Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian writes in a Jan. 30 column denouncing the Boy Scouts for considering allowing gays to take part:
Now the big question in all this, of course, is the following: With these sex-abuse cases within the Boy Scouting organization, just as those within the Catholic Church, are we dealing with actual “pedophiles” or with predatory homosexuals?
Virtually all defenders of the gay agenda will angrily denounce the mere suggestion that homosexuals could be victimizers here, or that the two groups could even overlap.Contrary to the media myth that the Catholic Church’s problems are primarily with “pedophile priests” – terminology which safely absolves homosexuals from suspicion – the major portion of the church’s sexual-abuse problem has been the infiltration of its seminaries by homosexuals. In fact, widespread cases of predatory homosexual priests created a full-blown crisis for the church.
“The real problem the Catholic Church faces,” explains Father Donald B. Cozzens, author of “The Changing Face of the Priesthood,” is the “disproportionate number of gay men that populate our seminaries.”
That's not true. Margaret Smith, a John Jay College criminologist who worked on a 2004 study of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, says it's an oversimplification to blame sexual abuse on gays. While most of the abusive acts were homosexual in nature, "participation in homosexual acts is not the same as sexual identity as a gay man."
Further, analysis of research shows that gay or bisexual men are not more likely than heterosexual men to molest children.
Nevertheless, Kupelian insists on pushing the unfounded link between homosexuality and pedophilia by parsing the definition of a pedophile:
“Pedophilia” is, by definition, sexual contact with a pre-pubescent child. Most of the boys molested by “pedophile priests” have been pubescent teens. Likewise, in the scout world, although we can comfortably indulge the fantasy that there is a wide gulf between the land of homosexuals and the land of same-sex pedophiles, this does not comport with the known facts. (If you want, you can read Scientific American’s explanation here – but bottom line, many of these sex-abuse cases, whether in Scouts or in church, do not involve actual pedophiles.)
Well, no. A 2011 John Jay report reiterates its earlier findings:
The report concludes that the vast majority of clergy sex offenders are not pedophiles at all but were situational generalists violating whoever they had access to. Pedophiles, by definition, seek sexual gratification from pre-pubescent children of one gender and target this age and gender group (especially while under stress). Clergy sexual offenders in the Church were more likely to be targeting whoever was around them (and they had unsupervised access to) regardless of age and gender.
The researchers conclude that there is no causative relationship between either celibacy or homosexuality and the sexual victimization of children in the Church. Therefore, being celibate or being gay did not increase the risk of violating children. So, blaming the clergy abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on gay men or celibacy is unfounded.
Sure, it's convenient for Kupelian to continue to publish discredited myths. But the fact that he does so is just another reason why nobody believes WND.
