Examining That Mythical Ten Percent
By Alan P. Medinger

The frequency that a condition or behavior occurs has nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong. Premarital sex (heterosexual) appears to be very common today, but that does not change God's view of it. The results of a recent survey presented at the February, 1990 convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans sheds new light on the disputed question as to what percentage of our population is homosexually oriented.

A central building block of the gay community's program of declaring homosexuality as a "normal", albeit minority condition, has been the constantly repeated claim that 10 percent of mankind is homosexual. The implication or the outright claim is made that homosexuality is a normal variation of the human condition, just like lefthandedness. By further implication, if such a condition occurs in a fairly constant pattern over time and in various places, then it must be inborn.

The 10 percent claim has been stated so frequently that the majority of the American public seems to have accepted it. The gay- affirming "Project-10" program in the Los Angeles County school system has been established to reach the "10 percent of our students who are gay or lesbian". The figure has shown signs of even increasing. At the massive 1988 Gay March on Washington, we heard one lesbian speaker boom out to America that "12 percent of your children and brothers and sisters and neighbors are lesbians and gays."

From a direct ministry perspective, the percentage of the community that is homosexual is not really relevant. It does not really matter whether the group we are trying to reach in the Baltimore-Washington area is 600,000 (10 percent) or 300,000 (5 percent). By comparison, what difference would it have made if Jesus had fed 10,000 rather than 5,000 with five loaves and two fish? In either situation the task at hand is impossible by human means, but totally reasonable when God's power is at work.

But it does matter simply because it is a part of the great effort to claim that homosexuality is "normal". We justify our ministry of healing on the basis that homosexuality is a disorder, one that God would make right. A deceptive view of homosexuality, of which the 10 percent claim is a part, is an obstacle to our effectively carrying on the ministry to which we are called. The 10 percent claim goes back to Alfred Kinsey's 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in which it was stated that "10 percent of the males are more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55." On the same page, however, Kinsey states that, "4 percent of the white males are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after adolescence."

Obviously, he is not saying that 10 percent of the population is homosexual. Even if he were, the shortcomings of Kinsey's survey methods (a large percentage of his surveyed population were prisoners, but he would never reveal what percentage), and his biases are so widely recognized now, that his results, from a statistical point of view, are practically useless.

The recent survey that sheds new light on the question was conducted in 1989 as a part of the General Social Survey (GSS) by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. The GSS surveys are national full probability samples of the adult household population of the United States. At the end of the 1989 survey, respondents were asked to complete, and turn in, in a sealed envelope, a self-administered questionnaire on sexual behaviors. The survey results showed the following:

Of the sexually active adults surveyed, 98.5 percent have been exclusively heterosexual during the past year.

Although some inferences had to be made by the authors of the report, their best estimate of the sexual orientation of the respondents during adulthood was 5.5 percent homosexual or bisexual.

Less than one percent were exclusively homosexual. These results are consistent with those from a 1970 Kinsey Institute- NORC survey which was studied and re-analyzed by Robert E. Fay et al. and reported in the January 20, 1989 edition of Science magazine (Prevalence and Patterns of Same-Gender Sexual Contact Among Men, pp. 338-348). That study reported that 6.7 percent of the male respondents had sexual contact (to orgasm) with another man after age 19 and between 1.6 percent and 2.0 percent had had such contact during the past year. In the 1970 survey 1.4 percent said they had adult homosexual contacts "fairly often" and 1.9 percent characterized their frequency as "occasionally", a total that we would presume reflects most active male homosexuals of 3.3 percent. If it is true that homosexuality among women is less common than among men, then the average for the entire population would certainly seem to be something less than 5 Percent.

Those who continue to use the 10 percent or higher estimates do so for one of two reasons: either they are ignorant of the facts, or they are being intentionally deceptive. In either case, the use of the 10 percent figure is a warning to be cautious about anything the speaker or author is saying.

The frequency with which a condition or behavior occurs has nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong. Pre-marital sex (heterosexual) appears to be very common today, but that does not change God's view of it. But to those who are naive or who do not examine situations in any depth, numbers do breed justification -- although it may be a justification coming out of a sense of inevitability.

It is this type of thinking that the 10 percent myth is aimed at feeding. God's plan is for heterosexuality. In this sinful and broken world, things go wrong. One of those things that can go wrong can be a person's sexual identity and feelings. But all of the wrongs in the world do not make a right, and God's plans are not changed by statistics.

The percentage of the population that is homosexually oriented is not a major issue in our ministry, but we do see the acceptance of homosexuality as one of the great human tragedies of our time, particularly as it affects young people. But as Christians we need to seek the truth--the truth that sets people free. To the extent that scholarship and science is honestly pursued, we believe that it will provide increasing evidence that homosexuality is a disorder.

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Copyright © 1990. Alan P. Medinger. All rights reserved.Used with permission.