REPLY TO BOOR AND DUNCAN

Ours is a 'national random sample' in the usual, rather imprecise, sense of the term employed in the social sciences. For instance, a recent effort (sampling also began in 1983) "to estimate prevalence and incidence of mental disorder in the United States" "initiated by the National Instirure of Mental Health" "is a five-site collaborative effort" (like ours) and included "Baltimore, MD, Durham, NC, Los Angeles, CA, New Haven, CT, and St. Louis, MOW (four of the NIMH cities were different from ours); see Siegel, Sorenson, Golding. Burnam, and Stein ( 5 ) , p. 1143. This NIMH study is exclusively urban and, although more substantially funded than ours, suffers from a noncompletion rate of 3296, failure to fill out questionnaires complerely, erc., yet when the whole study is statistically pasted together it will be treated by the field as sufficient to accomplish its appointed task. W e have examined the results of a number of studies comparable to ours in being represented as 'national' and 'random', and we nore that, when the p u b lished results are related to ours, there is usually reasonable agreement between the two data-sets (e.g., in the Siegel, et a!. survey, 8.7% of their whites reported "childhood sexual assault" before the age of 16 vs approximately 16% of our ( 3 ) sample of 1986 who reported childhood sexual contact with an adult, and 10% of our sample who reported childhood sexual contact with a man lthe difference berween our and Siegel, et al.'s parameters is partially explained by their exclusion of voluntwy child/adult sexual interaction]; 36% of those assaulted in Siegel, er al.'s report were boys vs approximately a. third in ours). What we attempted and how well we fared is detailed in the method section of our report ( to a considerably greater degree than the oft-cited Kinsey Institute surveys). Just about every empirical smdy in the social sciences, including ours, can be criticized for various shorrcomings. W e believe that our resulcs are 'close to target', or 'true' in the usual sense of the word in the discipline. If Boor ( 1 ) and Duncan ( 4 ) do not believe it, let them spend their nickel and demonstrate otherwise. Boor ( 1 ) takes the position that our results "might imply" that heterosexuals ought ro be taught to accept homosexuals in the military as much as homosexuals do. Would he also suggest that they "mighr imply" that women should be taught to accept heterosexual voyeurism as much as men do? 'Homosexual mentality', as indexed by almost every item in our report, is almost 180 degrees at variance from 'heterosexual mentality'. Every civilization has come to the same conclusion: homosexual practitioners engage in pathology and generate personal and social pathology as a consequence. Our results provide no reaFon to reject this appraisal. Duncan ( 4 ) apparently believes that ( a ) homosexuals are a minority, ( b ) all minorities deserve protecrion from the majority, and (c) therefore ought to be allowed into the military. Drug abusers, child molesters, and thieves also form 'minorities'; do members of these groups 'deserve protection from the majority'? Hardly! Ail contraire, the majority has both a right and obligation to protect itself against the socially disruptive effects of such.