Opinion:   “Gay households in North Carolina number less than three percent of the population. (5)

Fact:  This statement most likely means to compare numbers of same-sex couple households to those of opposite-sex households. According to the 2010 Census, and the best efforts of a team of researchers to accurately interpret the census data, same-sex households account for less than one percent of the total number of households. That may sound insignificant, but as long as we’re discussing numbers, the actual number of households identifying as “same-sex” in the 2010 North Carolina census is 27,250, which sounds like a bigger number than 1%. But most researchers agree, and surveying shows, that the real numbers are historically undercounted: people are reluctant to identify officially as same-sex couples due to a number of obvious inhibitions.

But, the exercise in finding these actual numbers, and analysing the data myself, has meant I’ve had to suspend reason long enough to engage with the disorienting suggestion that civil rights policy should be decided according to the number of people affected. Human and civil rights are not validated according to group size, they are validated because they are the right thing to do. It only takes one person, acting for himself, to appeal for his own personal rights before the courts, and the Supreme Court makes decisions on individual cases. Therefore, one person, judged to have his civil rights denied, is enough for American citizens to declare that the right belongs to all others similarly affected. In the United States of America, Mildred Loving represents thousands of others.

Many thinking, reasoning people only need to hear one agonizing story in order to decide how to feel about public initiatives. In Florida, a woman was denied time at her longtime partner’s hospital bedside. Because the two women were not married, and though they presented other ‘legal contracts’ addressing these issues, the woman’s partner died alone. Two, or two thousand such stories may make the initiative more urgent, but not more valid.

If this is an attempt to suggest that the relatively small number of 'gay households' are the only households advocating for this right, and therefore, their pitiful numbers are outweighed by the 'straight households', then there may be willful ignorance of the enormous outcry against the amendment from heterosexual households, and of the survey results repeatedly showing that a majority of North Carolinians, gay and straight, oppose this amendment when they understand what it actually would do.

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www.census.gov/hhes/samesex/files/ss-report.doc

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

link to latest elon poll.


(*) These are the misleading sources linked from the NC Values Coalition web page ‘opinions’ above:

(5) Mitch Weiss, "Census Shows Jump in Reported Number of Gay Households," Greensboro News-Record, June 30, 2011, at http://www.news-record.com/content/2011/06/30/article/census_shows_jump_in_reported_nc_gay_households.