Wash. Post publishes Bill Donohue’s anti-gay, Catholic nonsense: Homosexuality is related to child sex crimes
”The conventional wisdom maintains there is a pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church; I maintain it has been a homosexual crisis all along…. Correlation is not causation; it is an association. So to say that there is a correlation between homosexual orientation and the sexual abuse of minors is not to say that being a homosexual makes one a molester. Indeed, as I have said many times, most gay priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters have been gay. In other words, although sexual orientation does not cause sexual abuse, the fact that there is a relationship between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors cannot be ignored in dealing with this problem.”
Portion of an opinion by Bill Donohue published by the Washington Post. Donohue, the one-man, media attack dog for the US Catholic Church, recently declared that sex with 13-year-old children did not qualify as pedophilia. (Washington Post)
Here, Donohue relies heavily on “research” found in documents collected by NARTH. NARTH is the ridiculously anti-gay organization that made headlines when one of it’s prominent member, George Rekers, was caught on vacation with a gay male escort. The questionable sources that Donohue extrudes his religiously biased argument from are primarily from the early 1990s or earlier. He also includes declarations by the Catholic Church’s own personal psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons, and a tidbit from a Boston Globe article.
That 2002 article begins by saying most sex abuse cases by priests are with adolescents, quoting lawyers who represent cases of molested boys, mostly ”around 12 and 14.” The article then draws on a wide swath of opinions but draws no conclusions, stating that ”many scholars say the link between homosexuality and the abuse of teenage boys is unclear. Specialists also don’t know what percentage of priests who molest boys are gay…. But others caution that there is no evidence suggesting that gay men are more likely to abuse teenagers than straight men.” Some of the many best guesses given by the article’s interviewees: Stunted psychosexual growth by priests; a Catholic culture of power deferred to priests; easy access to “altar boys” rather than girls; statistically there is an incredibly high percentage of priests who are homosexual.
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