etc. Many people with great access to the media are not well acquainted with the truth.