oh, goody, here comes the gay witch hunt and purge of homosexuals from the ranks of the GOP:
[q]
In the wake of the scandal of former Congressman Mark Foley’s inappropriate behavior involving teenage male pages, a number of conservative commentators and organizations are reviving an old charge that homosexuals are more likely to sexually abuse children. The Family Research Council is promoting a paper by one Timothy Dailey which claims that since approximately one-third of child sex crimes are committed by men against boys, and homosexuals comprise only 1 to 3 percent of the population, gay men are greatly overrepresented in child sex offenses.1 Articles by Steve Baldwin and Judith Reisman in Pat Robertson's Regent University Law Review make similar claims and argue that “homosexuals sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is five times greater than the molestation of girls.”2 A booklet from Focus on the Family charges that “studies indicate that around 35 percent of pedophiles are homosexuals. . . . a child molester is 17 times more likely to be homosexual than heterosexual.”3
In addition to these claims, a number of conservative Christians have employed a version of the “slippery slope” argument, charging that the gay rights movement inevitably leads to tolerance for pedophilia by eroding all traditional norms of sexual behavior. Robert Knight, formerly of the Family Research Council and now with Concerned Women for America, argues that if gay marriage is accepted, “Why not [marriage between] three men? Three women? A man and a boy?”4 Senator Rick Santorum has blamed the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals on modern liberalism, arguing “It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning ‘private’ moral matters such as alternative lifestyles.”5 Similarly, the Wall Street Journal has complained, “Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for [House Speaker] Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys.”6 Mary Eberstadt, a writer for the Weekly Standard, has written no fewer than three articles attempting to link homosexuality to pedophilia, arguing that the growing success of the gay rights movement has brought a formerly taboo subject out into the open.7
There are, however, two major problems with these claims which try to link homosexuality with pedophilia. First, the statistical data that has been cited is based upon a serious distortion of reputable scientists’ studies on child molestation. The scientists who authored the studies made no such claim about homosexuals posing a greater threat to children, and in fact in many cases explicitly argued the opposite. These scientists have concluded that pedophilia is a separate orientation from homosexuality and that the vast majority of molesters who target boys have either no interest in mature males or are heterosexual men who are attracted to the feminine characteristics of young boys.
Second, the “slippery slope” argument is based on the false premise that the protection of children from sexual activity is a long-standing part of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which has only recently come under assault as a result of the gay rights movement. In fact, throughout most of history, the Judeo-Christian tradition tolerated and even approved of sexual relations between adult males and girls of twelve years of age or even younger. The contemporary taboo against sex between adults and minors developed only in the late nineteenth century, as societies became increasingly committed to the ideals of individual rights and personal autonomy, which led to concern about the possibility of coercion and exploitation in adult-minor relationships. If the slippery slope argument has any validity, it more aptly applies to defenders of religious tradition and orthodoxy than to proponents of gay rights.[/q]
