Topic: WorldNetDaily
In a March 25 column warning that homosexuals are "using the public airwaves, public parks and public schools to push deviant sexual practices into the faces of our innocent children," Olivia St. John writes:
Dr. Gene Abel, medical director of the Behavioral Medicine Institute of Atlanta, compared groups of self-confessed homosexual and heterosexual molesters. A sampling of molestation rates indicated that the homosexuals averaged molesting 150 children each, while the heterosexuals molested 19.8 victims each.
St. John falsely assumes that all same-sex pedophiles are homosexual. In fact, as Mark E. Pietrzyk points out, Abel has written:
[M]ost men who molest little boys are not gay. Only 21 percent of the child molesters we studied who assault little boys were exclusively homosexual. Nearly 80 percent of the men who molested little boys were heterosexual or bisexual, and most of these men were married and had children of their own.
This is a distortion of Abel's work that WND has propagated as far back as 2000. David Bresnahan wrote in an article "excerpted from an in-depth exploration of pedophilia, homosexuality and the Boy Scouts of America in the October edition of WND's sister publication, the monthly WorldNet Magazine [now Whistleblower]": "Based on data from a study of non-incarcerated child sex offenders, Gene G. Abel, M.D., has found that homosexuals 'sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls.'" But Abel did not label all same-sex pedophiles as homosexuals.
