From: pdb059@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov (Paul Bartholomew)
Newsgroups: ca.politics
Subject: Re: Homosexuals are like the rest of us, right?
Date: 13 Aug 92 09:14:47 GMT
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Image Processing Lab

In article <11720@optilink.UUCP>, cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
> Yeah, you see it all the time in the gay parades and soc.motss. :-)

I'm really sick of this, Clayton.  Let me point out to you one more time
your errors in logic here.  First of all, there are actually three gay
"communities" that we're talking about here.  The first, and by far the
smallest, is the gay "community" that posts to soc.motss.  This group
numbers in the hundreds or perhaps the thousands, but is certainly a
rather small, atypical, sample of the gay "community".

The second, far larger group, are those people that are "actively" gay--
e.g., have come out of the closet and lead openly gay lifestyles; march in
gay parades; engage in political protests, etc.  This group, while larger,
is still rather small, numbering (I estimate) in the hundreds of thousands,
primarily concentrated in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco.

The third, and largest, gay "community" are those homosexuals that are not
actively gay, most of whom are still in the closet.  Depending on whom you
believe, homosexuals are between 3% and 12% of the total population in the
US.  Assuming a conservative estimate of 5%, that still leaves over 10
million gays to account for.  This group is by far the hardest to categorize
because of its very secrecy.

Your problem all along is that you have made serious errors in judgment by
assuming that people who post to soc.motss are a representative sample of
the active gay population, and that the active gay population is represen-
tative of the "passive" (for lack of a better word) gay population.  This
is patently false and undermines your entire argument (such as it is).

If you base your knowledge of homosexuality on postings to Usenet and TV
coverage of gay pride parades, then you don't know a damned thing about
homosexuality.  Your postings, of course, make this obvious.

> # There's a LOT more to life than spending your life trying to incite
> # hatred against a group of people who want nothing but to be allowed to
> # live their private lives in private.
> # 
> # || Mark Craig Carroll: <MC#     || "Only love
> 
> You really are dense, aren't you?  It's because homosexuals insist
> on using the government to tell consenting adults what to do in
> private that so many people are pissed.  When homosexuals stop trying
> to force themselves onto straight people in private, we can talk
> about this.  In the meantime, homosexuals need to get the government
> out of straight people's lives.

You really are dense, aren't you?  It's only in your fevered imagination
that homosexuals are insisting on "using the government to tell consenting
adults what to do in private."  The converse is actually true, by the
way, or hadn't you remembered all the statutes on the books prohibiting
homosexual behavior (remember the Texas and Georgia sodomy laws)?

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Paul Bartholomew          |   "The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of
                          |    many things..."                  Lewis Carroll
pdb059@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov   |   Disclaimer:  Opinions?  What opinions?
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