On 10 April (‘How many gays in Australia?’) I criticised Bill Muehlenberg, National Vice-President of the Australian Family Association, for his rough handling of statistical material on this question. Having carefully read Juliet Richters’ and Chris Rissel’s Doing it Down Under (Allen and Unwin, 2005), a source of his stats, I would now like to criticise him for blatant misquoting as well.

Muehlenberg concludes the relevant section of his article as follows:

Incredibly, however, in the face of all this hard evidence to demonstrate the very low percentage of homosexuals in society, the two authors put this rather unscientific spin on things: ‘It is too simple to say “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’! (‘Separating Myth From Science’, The Australian Family, Mar. 2005, 43)

In fact, what Richters and Rissel wrote was:

It is too simple to say ‘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 (my emphasis). (55)

This conclusion is entirely borne out by their statistics (see their Chapter 8) and is not ‘unscientific’ in any way.

Why did Muehlenberg omit these final words? I think it was because Religious Right authors simply cannot cope with the idea that straight and gay behaviours lie on a spectrum. In discussing the problems of interviewing, Richters and Rissel accept that:

A married man who occasionally meets other men for sex in the park but never talks about this and has no gay friends may ‘forget’ this when reporting his sexual partners in an interview. (145)

Is it really so ‘unscientific’ to call people with these sorts of sexual lives ‘a little bit gay-ish’? Only if you can’t countenance ideas and behaviours which are not absolutely black and white.

More generally, Muehlenberg’s article is a good example of the ‘hunt and peck’ approach to research employed by the Religious Right. Because the Bible has supposedly determined your conclusions in advance, you’re looking for arguments which seem to justify those conclusions. Any information which contradicts the ’settled idea’ that, say, only one per cent of the population is homosexual, can simply be ignored. Even if it means chopping your source off in mid-sentence.

And, as a matter of interest, the very best examples of this are to be found in the voluminous literature of creationism.

Filed in: Sexuality