Some Guys Are Normal

Who Cares This Much About Gays?

I'm gay, and I started this blog to talk about politics, other blogs I read, and my life in general. Gay rights issues is one of the main reasons I started becoming interested in politics (and reading blogs), so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that I write about gay things quite often.

I am surprised, though, that non-gay people care so much about what's going on with gays. This idea that the "homosexual agenda" is taking over the country is so absurdly over the top it makes me not be able to see straight. But, some politicians (and unfortunately some religious groups), especially those on the right, have realized that anti-gay hysteria is something they can drum up in the public to draw support for their own groups, so they continue to dwell on the issue.

A while back I looked at a week's worth of archives at the Family News In Focus online broadcast to see how often homosexuality was mentioned as a topic. Today I decided to do it again, and it looks like not much has changed in the last year.

Keep in mind that there hasn't been in any HUGE gay issue out recently to draw extra attention.

I looked at the week of 5/9/06-5/17/06 (the last 7 shows) and here's what I found:

Of the 7 shows, only two did not have a segment that specifically mentioned a subject about gays, and of the 28 show segments, 8 were completely gay-themed. This means that just around 30% of the segments released by Focus on the Family in the last 7 episodes were gay-oriented, and if you were just randomly listening the show one day, odds are very good that you would hear something about gays.

Do regular folks really care about gays so much that they want to hear about it every single time they listen to a FotF broadcast? Do conservative Christians even want to hear about gays that much? I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that these guys are not focusing on gays (as some people claim). But considering these days they're just talking about it to keep it in the public eye (not because there's some huge gay story out there), I wonder how long it can last before their readers feel like they're reading The Advocate rather than what they thought was a conservative Christian news source.

posted by Brady @ 8:59 AM