Kerby Anderson

Each year I teach second-year students at a bible school a class on homosexuality. One of the questions we discuss is what percentage of the population is homosexual. I quote from studies done by the University of Chicago and the Alan Guttmacher Institute which put the percentage around 2 percent. Then I show the students a Gallup poll that found US adults estimated that 25 percent of Americans are gay and lesbian. Of course, those estimates are off by an order of magnitude.

We now have articles quoting the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System of the CDC that estimates that only 75 percent of American high-school students now identify as heterosexual. The headlines and articles therefore claim that 25 percent are LGBTQ.

In a recent commentary, Wilfried Reilly raises some significant questions. First, “there is simply no genetic or biological explanation for a surge like this one.” This is significantly different from the many studies I have quoted in the past.

Attempts to argue that this is due to “increased social tolerance for gays” does not hold either, especially when you consider that many other European countries have been even more tolerant of LGBTQ. I think a better explanation is social contagion, which I have discussed in relation to transgenderism in previous commentaries.

Andrew Sullivan is a prominent gay columnist and provides this answer. “The most plausible explanation is that everyone wants to be LGBTQ now — so why not lie and be cool? Only problem is that this makes the LGBTQ community majority straight.” As you can tell, he doesn’t believe the 25 percent headlines and doesn’t think this is helpful to his gay agenda.

There is no reason to believe the 25 percent claim. It reminds me of the Gallup poll estimate from many years ago.