The Nappy Cat Chronicles

Social Stigma

The Claims:

We are all shocked by this spectacle of aberrant sexual behavior, but we shouldn’t be. This is the end result of a society that rejects sexual restraints in the name of diversity…Maybe it’s time to question: when is tolerance just an excuse for permissiveness?⁵

Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, issued a statement late Monday saying that although Democrats were exploiting the scandal, they “are right to criticize the slow response of Republican congressional leaders.” Perkins said neither party “seems likely to address the real issue, which is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse…ignoring this reality got the Catholic Church into trouble over abusive priests, and now it is doing the same to the House GOP leadership.”⁶

Homosexual apologists admit that some homosexuals sexually molest children, but they deny that homosexuals are more likely to commit such offenses. After all, they argue, the majority of child molestation cases are heterosexual in nature. While this is correct in terms of absolute numbers, this argument ignores the fact that homosexuals comprise only a very small percentage of the population. The evidence indicates that homosexual men molest boys at rates grossly disproportionate to the rates at which heterosexual men molest girls.⁷

The Empirical Evidence:

In brief, the scientific sources cited by the FRC report don’t support their argument. Most of the studies they cited did not even assess the sexual orientation of abusers. Two of the studies explicitly concluded that sexual orientation and child molestation are unrelated.⁸

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.⁹

Are homosexual adults in general sexually attracted to children and are preadolescent children at greater risk of molestation from homosexual adults than from heterosexual adults? There is no reason to believe so. The research to date all points to there being no significant relationship between a homosexual lifestyle and child molestation. There appears to be practically no reportage of sexual molestation of girls by lesbian adults, and the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.¹⁰