Mods,
As I stated originally and will restate, my offense at the situation wasn't with the word in question but was with the issue of censorship and heavy handedness. I salute you for listening to the outcry of the most active members on the board and considering our feelings in this matter. It took courage to rethink and restate and I for one appreciate it. I also appreciate your removal of
SuperSix's ban.
Harvey,
Good to see you back! Your wit and intellect are sorely missed around here... at least by me!
That said... as usual, you and I differ.
Merkat's point about communism is valid.... at least in the US where we have a choice of political parties. I know that you believe that homosexuality is not a chioce, but as posted last night, the latest gallop poll shows more people believe that it
is in fact a choice and not a genetic trait like skin color. That being the case, it is not unfair to equate negative speech about one "choice" with negative speech about another "choice". Discipline must be handed out equally or it is no good.
Another thing
Harvey, although it was long ago, I may still have the threads from WAY back where you called me all sorts of things based on my staunch religious beliefs about evangelizing and salvation. If it is wrong to name call one group of people, isn't just as wrong to do it to another?
The following is lifted from a web report:
The Alan Guttmacher Institute (a think-tank related to Planned Parenthood) found that 2.3% of "sexually active men aged 20-39 have had same-gender activity during the last 10 years," with only 1.1 percent reporting exclusive homosexual contact. A University of Chicago study found that while 4.9% to 5.6% of survey participants had participated in an act with a same-sex partner, only .6% to .7% were exclusively homosexual. Another study in Science magazine reported that 1.6 to 2% had engaged in homosexual activity in the last year. This is reflected in the 2-3% figure from the U.S. Census Bureau National Center for Health Statistics which is based on actions, rather than feeling or thoughts.
The following is also lifted from the web:
In their book, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, (Lochinvar-Huntington House pub., 1990) Reisman and Eichel point out that Kinsey's data base was clearly skewed by his choice to include a high percentage of prison inmates and known sex offenders. (Convicted criminals comprised a full 25% of Kinsey's male sample, though they made up less than 1% of the total U.S. population.) Both practice homosexual behavior much more frequently than individuals in the general population.
Tom W. Smith's much more recent study, Adult Sexual Behavior in 1989: Numbers of Partners, Frequency and Risk, conducted among a full probability sample of the adult U.S. household population, reported that "Overall... less than 1% [of the study population] has been exclusively homosexual."
Jeffrey Vitale, President of Overlooked Opinions (op. cit.), which "is compiling the results of an ongoing national survey of a panel of about 20,000 homosexuals" estimates that "even in California and New York, two well-known [gay] havens, the gay population is less than 8 percent" (American Marketplace, "Gay Community Looks for Strength in `Numbers,'" Vol. 12, No. 14, July 4, 1991, p. 131).
Recent national surveys of about 10,000 subjects conducted by the
National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control report less than 3% of men as saying they have had sex with another man "at some time since 1977, even one time ("AIDS Knowledge and Attitudes for January-March, 1990, Provisional Data From the National Health Interview Survey," Deborah Dawson; Joseph E. Fitti and Marcie Cynamon, op. cit. for April-June, 1990; Pamela F. Adams and Ann M. Hardy, op. cit. for July-September, 1990, in Advance Data, #s 193,195,198, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, p. 11 in all three documents).
The September 2, 1992, Dallas Morning Times (pg. 4C) reported on a "University of Chicago study aimed to be the most significant study [on American sexuality] since Mr. Kinsey's" and a related study by the National Opinion Research Center. The findings:
"...An estimated 3 percent of the population claimed at least one act of homosexual sex during 1991. Over the respondents' lifetime, 4.5 percent claim some such sex... The final conclusions from the University of Chicago's study may confirm a figure far lower than Mr. Kinsey's. They may also show that American sexual behavior is quite conservative. The mean number of sexual partners over an individual's lifetime is probably around six or seven" ("Study of U.S. sex habits may contain surprises"
.
Science magazine, July 3, 1992, reports a very recent French study that found only 4.1% of men and 2.6% of women said they'd had homosexual intercourse at least once in their lives. Only 1.1% of men and 0.3% of women said they'd had homosexual intercourse in the past 12 months (as reported in "Homosexual figures grossly exaggerated," AFA Journal, September, 1992, pg. 9).
"The London Daily Mail released last week what it calls `the most exhaustive survey ever conducted into British sexual habits.' The most stunning finding was that only 1.1 percent of British men said they were active homosexuals, a figure similar to the most recent American polls" (World magazine, Jan. 29, 1994, p. 9).
My point isn't that we should demean or be hostile to anyone at all, but just that if we are going to try to use statistics to base our claims we should at least be sure of what those statistics are saying. In this case, the latest compilations seem to indicate that the homosexual population is
at most one half of what it is claimed to be... and that in probability it is much lower than that.
As to the right and wrong of homosexuality... this isn't the thread for that discussion and we shouldn't get into those issues here.
Joe
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