If you know anything about Consumer Reports, the magazine and the research group that supports them, you know they are fiercely independent. They accept no advertisement so that they can’t be accused of bias. Well I’m here to tell you they are.
This magazine that prides itself in details, in numbers, in percentages has an article on mattresses in the February 2016 issue. (As an aside, where did all these mattress stores come from? Have they, as Listerine did, succeeded not in selling us a product but an idea? Listerine sold us the notion of bad breath. They’ve sold us the notion that mattresses go bad after 8 years. And how do they make the link between buying a mattress and celebrating President’s Day? Is it an oblique reference to philandering presidents or perhaps to the plagues boasting a president slept here?) But I digress, but not that far.
Consumer Reports evaluation of mattresses, true to form and principle, is detailed and supported by research. There is one page that is detailed but unsupported in fact and even runs counter to the facts. It’s a picture taken from above of sixteen couples in bed, and of course you know where I’m going with this. They had one single sleeper, 15 couples, and of the 15 couples, 4 were same sex.
A couple of things: I have only one time shared a bed with another man. Actually I shared it with 4 other men and it wasn’t a bed but a poncho. It was in the Sierra Blanca mountains on an Army training exercise. The temperature dipped to 25 degrees and we were in jungle fatigues. I gladly spent that night sandwiched between two males. However, since then, not only don’t I share a bed I won’t even share a room with another man.
Most men don’t share beds with other men unless they are a couple, and that’s the point of the picture. Consumer Reports is inclusive, open-minded, accepting, modern or whatever other big-hearted saying you want to use. However, they are inaccurate according to a definitive 2015 Gallup poll showing that 3.6% of Americans are gay. The Consumer Report picture implies that over 26% are which, not by coincidence, is exactly what Millennials when polled say they think the percentage of gays in the U.S. population is.
How we have fallen! And while the society around you and most mainline churches and many Christians think we have somehow fallen upward we have not. It’s down, down, to a burning ring of fire.
How we have gone from the network TV of the mid-50s not daring to depict husband and wife Desi and Lucy as sleeping in the same bed to a magazine of “science” depicting same-sex couples in the same bed? How come the numbers and facts matter to Consumer Reports when it comes to products people use but not when it comes to the reality they live in? Because homosexuality and gay marriage are denials of God-given realities, and to maintain a fiction you must constantly reinforce it.
