Study: No link between gay priests and sex abuse scandal

The authors have produced a thoroughly politically-motivated dishonest report. Almost all (80%) of the incidents consisted of homosexual assaults by gay priests on post-pubescent boys.

So some priests, who unfortunately--and inexcusably--victimized vulnerable persons, suffer from a sexual deviancy; but suffer from a different one than some theorized. This study is good since it takes a weight of blame off those who are already struggling with their own disorder, but it has zero effect on the fact that those same people are indeed suffering from a disorder and need compassionate help.

Dignity can't meet on Church property, but in Chicago Cardinal George has apparently done nothing to keep parishioners from holding a rally in support of a multiply-accused pedophile priest whom he, himself, suspended.

It is a truism that bigots, among them homophobes, will find anything they can to prop up their bigotry. It happened to people of color, and still does (the argument about number of African American men in prison still gets trotted out at the lunch tables).

Our GLBT brothers and sisters have been putting up with the lie that has hung the clergy sex abuse scandal around their necks.

Even in these pages, we've seen responses to the study calling it flawed, or re-asserting that the scandal was the result of some sort of "recruiting" by homosexual priests.

This claim is ridiculous. The sexual abuse crisis was one of ephebophilia of a homosexual nature. Male adults who like teenage boys in the erotic sense are gay are they not? Hello! Studies have shown that up to 1/3 of adult male homosexuals have had sex with teenage boys. Gay is a catch-all phrase; it covers the whole spectrum of male homosexuality. The fact of the matter is that teenage boys are more at risk of seduction by male homosexuals than teenage girls are by male heterosexuals. Furthermore, this whole problem of the sexual seduction of teens is a male problem. Very few women in general engage in this kind of behavior and it is virtually non-existent among nuns.

"It has been a case of guilty until proven innocent."

And here's another one:

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=30&art_id=90816&sid...

Do you wonder why no mention is given to the percentage of the 14,000 claims are man/boy vs. man/girl?

This study smells like two-week old fish. Not sure how many people are going to be foolish enough to believe it; the facts show clearly that the problem is pederasty, not over-arching pedophilia.

The John Jay College study is news and not news, all at the same time.

What makes it news is the drummed up contexts of church antigay labelling and false witness claiming that gay folks in general and gay clergy in particular are innately disordered and immature and predatory (all supposedly stemming from their sexual orientation). Bad news about gay folks is preached all together, a fairly neat package of scary claims and nasty beliefs. Then linked to the egregious and painful outcomes of surviving sexual abuse at the hands of once-trusted clergy. This package also fits neatly with the traditional folks beliefs that, if gay folks are different, then something fairly deep and terrible must be wrong with them; and if something is wrong with them in one regard, what else might be going wrong with them?

The drummed up contexts of innuendo - often coded nowadays since it is somewhat less acceptable to just come right out with bald and demeaning attacks on the dignity and human rights of gay folks - plus the outright repeats of false witness that is actively disconfirmed by all the available evidence of six or seven decades (since WW II) studying these alleged connections and causes are all embarrasing. Worse, instead of focusing on the evils and pain of sexual abuse, the narratives deflect out attention to something much more widely acceptable, looking high and low in church life for gay clergy and lay people to bear the blame. In a renewed sweep for non-comformists defined as trouble makers, church leaders also deflect narrative attention from themselves, including those documented instances where superiors in church life had plenty of evidence of harm, and yet facilitated various degrees of high secrecy to avoid what they expected would be public scandals. The public scandals arose anyway, concomitant with truth telling.

This track record of genteel but tough bishops willing to sacrifice individual children or youth to the better public reputations of their local churches is terrible enough, that it deserves a good look all on in its own right.

The not news part is simply that JJC is consistent with seven decades of post-World-War-II study - ranging from clinical observations of high functioning gay soldiers which surprised the armed forces psychiatrists who had been carefully trained to expect otherwise, all the way to empirically rigorous studies that revolved around testing one or another of our traditional bad faith hypotheses about sexual orientation variance and human nature and human functioning levels. Heady alliances between junk science and mean religion can hardly be predicted to actually do anybody any good. Yet we are still struggling to reconcile our long, slow controversy between the empirical facts and the various domains of flat earth beliefs about gays.

Since many bishops have now chosen to re-enter the hot button frays about what legal status or public policy relevance committed gay couples and their children may have, if any ... (not just in local church life jurisdictions, but in the public citizenship squares, period); we see a repeat of the familiar pattern of rendering some children and youth unimportant and invisible. The children of gay parents are thus as expendable as the sexually abused children of scandal seemed to be during all the cover-ups. Expect the struggle between the surprise good living human facts about the average gay citizen and his or her children, contrasted with simply awful allegations of dirt and danger to continue with renewed gusto. Www.colage.org estimates ten million kids in USA, raised by gay parents, thriving. None of those children or youth will register on this mean-spirited church life radar? Add this JJC study to the long list of empirical studies and analysis, then get gussied up to return to the public square with all the familiar blameworthy preachments? Alas. Lord have mercy.

Interesting that the USCCB website doesn't mention this fact in it's coverage of the John Jay report. At least it hadn't when checked yesterday. Must be really hard for them to give up a scapegoat they worked so hard to create.

So much of the abuse seems to originate with people who are denied basic human sexuality. And it seems to run similar to what happens in prison populations where the strong establish control by raping and hence humiliating the weak.

And we must also ask why the church let this go on for decades, instead of dragging the abusers off in chains to the police.

But to make it worse, the church instead of expelling the violators, simply moved them to a new location where they were not known, so they could continue their vile crimes. It does make one wonder if the rot reaches all the way to the top.

And it wasn't just here in the USA. Google "Christian Brothers - Ireland". You'll find the expose on how this catholic organization ran reform schools and orphanages. Children were sexually abused, worked half to death in cold factories, poorly fed, etc, while making religious trinkets. And a good day was a day when you didn't get a beating. Damages have reached $175 million, and there is an expected $1.75 Billion expected total. There are also reports of the same issues in Italy.

And lets make the scene worse - the Pope recently un-excommunicated and welcomed back into the church a Bishop Williamson. He heads a group of 600,000 extremists, and he is a Holocaust denier / minimizer. When Argentina found out Williamson was living there, he was thrown out of the country.

While my Jewish friends are still waiting for the church to excommunicate Adolf Hitler and his gang. Hitler of course was a Catholic, grew up in very Catholic Austria, and if you read Mein Kampf, you will find he learned his hatred of Jesus own people early in life. And Hitler leveraged his election in Germany on a campaign of hatred against the Jews. A hatred which the church spread for a thousand years, and waited until 1962 to essentially apologize to the Jews for the Holocaust, and the 50 million other deaths of WWII.

Sometimes I must wonder how anyone, repeat anyone, who believes in Jesus message of God's love for all His creation, can with clear conscious set foot in a Catholic church, except for those that have in many ways broken free from the tyranny of Rome. Virtually all my gay friends are somewhere between agnostic to Episcopal, or other progressive religions. And I give thanks that I never was a Catholic more and more, as we come to see how the church appears to be all about absolute power and absolute control. And always has needed a group to denigrate, and destroy the humanity of those victims, to sell its message of Love.

Dignity may be trying to correct the church, but unless someone comes up with the magic drug that extends human life on earth tenfold, I think we are wasting our time fighting the fire, and should be looking for the exit.

Oh - I missed one major item. Why were so many of the victims of church abuse male. Could it be that until fairly recently, the church only had altar boys, not altar girls.

And in our homophobic society, doesn't male on male rape garner more headlines then male on female? Possibly because if you go back to the ancient history of Leviticus, male on male sex was punishable by death, while female to female was punishable only by the lash.

And doesn't the church also perpetuate a second class status for women? As you look across many christian, Jewish, and of course Islamic sects, you find that the more conservative the church, the more and more that women have second class status. The source of much of Machoism, and the poisoning of so many minds that the man is justified in controlling and even raping women. The extreme case is Wahabi Islam, where a raped woman is often found to be guilty of the rape - it had to be her fault. while the perpetrator often gets off with a slap on the hand.