The quiz in this week’s Ruth Institute newsletter asks “what percentage of the population is gay?” The answer turns out to be a resounding, “It depends.” It depends on whether you’re talking about men or women, whether you’re looking at urban areas or not, and most significantly, what you mean by gay in the first place. Does a person count as gay if they have ever had a sexual fantasy about a person of the same sex? Does a single sexual encounter with a person of the same sex mean that you are “really” gay? Or does self-identification count as the final arbiter of who counts as gay?
This may sound like academic hair-splitting, or irretrievably nosey minding other people’s business. But, it turns out that the legal agenda advocated by the Gay Lobby and the Sex Radicals has made these questions public business. One of the questions involved in the Prop 8 trial is whether sexual orientation will become a protected class, and if so, what level of legal scrutiny will that protected class be offered. In other words, if sexual orientation is subject to “strict scrutiny,” that means the law will treat it like race: you have to have a really, really good reason to treat a gay person differently than a straight person. If sexual orientation is more like gender, in many states subject to a “rational basis” test, you can treat gays differently from straights if there is a rational reason for doing so. Obviously, the strict scrutiny standard is much more difficult for an employer, for instance, to meet.
This is why the question of “who counts as gay” becomes so important. If I can obtain protected status from myself by proclaiming myself a lesbian, well, elementary economics suggests that people will start proclaiming themselves lesbians. If there is a behavioral standard for being part of the protected class, then we have to ask ourselves whether people might engage in the behavior in order to have the benefits of the protection.
The Gay Lobby has invested a great deal in trying to convince people that sexual orientation is completely unchangeable characteristic, similar to race. That is why it is unfair to impose any behavioral requirements on them that would not pinch similarly on straight people. But what if sexual orientation is not an immutable characteristic? What if people’s behavior does sometimes change?
Now notice, I am taking no position on the question of whether therapy can change someone’s orientation. I’m just asking whether it is in fact always the case that people’s sexual behavior is unchanging. That is why the data I present in the answer to my quiz is so intriguing. If you ask, what percentage of the population has had exclusively same sex sexual activity since puberty, the answer is less than 1%: .6% for men and .2% for women. If, by contrast, you look at what percentage of the population has had exclusively same sex encounters in the last five years, you get 2.6% for men and 1.5% for women. This plainly means that some of these people had some opposite sex partners at some time since puberty, but not in the last five years.
The claim that sexual orientation is a completely fixed characteristic, similar to race, is difficult to maintain. It makes no legal sense to create a protected class that: a) can’t be defined and b) a person can define themselves into. Finally, do we really want the government making decisions about who counts as gay? Honestly, people, have you thought this thing through?
