So What Did Your Gay Uncle Give You for Christmas?

In the wake of the Andrew Sullivan racial-intelligence flap, Half Sigma's post on the topic devolved into a debate over the heritability of homosexuality. Regrettably, despite it being an "HBD" blog, the commenters generally proved themselves rather dense, with the host not helping much either. A common theme was the absurd "Gay Uncle" theory. This theory posits that homosexuality would be a favored trait because gay uncles help out raising their nieces and nephews. Mathematically this seems ridiculous as an uncle, sharing only 1/4 of his niece's genes, would have to be twice as beneficial to a niece/nephew than a parent (who shares 1/2 her genes with her children) to make up for the shortfall. But since I'm only mediocre in math, that doesn't bother me so much as the common-sense angle. Do these people know any gays? Have they ever seen them pay more than the most superficial attention to any children?

But perhaps gay men are more successful on average otherwise, and can bequeath benefits to their nieces/nephews. So I took a look at the General Social Survey (GSS) to see if there's any evidence of such a phenomenon. I looked at the GSS variables SEXSEX5 - which asks respondents the sex of anyone they've had sexual relations with over the last 5 years - and CONINC which is a measure of income in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars. This question has been asked since 1991 so I tracked this over that time.

While the incomes of gays are jumpy, the incomes for straight males are substantially higher for all years but three. If there were a tendency for gays to be highly successful and thus well situated to help out their relatives, it sure doesn't show up here.

But, the sample sizes for gays are small, so how reliable are this data? Gay men constitute around 2 to 3 percent of the male population (I'm leaving out those with bi-sexual relationships - their incomes are consistently lower with one outlier). So if we wanted to validate that such a small population could be represented with reasonable accuracy at such low numbers, what might we look at - particularly when it comes to income? Obviously, Jews make up about the same proportion of the population, and the fact that Jewish incomes significantly outstrip those of non-Jews is well known. So this should show up clearly in the GSS if the income figures are reliable. Well here it is:

Just as we'd hope to see, incomes of Jews are significantly higher than non-Jews. Similarly, if gays were consistently more successful than non-gays, we should expect to that here as well - but we see, mostly, the opposite.

So the lesson is, if you want help from your uncle, you'll be much better off if he's Jewish than if he's gay.

Gays and Jews get a lot of attention in the media. While I know the readers of this blog are well aware of it, it might not be clear to the random person exactly what proportion of the population these groups constitute. Below, in full scale, are the percentages of those self-identifying as Jewish among all respondents and those reporting sexual relations exclusively with other men among all male respondents in the GSS:

Even 5-inch Deep Sea Squid Do It!

From the featured Science story in the Times:

A five-and-a-half-inch deep-sea squid that lives a solitary life up to half a mile down in the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean is the latest addition to the hundreds of species that are known to engage in same-sex sex.

So, so then Gay Marriage just has to make sense, doncha see?! The next six paragraphs continue to discuss same-sex activity of some sort in nature. Not until the seventh paragraph do we find a description of this squid's "same-sex sex" - the males simply fire off sperm in the direction of the nearest squid that might pass by, in the hope that in the deep-sea's blackness it might catch a female. Yep, that's it - no Brokeback Mountain romanticism after all. Then, at the end of the article, the writer has the nerve to pooh-pooh any anthropomorphism that might appear in the less responsible press.

Dr. Hoving was prepared for attention to the same-sex behavior and was ready for people to conflate squid and human behavior and announce the discovery of gay squid. He fended off that notion, reiterating that the squid has no discernible sexual orientation, and that a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh really has nothing to do with human behavior.

Of course not - who would ever dream of making such a connection - wink, wink.

The Bullying Pulpit

How do you bring about radical social change in a democracy? At the ballot box? Hah! Never happen - after all, the very people whose lives you want to throw into disarray are the very votes you'd need. Take your case to the courts until you get to the Supremes where you win a huge landmark decision overthrowing the old order? That's so 70's - what with the current makeup of the SCOTUS.

No, the best way is to set up a mega-righteous advocacy group that looks for vulnerable bastions of the very thing you're trying to overthrow - and sue the poor suckers for some vague civil-rights violations. We don't need no steenking SCOTUS - we'll just sue the bastards in federal court for hefty damages, dare the cash-strapped entity (and what public entity isn't cash strapped right now?) to fight back, and then ultimately settle. What's the settlement - multi-millions of dollars for the victims? Not a chance. It's a consent decree where you - the neanderthals - agree to throw out all your democratically sanctioned, old-world policies and agree to set up a formidable bureaucratic juggernaut mandated to overthrow all those crusty, traditional ways you so pathetically cherish.

The Times had an article today which highlighted a school district which - as it mentioned several times - is in Michelle Bachmann's congressional district that does not sufficiently genuflect to homosexual identity. To be precise, the article discusses a lawsuit alleging that "school officials have failed to stop relentless antigay bullying and that a district policy requiring teachers to remain “neutral” on issues of sexual orientation has fostered oppressive silence and a corrosive stigma." The charge is that homosexual students are being bullied and the school is not properly addressing this. How many students are part of this lawsuit? Six. How many students are in the Anoka school district being sued? 40,000. So these 6 students must be getting bullied really hard to justify hiring a lawyer to sue the district, right? As I'm sure you've guessed, no.

The lawsuit was brought in July on behalf of six current and former students by the Southern Poverty Law Center and by the National Center for Lesbian Rights. It charges that district staff members, when they witnessed or heard reports of antigay harassment, tended to “ignore, minimize, dismiss, or in some instances, to blame the victim for the other students’ abusive behavior.”

So what's the problem?

Through it all, conservative Christian groups have demanded that the schools avoid any descriptions of homosexuality or same-sex marriage as normal, warning against any surrender to what they say is the “homosexual agenda” of recruiting youngsters to an “unhealthy and abnormal lifestyle.”

How bad are things?

One of the plaintiffs, Kyle Rooker, 14, has not declared his sexual orientation but was perceived by classmates as gay, he said, in part because he likes to wear glittery scarves and belt out Lady Gaga songs.

Has it really gotten to this - where a kid can't be mocked for wearing glittery scarves and belting out Lady Gaga songs? Can there be no more obvious sign of America's doom - that a 14 year old boy who wears glittery scarves and belts out Lady Gaga songs gets to sue in federal court for being mocked?

But of course it has nothing to do with any student's ordeal - Bachmann's conservative district is being targeted, their Christian viewpoint is anathema, and six(6!) students out of 40,000 were enlisted to front the suit. The article notes that Ms. Bachmann "did not respond to requests to comment for this article" - and why should she? Even a President Bachmann wouldn't be able to mount a defense. (If I were President, I would put the full force of the Justice Department against the SPLC at every occasion (in this case in defense of the first amendment), potentially bankrupting them. Ah, dreams.)