As the Kim Davis saga drags into another week down in Rowan County, Kentucky, one thing immediately pops into my head: This story needs more drag. If Rowan would let a drag queen do her makeup and hair she'd probably look stunning. Most people do.
After that, however, I remain incredulous at the number of people who see Davis as a martyr, particularly against the always-scary "activist judges." "Kim Davis is the first victim of this tragedy," says her lawyer, Mat Staver. "A Christian is imprisoned for believing what the voters affirmed, that marriage is between a man and a woman."
He's right -- about the voters, anyway. Kentucky voters rejected marriage equality by a three to one margin in 2004. More, in a poll conducted just this past summer, the majority of Kentucky voters were still opposed to marriage equality.
Just as true, however, is that none of that matters. As people in the Deep South so often need to be reminded, the final word in civil rights isn't a matter voters get to weigh in on.
Fortunately, the justices of the Supreme Court -- five out of nine, anyway -- understand our Constitution better than the Kentucky majority, and that 75 percent doesn't mean bubkis. Our government was created the way it was to protect the minority -- in this case LGBTQ people -- from the majority.
This got me wondering, however: Just how big of a minority are we? Seems to me that should be a fairly simple thing to do. Counting us, that is. Heck, my 3-year-old daughter counts everything. Parking spaces in my high school's parking lot, shampoo bottles at Safeway, errant green hairs in daddy's make-up: She's really quite good at it.
Perhaps we should put her in charge of counting LGBT people.
People ask it all the time: "How many people are gay?" (Yes, I know, it's LGBTQ. But let's face it, for most people one syllable always trumps five.) The truth is, no one really knows.
Many people default to the most widely repeated number, one in ten. Taken from Alfred Kinsey's studies in the '40s and '50s, it's one of those numbers that's been repeated so often it's taken on a life of it's own. Unfortunately, like the idea that the Dallas Cowboys are "America's team" or people's kidneys are being stolen, it's just not true.
At this point I should note as a obsessive checker of, well, everything, it doesn't surprise me how many people assume this one in ten number is true. If Americans have proven to be adept at anything, it's believing anything that's repeated endlessly. And, yes, this was true even before Facebook and Twitter. How do you think Dick Cheney sleeps at night?
Having said that, there is now an Internet, people. For God's sake, check things before you believe them and stop being afraid of Kentucky Fried Chicken, wandering surgeons, lizards in the sewers and Dick Cheney. (Yes, I know the last two are redundant.)
Thankfully, the Internet can be used for good. Which is why -- love it or hate it -- this 10 percent number has been debunked time and time again as an accurate reflection of America's LGBT population.
For one thing, Kinsey himself was a practitioner of atypical sexual practices. Hate to repeat a gay cliché, but he seems to have had an agenda. Part of it being that since 10 percent is a fairly large number, it makes it "more acceptable" for people to be LGBTQ. Because let's face it, if the number's a discount you can get at JC Penney, it's got to be a meaningful quantity.
So what is the number, then?
It looks to be closer to 3.8 percent, or about 1 in 25. This is based on a UCLA study in 2011, which would mean about 9 to 10 million adults identifying themselves as LGBT. Of course, even this number seems to be fungible when you change the definition of gay.
For instance:
• If you're asking if people identify with one of the LGBTQ labels, the number stays near four percent.
• If, however, you define gay as having same-sex attraction or behaviors, the number goes back to near one in ten.
• Isn't fungible a great word? Seriously. It means: "able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable."
You say FUN-ji-bul, I say FUN-ga-bul, let's call the whole thing off? (Forget tomatoes; I just can't handle another cliché.') No, of course we shouldn't stop trying to identify our population. But having said that, it's going to get even more confusing, because now the Brits want to bring Kinsey back into the conversation.
In a banner headline-causing story that rolled through the LGBTQ corner of the Internet just last month, "Asked to plot themselves on a 'sexuality scale,' 23 percent of British people choose something other than 100 percent heterosexual -- and the figure rises to 49 percent among 18-24 year olds." The inventor of this scale? Kinsey.
Does this give more credence to Kinsey's 10 percent number? No; there's enough current and accurate data to say that his original numbers are still wrong. What it does mean, however, is that the debate about numbers and the meaning of those numbers likely won't be over soon.
If she's still counting, perhaps my daughter can figure it out someday -- but I doubt it.