Rev. Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party recently told us why there are now ’so many homosexual TV shows’:

The powerful homosexual lobby has demanded one in ten characters must be a homosexual … [But] homosexuals are only 1-2% of the population so it should only be one homosexual in 100 characters, NOT one in 10! (Family World News, Apr. 2005, 2)

Australian Religious Right groups generally push the idea that only about one per cent of our population is gay, and argue on this basis that such a small minority is unworthy of civil rights such as the right to marry, adopt children etc. The argument makes no sense and clearly involves discrimination against one particular minority on religious grounds; for example, you will not find Fred Nile calling for tiny Christian sects to be stripped of the right to run their own schools on the basis of their size.

But let’s examine this ‘one per cent’ claim. To begin with, one per cent of the Australian population is a lot of people, over 200,000 of them. By way of comparison, the entire national membership of the (Pentecostal) Assemblies of God denomination - which provides most of the support for a number of groups like the Australian Christian Lobby and the Family First Party - totals only 160,000. (Muriel Porter ‘Moderates drowned out by religious right shrill’, Melbourne Age, 30 Mar. 2005)

More to the point, Religious Right personalities themselves clearly accept that the ‘one per cent’ figure is bogus, while continuing to throw it around as if it was gospel truth.

Have a careful look at Fred Nile’s statement above: ‘[H]omosexuals are only one to two per cent of the population …’ He goes on to develop a faulty conclusion, namely that this means that ‘it should only be one homosexual in 100 characters’, but even on his own ‘reasoning’ it could be two rather than one. What does this extra one per cent mean in terms of overall numbers? Suddenly we have up to 400,000 Australian gays, many more people than attend, say, Anglican church services every week (Porter, ibid.) And remember, this is Fred Nile’s figure, a crowd of people that would fill about five MCGs!

But let’s not stop there. In the current issue of the Australian Family Association’s journal (’Separating Myth From Science’, The Australian Family, Mar. 2005, 40-48), National Vice-President Bill Muehlenberg examines this very question. He begins by castigating an Australian reporter for writing in 1994 that there were ‘1 million’ Australian gays at that time. Muehlenberg then becomes characteristically vague but seems to work on the assumption that this figure equates to ten per cent of the Australian population, whereas it would not have been much over five per cent. He then says:

What is the evidence? The ten per cent figure is actually about eight to ten times too high. (41)

Thus, according to Muehlenberg, the true figure should be about 1-1.25 per cent. He then proceeds to list a number of ’supportive’ Australian and international statistics, but fails to point out the extreme narrowness of their definitions. To count as ‘homosexual’, one had to ‘report homosexual activity’, ‘claim to be exclusively homosexual’, ‘have homosexual intercourse’ etc. Muehlenberg seems oblivious to the fact that, through justified fear of religious and other persecution, many gays would never declare the true nature of their sexuality. Statisticians themselves commonly acknowledge this; for example:

… [T]he Australian Bureau of Statistics recognises the limitations of its own information. In its study into same-sex couple families for the ‘2005 Year Book Australia’, statisticians acknowledged people’s ‘reluctance to identify as being in a same-sex de facto marriage and lack of knowledge that same-sex relationships could be counted as such in the census’. (Annette Binger ‘Happy Families’, Sunday Life, 27 Mar. 2005, 22)

Note too that the Religious Right has great difficulty in coping with the idea of bisexuals, often tending to ignore them rather than face the fact that many apparent heterosexuals are not exactly what they seem. Muehlenberg himself notes an Australian study in which ‘a paltry 0.9 per cent said [they] were bisexual’ (42). This ‘paltry’ percentage actually translates to about 180,000 people - and these were just the ones prepared to acknowledge it!

In any case, the most ’scientific’ statistics quoted by Muehlenberg give his ‘one per cent’ estimate no support. According to him, the Sex in America survey gave a figure of 2.8 per cent for ‘nationwide incidence of male homosexuality’ (1.4 per cent lesbians - overall average in excess of 2 per cent); while the 2000 Demography study put the ‘exclusive male homosexual’ population at 2.5 per cent.

Juliet Richters and Chris Rissel recently published a sex-research book based on extensive interviews with almost 20,000 Australians (Doing It Down Under, 2005). Muehlenberg selectively quotes some of their figures on the incidence of homosexuality, but cannot accept their conclusion that:

It is too simple to say that ‘10 per cent of the population is gay’, but it is true that at least 10 per cent of the population is a little bit gay-ish, either in experience or attraction or both. (55)

Muehlenberg fails to relate the background to this conclusion, which is based on the authors’ observation that there are at least three different ways to think about homosexuality: in terms of identity - how people define themselves; in terms of attraction - whether someone experiences same-sex attraction, whether or not they act upon this feeling; and finally in terms of sexual experience. The figures for ’same-sex sexual attraction’, for example, are several times as high as those for ‘homosexual experience’. (50-51)

Religious Right claims that only one per cent of Australians are homosexual are absurdly tendentious, are not borne out by the statistics they quote, and should be dismissed as propaganda.

Filed in: Sexuality