Michele Bachmann Claims Kinsey Report Is "A Myth"

[Cerim Treascair]

*elects Shane president of the United States*

That's a terrible idea.

Not if you made The L Word the national TV show.  Better than American Idol.

[Undecided]

In a sense, the Kinsey Reports are a myth: the "10 percent" number is passed on from person to person mostly without anybody reading the actual papers or thinking critically. Subsequent US studies have mostly been in the three to ten percent range, and there is probably oversampling from urban populations. There isn't really any rhetorical reason to stick to 10%: even the most conservative estimates put the US LGBT population in the >10^7 range, and (more importantly) the Kinsey Reports are vulnerable to criticism in a way that subsequent studies are not.

I doubt that Michelle Bachmann has any interest in such nuance. Still, an unthinking political adversary is no excuse for sloppily repeating archaic exploratory results when far more rigorous and relevant studies are available.

[Shane for Wax]

*elects Shane president of the United States*

That's a terrible idea.

Not if you made The L Word the national TV show.  Better than American Idol.

...



lol but still other than that. Terrible idea.

[erictheblue]

You know, I think the thread title is misleading.  She's not saying the study is a myth.  Rather, she's asserting that the claims the study makes - at least about gay people - are what are false.  She could possibly be right, but not for the reasons she thinks.

The studies I found about a year ago put the number between 4-8% of men and 4-14% of women are either homosexual or bisexual. Not quite the 10% claimed by the Kinsey Report, but not an insignificant number of people.

Even if the numbers were wrong, what would that prove?  How would that change anything about gay people?  They'd still be gay, and they'd still be humans.

Yup.

Also, I'd like to point out that the numbers being wrong would not necessarily mean an overestimation, either.  The numbers could be an underestimation.

They are probably an overestimation, especially if you are only looking at the number of homosexuals (and excluding bisexuals). But the rest of your point still stands.

[Osama bin Bambi]

A lot of homophobes like to say that the Kinsey Report is a myth, or that Kinsey was bisexual atheist pedophile libertine. Coming out of Bachmann's mouth, this doesn't surprise me.

[TheL]

The thing that bothers me is, even if only about 1% of the US population were gay...that's still over 3 million people.  There are more gay people* in the United States than there are in the average large city.  What excuse could we possibly have for treating millions of people as sub-humans?

What's that?  Your religion's special book tells you to?  FOADIAF.


* I'm not even counting bisexual, transgender, or intersex people in this number.  Just the purely homosexual cisfolk.