Dept. of Bait and Switch

Newsflash: 96.6 percent of Americans identify as straight. Which is kind of surprising since America has been told, over and over, that 10 percent of the country is gay.

This figure was trumpeted so relentlessly that eventually people kind of thought it was a low-end estimate. Which is why, two years ago, Gallup found that the average American guess that 24 percent of the country was gay.  (In the new CDC study, 1.6 percent of people identify as gay or lesbian.)

At some point in the near future we’re going to start getting data on the actual number of same-sex unions and only then will society get a sense of the real magnitude of the trade it seems to have made.