The mouse that roared. . .

It can hardly be called an oppressed minority when the movement boasts the full assets of the media, Hollywood, and a political party to espouse its position. . .   It can hardly be called an oppressed minority when it is made up of people more highly educated and more well paid, on average, than the general population. . .  It can hardly be called an oppressed minority when it has so effectively moved from the fringe to the mainstream of society and culture in such a very short period of time.  In fact, it is such a successful minority that the average American might well think that a third to half of all Americans are gay.  But they are not.

Health survey gives government its first large-scale data on gay, bisexual population – The Washington Post:

Less than 3 percent of the U.S. population identify themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday in the first large-scale government survey measuring Americans’ sexual orientation.

The National Health Interview Survey, which is the government’s premier tool for annually assessing Americans’ health and behaviors, found that 1.6 percent of adults self-identify as gay or lesbian, and 0.7 percent consider themselves bisexual.

The overwhelming majority of adults, 96.6 percent, labeled themselves as straight in the 2013 survey. An additional 1.1 percent declined to answer, responded “I don’t know the answer” or said they were “something else.”

The figures offered a slightly smaller assessment of the size of the gay, lesbian and bisexual population than other surveys, which have pegged the overall proportion at closer to 3.5 or 4 percent. In particular, the estimate for bisexuals was lower than in some other surveys.

That the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender population is a distinct minority is not in dispute.  That they are oppressed is a conclusion at odds with the facts.  Their movement has been so effective with the media that they have appeared to be larger than the numbers justify.  Certainly we have more people experimenting and we have fewer moral constraints both upon such experimentation and upon the choice to identify publicly as gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual but we do not see this result in people self-identifying as gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual.  This movement is the mouse (mouth?!) that roared and their influence is substantially greater than there actual representation within the population.