The following comes from a Sept. 20 story on CNS News.
In the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released on Friday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that only about 2 percent of the U.S. population are men who have sex with men.
The CDC made the assertion in a new report indicating that 80 percent of all new HIV infections in 2010 were of men and that 78 percent of those were among men who have sex with men (MSM).
“MSM represent approximately 2 percent of the U.S. population,” said the report.
In stating this, the report cited an analytical report published last year by CDC researchers. That report–“Estimating the Population Size of Men Who Have Sex With Men in the United States to Obtain HIV and Syphilis Rates“–refuted the claim made by 20th-century sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that about 1 out of 10 American males are men who have sex with men.
“Research by Kinsey and his colleagues led to the notion that approximately 10 percent of U.S. men are gay or bisexual,” wrote the CDC researchers. “Later reviews lowered this estimate by approximately half. In 1990, the U.S. census added questions about same-sex household partners, but these data cannot lead to a national estimate because people who are not partnered were not counted.”
The estimate made by these CDC researchers was based on existing data from a number of national surveys that looked at “men aged 13 or older.”
“Using meta-analysis with behavorial data from population-based surveys, we found that MSM comprised 3.9% (3.5%-4.4%) of the U.S. adult male population. This translates into approximately 2.0% of the overall population or 4,791,626 MSM in the United States (95%CI = 4,299,850 to 5,405,526) in 2008.
In fact, the Census Bureau estimated there were 304,059,724 people in the United States as of July 2008. That would make the 4,791,626 men who have sex with men that the CDC estimated were in the United States in 2008 equal to about 1.57% of the population.
To read the original story, click here.
This is not really news. This matches the estimates made by a number of groups, including the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. If anything, it’s actually a little higher than other estimates.
But it leads me to ask…why is this news on CCD? What relevance does this have to do with anything Catholic? Especially in light of the fact that the Holy Father gave the first ever serious interview to a print publication in history last week, and CCD has not written a single article on it. In fact, if you actually read that interview, you would see that he encourages the Church to stop obsessing about things like homosexuality. Maybe our dear editors haven’t finished reading it?
Thank you for this post. Let me second your request that people on CCD read the interview of Pope Francis, in its entirety. I think it only takes about 20 to 30 minutes. We may be in a battle, but as Pope Francis suggests, we should be in the field hospital, not on the front lines attacking our neighbors.
The essential message is the GOOD News.
YFC?, I would assume the Pope also meant this for priest and Catholic laity espousing that the Church change its teaching homosexual activity, such that homosexual activity would be considered something good by the Church under certain circumstances. Would you agree?
I don’t think any reasonable person expects the Church to change her teaching on homosexual activity. If this were a sociology blog, this article would be relevant. But what does it matter to Catholics whether 2% of the population are MSM or whether the number is .02% ? Or 20%? It’s just so irrelevant that it makes one wonder about the motivations of the publisher/editor.
The Pope did not say that men having sex with men was okay now – he said the emphasis was too much on such things as homosexuality – with which many non-homosexuals would agree. However, most of us were shocked that he also mentioned abortion in the same sentence! I suppose murder will be next to be mentioned as something which we are spending too much time condemning. The Pope may have been indicating that there are other sins to emphasize also, which we are currently ignoring, and many other teachings of Jesus Christ we need to be heeding and talking about more than the sins of men against other men sexually, such as being more charitable with the poor and those afflicted with various maladies who are indeed our brothers and sisters.
Maryanne, when it comes to the abortion issue I tend to agree with you and I think the Pope owes the people a better explanation of what he said, especially when the media and pro-‘choice’ Catholics use his statements. Generally though, from my reading of the interview, he wants Salvation in Christ to be the Church’s most important message and I agree with this.
Maryanne: You are right in your assessment of Pope Francis’ rather indiscriminate remarks. By telling us not to “obsess” over certain issues he effectively minimizes the gravest of all sins, the killing of the unborn, by lumping it together with manifold lesser evils. Pope Francis seems not to possess the intellectual acuity of his predecessor and often falls into traps laid for him by his interviewers. His statements are often unnecessarily long-winded and need careful parsing and exegesis to be understood. A quick perusal often leads to false conclusions. The pope is a P.R. disaster. Someone wiser should council him in this regard. He is befuddling the faithful with his verbosity and confusing phraseology.
All that the Pope verbally states is CERTAINLY NOT DOGMA! Thank God for that!
May God have mercy on an amoral America!
Viva Cristo Rey!
God bless, yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher
Did you read the article in Italian? If not, the context of the statements are completely missing, in what was a very rugged translation. “Obsessing” and recognizing sin are too different things. the Holy Father emphasized what the RCC has always said: welcome the person with open arms, reject the sin. He was telling us that we can bring people to the faith by showing the Charity and Mercy of Christ and then they will begin to understand the damage they do to themselves and the Sacred Heart. From there we can bring souls to the foot of the cross. Nothing new.
However, he did not say we should not act in responsible ways when approaching the education of our children, protecting the structure of the family and professing our faith to the world.
If what you say is true of him in this interview, then why pray tell, did he forcefully denounce abortion (one of the things mentioned in the article) in his most forceful manner yet the day after the article was released?
He told a meeting of gynecologists: “Openness to life is at the center of true development.” How open to life is the self-centered “sex” between two men? Like it or not all these issues are intertwined. while we need show the charity of Christ to the fallen in order that they may come back into the fold, we do not condone or give in to the pressure to just look the other way (neither of which the Pope asked us to do).
The reason it’s important is because the way the secular world is shoving this in our faces, you’d think a greater percentage of men were involved in MSM.
Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet – which focuses on the Southern Hemisphere – although a lot still circulates around:
Three lies that built a revolution
MICHAEL COOK (MercatorNet)
America’s sexual revolution has been built on lies.
Three of the cases which transformed the legal system and altered the moral ecosystem are based on fiction:
Roe v Wade, which became the foundation stone for abortion rights;
Lawrence v Texas, which decriminalised sodomy and led inexorably to same-sex marriage;
and the murder of Matthew Shepard, which transformed disapproval of homosexual acts into hateful homophobia.
= The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard,,,, a shibboleth of the anti-gay bullying movement…
Shepard became a martyr… Obama signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a federal law against gay hate crimes which was named after Matthew Shepard…
Three films have been made about his death. A play, “The Laramie Project”…
– the murder had little to do with Shepard’s sexuality and a lot to do with drugs. America’s most reviled hate crime was not a hate crime after all.
Shepard was a regular crystal meth user and a meth dealer,
that his killer, McKinney, had been on a meth bender,
that McKinney and possibly Henderson dabbled in gay sex,
that McKinney had partied with Shepard and had even had sex with him
It is a seamy story, full of gut-wrenching violence. But it is not a story of homophobic rednecks torturing and murdering a refined, gentle gay activist.
Unnatural Born Kinseyian
Radical Homosex Trolls repeatedly chant the Big Lie = ‘Happy’ people are ‘born that way’ and its ‘Ism-Obia’ to say otherwise…
– Let alone mention the Pathological nature of their “Conga Line of Buggery”.
Corruption of the ‘justice’ system by Gaystapo Propagandists is common, but no single Sado-Masochistic Pederast had as big an influence on USSC Justice ‘phony tony’ Kennedy and Klan – than their beloved ‘Unkle Kinsey’.
Dr. Judith Reisman thoroughly exposed this legal chicanery cited by the USSC, and said their reliance on Kinsey (and his ‘Scientific’ Table #34 – quantifying Infant Boy Rape / Orgasms):
“Kinsey’s recent hagiographers, writes in “Sex, The Measure of All Things” (1998) that “The American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code of 1955 is virtually a Kinsey document!”
https://www.crossroad.to/articles2/2003/reisman/kinsey.htm
https://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/2005/08/sodomy_decision_1.html
Tracing Kennedy’s opinion (Lawrence v. Texas) to its origin reveals that the majority relied on only one sex “science” resource as the Court’s primary authority on sex and sodomy – the bi/homosexual, sadomasochistic, proven fraud, Prof. Alfred C. Kinsey.
– the USSC enshrined Kinsey’s fraudulent data as the revolutionary moral law of our land,
even though it derived from crimes of sexual torture inflicted on at least 317 and as many as 2,035 infants and children, who “convulsed,” “fainted” and tried to escape their abusers.
Kinsey – knew nothing about statistics, simply making up what he needed, while passing his young boyfriend off as his “statistician.”
In fact, roughly 86% of Kinsey’s total male subjects were sexually, criminally or mentally aberrant.”
Doing the Kinsey Conga
Referring to the alphabet soup of Treatment Resistant Diseases spread via Homo-Anal transmission through the “Conga Line of Buggery” (Will Self – Dorian) as “MSM”
– Only helps to linguistically sanitize an inherently pathological Behavior – if not actually clean it up.
Obama’s tax subsidized Bio-Terrorist Dan ‘The Savage Lickspittle’ clearly identified the Main Attraction / Turn On for his Homo-Anal Coprophile Caucus (Too Poopy to Publish) which he wants to spread in the Schools.
Consider the following – related to Homo-Anal Transmission / Infection amongst those targeted for Tolerance Training already – and think where this is really going:
CDC: 94 to 95 Percent of HIV Cases among Boys and Young Men Linked to Homosexual Sex
CDC funds “gay” activist groups like GLSEN that promote acceptance of behavior tied closely to HIV
By Peter LaBarbera 9/11/13
– an astonishing 94.9 percent of HIV diagnoses among teenage boys (13-19-years-old) were linked to homosexual (“male-to-male”) sex.
And 94.1 percent of the cases among young men ages 20-24 (more analysis follows graphic) were from “gay” sex:
– sexual risk behaviors (such as having sexual intercourse for the first time at younger ages, having multiple sex partners, and not using condoms); tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; and behaviors related to attempted suicide.”
Elephant in the room
– CDC’s politically correct, pro-homosexuality mindset reflects public policy malpractice on an Orwellian scale…
teaching young people NOT to practice unhealthy homosexual sex — is the one thing that is essentially forbidden.
This book is fiction. It is purely made up out of whole cloth.
I always remember a face from years ago about Communism. It was that only about 3 percent of the Russian population were Communists, but they ruled the country. In the US (well, certainly more in California than any other state so far) we are well on the way to being controlled by homosexual interests – just two percent. Just goes to show you the power of the devil.
You shouldn’t give the devil so much credit, God Almighty is more powerful. Perhaps credit should be given to concupiscence and the fallen human nature, and man’s unwillingness to fight against weakness and to take the good advice and steer away from the occasion of sin.
Laurette Elsberry, you beat me to the punch. Thank you, I couldn’t have said it better than that. Isn’t it truly amazing i.e. the power of Satan and all his devils and demons to have such deception to control our national population with such a minuscule number of people who mock and defy God publicly. Remember St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans Chapter 1, versus 24-32. We have no right to offend God in exchange for not offending man, for if we think we do, than we are insultingly putting man before God, and we will have to bear the wrath of God in the end. Better for the sake of our souls to put God first and offend man!
They make up only 2% of the population, but they make up 33% of all child sex abusers, making them 17.5 times more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexuals. Hence the real danger homosexuals pose to our children.
Make that 16.5 times.
When was the last time you heard a sermon on the sins of homosexuality, abortion, contraception, shacking up, etc. I bet you can’t even remember.
Where does the “too much emphasis” on these subject come from; not from the pulpit.
Along this line of thinking that the Pope doesn’t mean business when dealing with homosexuality, etc (also abortion as per his speech on Monday). this from the Catholic News Agency:
Pope Francis has ordered the excommunication of a Catholic priest in Australia who illicitly said Mass, taught that women should be ordained priests and advocated for “gay marriage.”