Accepting, excepting….
The NY Times just ran a profile on the Rev. Robert Carter, SJ who just passed away at the age of 82. Fr. Carter made headlines in the 70s when he came out as gay and went on to found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Yeah, whatever.
Quoted in the article is a section of Carter’s unpublished memoir in which he says:
Soon afterward he was visited by a subprovincial of the Jesuit order. “It seems that they were afraid I had had a psychotic break or something,” Father Carter wrote in an unpublished memoir.
Although there were calls for his expulsion by irate “Jesuits, parents and alumni of our schools,” Father Carter continued, he was not disciplined. In those days, the church and the Jesuit order were somewhat more accepting of gay people.
Well, maybe we were more accepting of gay priests back then. But in our defense, that was before we knew about them abusing all those children.
Yeah, that’s right. I am all for accepting, except….
March 17, 2010 at 11:33 am
Rev. Carter helped start the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, not NAMBLA.
Here's a good article that explains why pedophilia and homosexuality are two very different things:
http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/features/explaining-pedophilia
March 17, 2010 at 11:47 am
Craig, Most of the "pedophile priests" were actually homosexual predators who preyed on sexually/biologically young men not children.
March 17, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Anon,
Here's a great, though very long, article about the topic if you are interested in learning about why homosexuality and child abuse/molestation are completely unrelated:
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/HTML/facts_molestation.html
From the article:
"child molestation and child sexual abuse are used to describe actual sexual contact between an adult and someone who has not reached the legal age of consent. In this context, the latter individual is referred to as a child, even though he or she may be a teenager"
Here is the conclusion:
"The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterized as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children."
March 17, 2010 at 12:46 pm
The link didn't seem to paste properly:
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/HTML/facts_molestation.html
March 17, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Craig:
Ever had the opportunity to read gay "coming of age" stories? I have. They invariably involve a teenager and an older man. The vast majority of priests who are sexual offenders (out of the very small percentage who give the rest a bad name) have been involved with pubescent boys. Technically, that's ephebophilia. And it seems that if it's not done by a priest, it's acceptable to teach it in public schools as a normal thing.
March 17, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Craig,
Whether he advocated for consensual sex between same-sex adults or between men and children, he is still advocating evil. Yes, we find pedophilia absolutely abhorrent (and rightly so) yet we have been conditioned as a society to accept homosexuality as normal (quite wrongly so).
Whether Robert Carter did or did not embrace the evil advocated by NAMBLA does not change the evil he advocated in the organization he founded.
In any case, Isaiah 5:20-21 applies: "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who change darkness into light, and light into darkness, who change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own sight, and prudent in their own esteem!"
March 17, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Craig, it seems to me that we should be looking to the Scriptures for guidance and understanding, not subjective human belief. After all, psychology is more pseudo-science than anything else. Psychology may convey the truth sometimes, but the teachings from God are the absolute touchstone of truth, especially regarding morality.
To me it seems that the primary mistake made by bishops in the priest scandal was to listen to lawyers and psychologists and not the Word of God.
March 17, 2010 at 2:07 pm
I have no problem with making a distinction between paedophila and homosexuality. I DO have a problem with the 60% of the sexual abuse cases in the church that involve priests and teenage boys and then hearing people pretend that homosexuality has nothing whatsover to do with it.
March 17, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Dave P.,
Ephebophilia is a sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents. Child sexual abuse is actual sexual contact between an adult and someone who has not reached the legal age of consent.
Seamus,
Judging from this post, it seems the Church didn't think homosexuality was inherently evil until around 2005, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.
Anon,
Are you suggesting that some lawyer/psychologist or psychologist/lawyer was going around the globe and persuading bishops to let molesting priests keep on being priests? That's a new one on me.
I think bishops were short-sightedly covering up abuse to protect the reputation of the Church for the "greater good".
romish,
Read the article I linked to above. It explains in great detail why "homosexual = child molester" is not a valid equation.
Its called "Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation".
March 17, 2010 at 4:15 pm
The data from the John Jay study showed that the majority of cases were priests having sex with sexually mature young men. Men having sex with other men is called homosexuality. The majority of cases were of homosexual lust. To pretend otherwise is silly. Remember, these same "doctors" also told bishops that this predatory behavior could be cured…
March 17, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Read the article I linked to above. It explains in great detail why "homosexual = child molester" is not a valid equation.
Which wasn't my equation at all.
March 17, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Craig,
Total non sequitor. How does 2005 figure into this equation? In any case, the Church has always deemed homosexual acts as intrinsically evil. Never have they been seen as morally licit. Never.
March 17, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Dear Craig,
The article which you've linked doesn't necessarily answer the allegations which people have made. The sample size of 175 may seem large until you note that gays are a very small minority of the population share. Even the most self-selecting surveys never have homosexuals take larger than about 5% of the population. It's probably a lot closer to 1%. The majority of "gay" respondents are generally actually bisexuals (again, even the self-selecting surveys find no more than about 10% of the population to be homo- or bi-sexual). Thus, a survey of 175 people should find between 1-3 gays (approximately), which is smaller than the survey's margin of error (to first order, this is about 7.5% for this sample size, or 13 people).
For the sake of argument, we might lump the homosexuals and bisexuals into one "bin" (they tend to do that themselves, hence GLBT groups). According to the link which you showed, 13% of the respondents who had sexually molested children fall into this bin, denoted as the "gay" bin. This is approximately the upper-end of the "gay" share of the population, and is two or three times larger than the conservative estimates for the gay share of the population.
But it becomes an even larger share when you realize that only 40% of the respondents were "regressed" adult heterosexuals. The share of the population which is heterosexual, by the most self-selecting standards (that is, the samples which give the largest percent of gays), is about 90%. Thus, even this article shows, by generous apportionment, that gays are twice as likely per capita as heterosexuals to become "regressed" and thus child molesters; by less-generous measures, this swells to about 4-5:1.
March 17, 2010 at 4:54 pm
All of this is well and good well, though as the authors themselves admit,
"Science cannot prove a negative. Thus, these studies do not prove that homosexual or bisexual males are no more likely than heterosexual males to molest children."
Given the error bars on all of the studies (in one, only 269 of the 352 abused children had identified abusers), you've made a tepid-at-best case for the claim.
Here, however, is another problem: you are attacking a straw-man in your claim. Your attack is on, as you put it, the equation that "homosexual = child molester." Nobody is making this claim; the nearest anybody comes is the statement that "all child molesters are homosexuals," from which does not necessarily follow the statement "all homosexuals are child molesters." Both must be true for the equation "homosexual = child molester" to be valid.
But even this is not the claim being made. As romishgraffiti puts it, "I have no problem with making a distinction between paedophila and homosexuality. I DO have a problem with the 60% of the sexual abuse cases in the church that involve priests and teenage boys and then hearing people pretend that homosexuality has nothing whatsover to do with it."
The charge is against abuse of teenage (read:immature though fairly developed sexually) boys, not of children. The article which you linked mentions nothing abut age and generally refers to "child abuse." The assumption of "child abuse" is not of adolescents, but of pre-pubescent children. The charge made of the abuse of pubescent boys. As the author notes in reference to the Church's sexual abuse scandal, "These are cases in which the term pedophilia – referring as it does to attractions to prepubescent children – can cause confusion."
The author then argues that "There are no data, for example, showing that gay men and lesbians are more likely than heterosexual men and women to sexually harass their subordinates in the workplace." This is classic bait-and-switch. All of these studies, all of these data ignore the important FACT that 60% of the cases of sexual abuse were men abusing adolescent boys, teenagers who are sexually-developed. The studies cited involve children (understood as pre-pubescent), or between adults in the workplace.
Consider: most 16 and 17 years old girls and not a few boys of that age could pass as young college students. It can be difficult to judge based only on appearance the age of an individual to within a year or two (this is the reason why many states have ID laws which state that cashiers should ask for ID if the person buying alcohol appears to be younger than 25 or even 30). Yet, if the victims of abuse were actually two years older, they would be considered adults by the law, and we would hear nothing about "child abuse" or "child molestation." Two years of age, and perhaps no significant physical changes, and we would simply write that "60% of the sexual abuse cases were amongst homosexuals." There would be no "child abuse" about it, no problem of "pedophiles" vs "homosexuals."
March 17, 2010 at 6:06 pm
JC says "you are attacking a straw-man in your claim."
Straw man courtesy of the original post:
"Well, maybe we were more accepting of gay priests back then. But in our defense, that was before we knew about them abusing all those children."
Trying to pin the disgusting behavior of child abusers and the more despicable cover-up by the Church on supposed librul adoration of teh gay is flat out wrong.
The article I cited also explains what the term "child sexual abuse" means:
"child molestation and child sexual abuse are used to describe actual sexual contact between an adult and someone who has not reached the legal age of consent. In this context, the latter individual is referred to as a child, EVEN THOUGH HE OR SHE MAY BE A TEENAGER" (emphasis mine)
The article also discusses why male on male abuse does not equate to homosexual orientation. Abuse is about the young age of the victims and being able to dominate the victim.
Seamus,
The NYT article cited in the post explains what happened in 2005 as does the article I linked to.
romish,
OK, the article I cited explains why "homosexuality has nothing whatsoever to do with it".
Is that better?
March 17, 2010 at 6:50 pm
"child molestation and child sexual abuse are used to describe actual sexual contact between an adult and someone who has not reached the legal age of consent. In this context, the latter individual is referred to as a child, EVEN THOUGH HE OR SHE MAY BE A TEENAGER" (emphasis mine)
My point is that these studies do not tell us specifically about people whose "child abuse" involves explicitly teenagers. The bait and-switch is that we're told that "child abuse" involves anyone under the legal age of consent, and then given a study involving "child abuse" which may or may not cover the entire range in question. The range in question is teenagers, not all the people under the age of consent. Of those 175 offenders surveyed in the Groth and Birnbaum study, what percentage (if any) molested teenagers? If we only read Herek's piece, we wouldn't know, because he doesn't tell us. Luckily, it wasn't hard to find that study, which states that
The victims for both groups were predominantly prepubertal children, with a mean age of 10 years. Although the operational definition for "child" is anyone 16 years of age or younger, the large majority of victims for both the fixated group (74%) and the regressed group (69%) were 12 or under. Within this range, male victims appeared to be slightly older on the average for both groups. (emphases mine)
Beyond this, the study doesn't offer age-specific details, but I find it very unlikely that the remaining children were all ages 15-17; in fact, given their operation definition for children being "16 years of age or younger," and given the mean age was ten, I think we can assume that there were no 17-year-olds and very few 15 or 16-year-olds in this study.
March 17, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Dear Craig, explain (away) this article:
"the rate of new HIV diagnoses among men who have sex with men (MSM) is more than 44 times that of other men and more than 40 times that of women…The rate of primary and secondary syphilis among MSM is more than 46 times that of other men and more than 71 times that of women, the analysis says."
http://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/Newsroom/msmpressrelease.html
P.S. I don't want you touching my 12-16 year-old son any more than I want you touching my 12-16 year old daughter–whatever fancy word you want to call it.
March 17, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Anon,
I don't have to "explain it away". It's pretty self-explanatory.
P.S. Stay classy!