The above headline is from a recent Gallup Poll that you can read about here; below is some of what Rush Limbaugh had to say about it:
Yet another survey on what the American people think of homosexuality. This is a Gallup survey, and in this survey it is reported that Americans believe that 20% of the population is homosexual. In fact, more than half the American people in this survey believe the American homosexual population is at least 20%. Now, we know that the gay population in the country is barely 2%. In some places you might see 4%, but it’s really barely 2%.
A previous poll like this of Millennials — people 18 to 31, 18 to 34, 32, somewhere in that age rang — shows they believe that 35 to 40% of the of population is gay. The Gallup poll of the general population shows that over 50% (53%) of the American people think that the gay population is at least 20%. So we do not have a poll that indicates the American people are even close to knowing what the actual homosexual population of the country is, and there’s a perfectly understandable reason for that.
That would be the media, and I hate to keep saying it ’cause it sounds redundant, but it’s true. Not so much just the news media, but the entertainment media as well here. And, by the way, not just the media. Well, if you want to call television shows media, I guess they are, and if you want to call movies media. Because both genres for, I guess, the recent past maybe two or three TV seasons have been portraying… Well, the gay populations of the cast, the gay population of a TV show.
Half of a lot of shows is gay. Even the show Nashville. I mean, they have two or three running stories about homosexuality — and they don’t change. It’s about bigoted parents and mean-spirited citizens and about gay people scared to death to come out of the closet. It’s just the same old thing, and the American people have been pummeled with this. Although they don’t realize it’s a pummeling that they’ve gotten. It’s just been a steady onslaught.
It’s understandable based on the television shows that are populated with gay characters that they would think the country’s population is anywhere from 20% to 35% to 40% gay. But it isn’t. It goes back to the question I asked a couple of weeks ago in the aftermath of what happened in Indiana with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. “How is it that 1% to 2% of the population bully everybody else and get what they want?” And this is how it happens.
They’re not thought of as only 1% or 2%.
They’re thought of as, in one poll, almost half the country is gay. The Millennials come close to believing that. Well, it only stands to reason, then, that they would think, “Gay marriage is something that’s fine and dandy and we ought to be promoting it. We ought to support it. It’s love based, and it’s a whole lot of people that we’re discriminating against there,” and, of course, there’s no discrimination at all in the gay marriage issue.
There’s just assumed, presumed, stated discrimination. But marriage as an institution was not started to discriminate against people. Whoever started the whole idea of marriage did not sit around and say, “Okay, how can we establish a tradition and an institution that excludes 2% of the population? How can we do that?” That’s not how it came to be, and yet that’s how overcoming it is portrayed, that there’s latent bigotry and discrimination in the institution itself. Which, of course, they’re isn’t.
Read the entire transcript here.
Image credit: RushLimbaugh.com.
