In 1989, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen penned a book called After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90’s wherein the authors outlined a strategy for transforming how Americans viewed homosexuality. They proposed to harness the power of the ad industry and media to depict gays “in the least offensive fashion possible” while stigmatizing those who disagreed with the gay lifestyle. Kirk and Madsen were honest about their cynical scheme to manipulate the American public: “We’re talking about propaganda.”
They proposed “A continuous flood of gay-related advertising” while making “homo-hating beliefs and actions look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from them.”
“We have in mind a strategy as calculated and powerful as that which gays are accused of pursuing by their enemies–or, if you prefer, a plan as manipulative as that which our enemies themselves employ,” they wrote. “It’s time to learn from Madison Avenue, to roll out the big guns.”
Two decades later, no one would dispute that the campaign to normalize homosexuality has been wildly successful. So successful, in fact, that Americans vastly overestimate the number of gay Americans, believing there are five times as many as there actually are. A new Gallup poll reveals:
U.S. adults estimate that nearly one in four Americans (23.6%) are gay or lesbian. Gallup has previously found that Americans have greatly overestimated the U.S. gay population, recording similar average estimates of 24.6% in 2011 and 23.2% in 2015. In each of the three polls in which Gallup has asked this question, a majority of Americans estimated this population to be 20% or greater.
Americans’ estimate of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times Gallup’s more encompassing 2017 estimate that 4.5% of Americans are LGBT, based on respondents’ self-identification as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. [Emphasis added]
Gallup says the massively inflated estimations are owed to the group’s “outsized visibility.” Citing an annual report by LGBT advocacy group GLAAD, Gallup explained that “representation of LGBT people as television series regulars on broadcast primetime scripted programming reached an all-time high of 8.8% in the 2018-2019 television season, which is nearly twice Gallup’s estimate of the actual population.”
One need only watch HGTV’s House Hunters for a few hours to understand just how gay mainstream televisions has become. (It’s not just television—the mainstream media slants their reporting on LGBT issues in favor of gay rights and goes out of their way to demonize religious conservatives who object to same-sex marriage.)
And let’s not forget that this group—representing less than five percent of the population—gets an entire Pride Month to celebrate their lifestyle, with major corporations falling all over themselves to prove how woke they are, despite the fact that Americans are still deeply divided on these issues. They’d rather have their LGBTQ street cred than the dollars of average Americans who refuse to join the moral revolution. There’s no escaping Everything Pride during the month of June. LGBTQ affirmations are all over television, the news, and social media. The messaging is also being heavily directed at children—in schools, public libraries, stores, and even in some churches— glamorizing the gay lifestyle and heroizing its practitioners.
It’s no wonder Americans wildly overestimate the size of this minority population.
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