How Bad Science Helped Launch the 'Gay' Revolution

How Bad Science Helped Launch the 'Gay' Revolution 9/18/2002
By Robert H. Knight

Kinsey’s 10% figure has created a false "minority" group in the public mind

Franklin Kameny of Washington, D.C., is often described as the "dean" of homosexual activists. Mr. Kameny claims to have coined the term "gay is good," and was instrumental in having D.C.’s sodomy law repealed.

Recently, he made an amazing statement regarding one of the totems of the sexual revolution, the claim that one in every 10 people is "gay." Here’s his quote, from a letter in the September 6, 2002, Washington Blade:

"I personally created the ‘10 percent figure’ in late 1960 for use in my position to the U.S. Supreme Court, in my own case. The figure was based upon a reasonable and plausible, intentionally conservative and understated interpretation of the Kinsey data, which were the only statistics then available.

"The 10 percent figure subsequently achieved a life of its own, and was universally accepted and used. Whatever its initial accuracy, I am convinced it is much closer to reality than the ridiculously low figure of 1 or 2 percent, derived from highly questionable and unreliable research."

Mr. Kameny is right about the way the 10 percent myth was used. Journalists, lawyers and educators began citing it without a hint of skepticism. The result was the creation in the public mind of a false "minority" group that began to co-opt the moral capital of the civil rights movement. It didn’t matter that it was all based on bad science.

Alfred C. Kinsey’s research, which helped launch the sexual revolution, was utterly exposed in Dr. Judith Reisman’s and Edward Eichel’s 1990 book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People (Huntington House-Lochinvar). The British medical journal Lancet said the authors "demolish the two [Kinsey] reports."

Kinsey deliberately weighted his samples with homosexuals, convicted criminals and other unorthodox subjects. The authors also expose how Kinsey used children in sex studies to concoct a theory of "child sexuality" that is the guiding force today behind sex education curricula promoted by Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).

Studies published by the University of Chicago, Family Planning Perspectives, the British Medical Journal, the National Health Interview Survey of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and many others indicate an incidence of homosexuality of 1 to 2 percent in Western countries.

Although the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Science, initially supported the Kinsey research in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a reassessment emerged in 1989. Here is an excerpt from AIDS: Sexual Behavior and Intravenous Drug Use, edited by Charles F. Turner, Heather G. Miller, and Lincoln E. Moses (National Academy Press, National Research Council, 1989), p. 82:

"It has long been recognized that one of the greatest faults of the Kinsey research was the way in which the cases were selected; the sample is not representative of the entire U.S. population or of any definable group in the population. This fault limits the comparability and appropriateness of the Kinsey data as a basis for calculating the prevalence of any form of sexual conduct."

The book also notes that Kinsey’s agenda for sexual liberation tainted his research: "The very claim for the legitimacy of science in the area of sexuality was an attempt to change the ‘rules of the game’ that defined what conduct was normal and what was abnormal.

"Kinsey went even further, however. He attempted to counter the traditional religious view that sexual virtue was entirely composed of heterosexual activity in the pursuit of reproduction inside the bonds of marriage, as well as the orthodox psychoanalytic revision of this traditional view, which admitted the existence of other forms of sexual expression but treated them as either perversions from or preludes to the sexual ‘normality’ found in mature heterosexual committed relationships." (p. 86)

In 1997, in his book Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, biographer James H. Jones revealed Kinsey’s prodigious appetite for sadistic varieties of homosexual sex, voyeurism and other perversions, and how they inspired his social agenda:

"The man I came to know bore no resemblance to the canonical Kinsey. Anything but disinterested, he approached his work with missionary fervor. Kinsey loathed Victorian morality. … He was determined to use science to strip human sexuality of its guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality, to soften the rules of restraint. …Kinsey was a crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores and sex offender laws of the United States." (p. xii)

Based on his own imagination, Kinsey created his famous 7-point Kinsey scale of sexuality, with heterosexuality at 0 and homosexuality at 6 (bisexuality being a "balanced" score at 3.5). He drew a line from 0 upward and rightward to make a perfect diagonal, as if human sexuality could be precisely and geometrically charted. This entirely fabricated "scientific" scale has been used in sex education books, court cases and legislative hearings to contend that homosexuality and bisexuality are normative. Kinsey concocted the scale even before he had done any substantial interviewing of data subjects, according to his co-author, Wardell Pomeroy.

Dr. Reisman, who has pursued the Kinsey myth for three decades, authored another book in 1998, showing how Kinsey’s research became the foundation for America’s sexual revolution. In Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences (First Principles Press, 1998, 2000), she also chronicled how Kinsey and his disciples systematically weakened America’s sex offender laws by inserting the fraudulent Kinsey data into cases, law review articles, and presentations before state legislatures.

Kinsey’s legacy in the form of a cultural blitzkrieg against sexual restraint – and therefore against marriage and family — has been enormous. He just might be the most influential fraud in American social history.

As far as "gay" activist Franklin Kameny’s boast of using the Kinsey research as his lodestar, it’s a welcome and revealing confession, although it is doubtful that Mr. Kameny would see it that way.

Robert Knight is the director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. Knight wrote and directed The Children of Table 34, a Family Research Council video documentary about Alfred Kinsey.