It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff wrote left-handed. Crane’s conclusion from the statistical oddity was that the left-handed aren’t mirror images of majority. They see the world differently, and seemingly in a libertarian fashion.
More on Cato, when John Stossel would present to the Institute’s donors and explain his libertarianism, he would always say that he viewed homosexuality as something every bit as natural as heterosexuality. Few disagreed with Stossel considering how natural desire is, but after reading Philip Gefter’s spectacular new book, Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I found myself wanting to ask Crane, Stossel and the great libertarian scholar Charles Murray if, as with the left-handed (I am one), dyslexics, and other “minorities,” there’s perhaps something different about homosexuals; that to limit the difference to sexual preference is to miss something greater?
What brought on the thinking, and the wondering, was the quote that Gefter leads with ahead of Chapter One. It’s by Fran Lebowitz, and it goes like this: “If you removed the homosexuals and the homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” What a remark. What an insight. And a very economically insightful one at that.
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