A Stitch in Haste

Care to guess who said this?

In a heterogeneous society, practice tends to be normative. That is why homosexual activists greatly exaggerate the prevalence of homosexuality -- asserting, on the basis of a misreading of Kinsey's famous studies, that 10 percent of the population is homosexual, whereas the true figure is probably at most 2 percent. The more homosexuals there are, the stronger their claim to be normal, a claim that would fail in a society that had a strict moral code condemning homosexuality.

Hint: Not a libertarian. Never was, never will be. Despite the insistence by some libertarians to the contrary.

(No, not Ron Paul -- though I could easily see him saying it.)

Before I disclose the author, a rebuttal:

First, sweeping generalizations such as this, even when spoken out of intellectual sloppiness and not malevolence, are bigotry.

Second, many if not most gay "activists" -- and certainly this gay activist -- argue not from a position of "normalcy" per se, but from a position of rights. The Ninth Amendment does not guarantee unenumerated rights "for the normal," but for everyone. The Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee equal protection "for the normal," but for all people, period. The point is not that "we want you to consider us normal," but rather that "your connotations of normalcy ought to be irrelevant in a just society."

Moreover, rights accrue to individuals, not groups. There is not, or ought not be, some vague "critical mass" at which point a group suddenly achieves rights (i.e., by becoming "normal"). Moreover, even as a pragmatic question, the thesis is belied by the record. To a bigot, or the politician who panders to him, would it really have made a difference over the past few years whether gays were irrefutably 2% or 10% of the population? Is there any substantial difference between a democracy that is "two wolves and a sheep" and one that is "twenty wolves and a sheep"?

Third, we were "a society that had a strict moral code condemning homosexuality" for most of our history. That did not make our society "moral" -- any more than saying, circa 1860, that "society had a strict moral code endorsing slavery for most of our history" made that aspect of society "moral," then or now. Simply put: Moral codes can be decidedly immoral. That's precisely the problem with "normalcy-based" statecraft.

Answer here.