The Washington Post dug itself a little deeper into the gutter the other day (I guess that’s still possible), when it allowed Bill Donohue, of the One Man Catholic Defense League, to repeat in its pages one of the older and more enduring lies in the kook pew’s arsenal…
Alfred Kinsey was the first to identify a correlation between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors. In 1948, he found that 37 percent of all male homosexuals admitted to having sex with children under 17 years old.
This is why I own a copy of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior In The Human Male. Nobody but other sex researchers, and those of us with an interest in fact checking the bigots, actually takes the trouble to go through its page after page after page after page of dry, meticulously documented tables. Which makes it an easy book for the bigots to to lie through their teeth about. In fact, Kinsey said no such thing as, happily, some of the comments to that Washington Post column are pointing out. What Kinsey discovered, was that 37 percent of all males had some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm, sometime between adolescence and old age.
Notice the difference? It’s not even 37 percent actually had sex when they were teenagers. But never mind that for a moment. If having had gay sex with a teenager, when you yourself were also a teenager makes you a pedophile (and yes, remarkably, some of them will insist even that is so), then tell me what percentage of the heterosexual population are also pedophiles? Is everyone who ever took a roll in the hay with their high school sweetheart a pedophile now? The line to register as a sex offender is going to be a tad long then. Maybe we can all just check a box off during the next census.
This kind of mendacity doesn’t happen accidentally and this one is actually quite old now. I saw them dispensing this back in the 80s, when all the kook pews had to vent on was the letters to the editor page and Usenet. I don’t know if Paul Cameron floated this one first but it has his touch written all over it. Call it an early example of how to employ real scientific research for a bit of deft hate mongering by omitting one small bit of information…like in this case, that Kinsey was talking about sexual experience over a lifetime (and wouldn’t you know, teenagers tend to have sex with other teenagers when their parents aren’t looking…). It’s been debunked so often that the instant Bill puts it out there people start filling the comments with its rebuttal. But you can see here, and it’s almost sad to look at, how the anti-gay industrial complex doggedly keeps all the old lies in their tool kit. Because ultimately, even when they don’t fool anyone at all anymore, repeating them will still gives the faithful something to scream at the world, whenever it looks like the world isn’t listening to them anymore.
[Edited a tad right after I posted for clarity...and once more to correct Bill (not Phil!) Donohue's name.]
You mean Bill Donohue, not Phil. Otherwise I agree!
The dangers of research even when done completely accurately and properly is that it can be used improperly by those who have bad motives and worse still if the people interpreting the findings don’t know there asses from a hole in the ground.
When is WaPo going to correct this?
Yeah…I got Bill’s name wrong. Mike redlined it and I just corrected it and made a note. This is why bloggers need editors.
Thank you, Bruce, for taking the time to check this. It’s so important to call bigots on this stuff. This is so egregious, it seems hard to believe this was an honest error.
[Note to Bill Donohue - I thought you considered bearing "false witness" a sin. Perhaps you don't consider gays your neighbors and therefore think you are exempt? What a shameful example of Catholicism.]
Bruce, are you going to send a shortened version of this as a letter to the editor to the Post?
Thank you again for caring and taking action. The truth, indeed, does matter.
Phil Donohue, on the other hand, is a fine example of Catholicism and an ally to the LGBT community.
Thanks for the research work. I think the most useful campaign gay men can do is to discredit the link between gay men = pedophiles. All the studies I’ve read conclude that gay men are responsible for about three percent of pedophilia. Yet, we’re still often perceived as being the ones primarily responsible for it.
I’ve wondered about how much pedophilia is done at the hand of straight fathers. I’ve know more than a few men and women who were raped by their fathers. And, as usual for pedophiles, it didn’t matter what the sex of the child was. I knew two sisters and one brother who were raped by their father. This is the kind of information about pedophilia that should get into the press.
If anyone knows of research that deals with father pedophilia, I’d appreciate that you post a link here.
Thanks,
Joe
I notice that he also mentions the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy. Presumably he is referring to the paper entitled “The Proportions of Heterosexual and Homosexual Pedophiles Among Sex Offenders Against Children” by Kurt Freund and Robin Watson, which was published in that journal in 1992. This citation is another favourite of purveyors of the “gay paedophile” lie, and it has been repeatedly cut and pasted / copied from one anti-gay website / book to another.
I suspect that few of those who cite this paper have ever actually read it. I admit that I haven’t read it either, because I have never been able to access it, and I doubt that, as a layman, I could fully understand it if I did read it. However, through the kindness of Dr Gregory M. Herek, I was enabled a few years ago to read the abstract of it.
Freund and Watson refer to adults with an exclusive or primary sexual attraction to children as PAEDOPHILES (standard usage); they refer to adults with an exclusive or primary sexual attraction to other adults as TELEIOPHILES. They concluded that the percentage of male PAEDOPHILES who are sexually attracted to male CHILDREN is considerably higher than the percentage of male TELEIOPHILES who are sexually attracted to other ADULT MALES. They refer to this latter category as ANDROPHILES and to adult males who are sexually attracted to ADULT FEMALES as GYNEPHILES. (Sorry about all this jargon, but it’s what they used.)
They explicitly stated that their study did NOT show that ANDROPHILES (i.e. ordinary gay men) were more likely than GYNEPHILES (i.e. ordinary straight men) to engage in paedophile practices; furthermore they noted that the myth that they were more likely to do so had already been refuted in an earlier study of theirs.
In his memorial address, “Remembering Kurt Freund 1914 – 1996”, Watson (whose real name is Wilson) mentioned this matter once again. Referring to “oft-misquoted research on which I collaborated with Dr. Freund” he said:
“These articles have frequently been cited by fundamentalist lobbyists as proof-positive that homosexuals are more inclined to molest children. This was not a finding of our research, period.”
Why do these religious fanatics all think that “Thou shalt not LIE” is for everyone else but them?
A RRRW bigot lying and distorting ancient research to smear gay people? Say it isn’t so!
They lie and they do so knowingly because in their mind,they are lying on behalf of God. In other words, you use whatever tools necessary to fight the devil, including the tools of the devil.
That’s how they justify it.