“Gays aren’t perfect”, bigots argue against no one in particular

Why are “traditional-values groups” interested in the just-released report on the Sandusky sex abuse scandal? They saw an opportunity to use it as a weapon against gays:

And there are aspects of the entire case that both Gramley and Barber say cannot be ignored.

“Through all this we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Sandusky’s victims were all young boys. We can’t ignore the homosexual aspect of this,” Gramley offers. “And through Graham Spanier’s tenure as president, he has brought more and more homosexual-oriented programming and events to the campus than ever before.”

Adds Barber: “There also is an element of political correctness run amok here,” he explains. “Anytime homosexuality is involved — even though in this case it’s a homosexual predator preying on children — people seem to have this innate fear that they are going to be crushed by the sexual anarchist lobby if they speak out against it.” Yet Barber says it is a fact that percentage-wise more sexual crimes are committed against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals.

Yeah, because “homosexual-oriented programming” includes, um… child rape.

First of all, let’s not fall for the misconception that the gender of a child molester’s victims necessarily tells us anything about their sexual orientation. Contrary to what some may expect, men who molest children are, almost universally, not primarily attracted to adult men – yes, even the men who molest boys. Many consistently engage in relationships with adult women, not men. As pre-pubescent boys lack male secondary sex characteristics, heterosexual men who are attracted to them are apparently responding to their feminine qualities.

Devout homophobe Peter LaBarbera dismisses these findings and says, “Who cares if a guy is married? If he’s into molesting boys, that’s homosexual behavior. It’s academic nonsense to talk about these people as heterosexuals.” Ironically, this takes an academic dispute about the definition of homosexuality and prioritizes it over recognizing the reality of the situation. It means ignoring the facts about what sort of people actually molest children, in favor of perpetuating baseless hate against gays. And it means mistakenly eyeing the two gay guys down the block with suspicion, while believing that the heterosexuals around you could pose no risk to kids. Apparently it’s more important to attack gays than to understand what’s really going on here.

But even if we did agree that Sandusky is gay, and even if he did have a history of relationships with adult men (which there appears to be no evidence of), so what? You know what we call it when a straight person gets caught sexually abusing children? Tuesday. Anti-gay groups seem to want to assign supporters of equality a strawman position that gay people must be saintly, transcendent angels who are incapable of any wrongdoing. I suspect this is the flip side of their inability to see us as fully human – they deeply and comprehensively fail to grasp that LGBT people actually are just like everyone else, warts and all. Yes, sometimes gay people are going to molest children. And that’s unspeakably horrifying. But this doesn’t constitute an argument against homosexuality, any more than straight people who abuse children are an argument against heterosexuality.

As for the claim that anyone would be afraid to report child sexual abuse because the abuser was (supposedly) gay and some all-powerful gay lobby will destroy anyone who tries to stop gay people from raping children: Where does this come from? What basis could this possibly have in reality, however remote and tenuous? Has this ever happened? Even for the anti-gay movement, this is an extraordinary allegation. What is their evidence of a “sexual anarchist lobby” that seeks to intimidate people from taking action against ongoing child abuse? How can they possibly justify suggesting that gay people support the unhindered raping of children? And what makes them so certain that scary, scary gays were the reason that Sandusky was able to continue preying on children for so long?

What?

If you’re looking for a real “sexual anarchist lobby”, how about the thousands of Penn State students who were so irrationally devoted to a fucking college football program that they literally rioted when Joe Paterno was fired? They weren’t rioting in protest of his failure to take appropriate action on reports that Sandusky had raped a child. They were rioting in support of him.

These aren’t the gays you’re looking for. You utter twits.

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“Gays aren’t perfect”, bigots argue against no one in particular
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19 thoughts on ““Gays aren’t perfect”, bigots argue against no one in particular

  1. 2

    Derp! Even in an athletic program with a very lax atmosphere it’s pretty difficult for the male staff to get young girls alone in the shower.

  2. 3

    Oh, and if you want to link child-rape with “homosexual behavior,” you really should address the question of why child-rape happens, and gets covered up and enabled, in the most homophobic and patriarchial of institutions — like the Catholic Church, a football team, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish subculture, and some mosques in Iran…were these institutions “pro-gay” before boys started being molested within their walls?

  3. 4

    Ironically, this takes an academic dispute about the definition of homosexuality and prioritizes it over recognizing the reality of the situation.

    And, even more ironically, that makes these idiots part of the problem they’re alegedly so upset about. Every day we spend bashing gays for child-rape, is one more day we show the actual perps, in no uncertain terms, that they’re free to keep on doing their thing.

    And we wonder why this kind of shit goes on for so long under our noses?

  4. 5

    One would think that the most successful pedophiles would hide as heterosexual, married individuals in a hierarchical, authoritarian culture where children are at the bottom of the totem pole. Outwardly Gay appearing pedophiles in this culture may have a hard time getting parents trusting them.

  5. 6

    “What is their evidence of a “sexual anarchist lobby” that seeks to intimidate people from taking action against ongoing child abuse?”

    actually, zinnia, RAINBOW OREOS are evidence of a sexual anarchist lobby. 😉

  6. 7

    But this doesn’t constitute an argument against homosexuality, any more than straight people who abuse children are an argument against heterosexuality.

    This! Seriously, exactly this! I wonder how people who are heterosexual would feel if their attraction to and consensual relationships with adults of a different gender was continually compared to child rape in our society.

    I also can’t help noticing that the standard that I and many others use when arguing that LGBTQIA people should be accepted and that things like same-sex marriage should be allowed (the premise that consenting adults are involved, so it should be considered okay) does not permit child abuse and rape, whereas the standard that the other side often wants to use (the Bible and/or Qur’an) does allow forced marriage and rape.

  7. 8

    What is their evidence of a “sexual anarchist lobby” that seeks to intimidate people from taking action against ongoing child abuse?

    Obviously, the fact that there is no such evidence demonstrates that the evidence has been suppressed by our all-powerful Sexual Anarchist Overlords.

  8. 11

    To Zinnai Jones, thank you for writing this. I do not have the skills as a writer to express my thoughts, on this subject, as eloquently as you have, but my thoughts match yours.

    I am an outspoken supporter of full human rights for gays, for the simple fact that they are people.

    I have also taken action to get the police involved, on multiple occasions, when child rape was involved or suspected. As a teacher, I am required by law to do so. More importantly, though, I am required to do so by conscience.

    In some cases, this involved men raping, or attempting to rape, boys. In other cases, the men were raping, or attempting to rape, girls. The important issue was not sexual orientation at all. It was protecting children from the horrors of rape.

    This isn’t a matter of sexual orientation. It’s a matter of criminal, evil behavior — abuse of the powerless by the powerful — and I will not stop fighting it until I die.

    I will also not stop supporting the rights of gays — and everyone — to enjoy relationships with consenting adults, in whatever manner they choose.

    What I do not understand is this: why is it not obvious, to everyone, that sexual orientation, and the rape of children, are two completely different things?

  9. 13

    You have to understand that the right, particularly the religious right, is pretty unclear on the concept of meaningful consent.

    I think all humans have innate sympathy. I think all humans have a kind of “cheater detector” logic module. We all have basic sympathy and a kind of logical cunning that is the foundation of more advanced moral reasoning. But in religious people these instinctive faculties are dulled. Their belief in right and wrong is weak, they are morally weak. Authority equals asskicking for them, and God has ultimate authority because we are all worthless mierditas (little pieces of shit) who deserve his eternal torture in hell. God can infinitely kick our asses forever, so God is right.

    I sometimes thing when a religious conservative is mugged, they might not think it’s wrong because an unusual level of force overcame what they would normally have consented to, which is why I would think it wrong. They probably come to merge their sense of personal outrage and violation into some account of how the asskicking State should have protected them and how their asskicking God might get their revenge.

    This is what we are up against. Religious conservatives do not have as robust moral sentiments as we do. Never forget that. They are moral simpletons. It is proper that we should rule over them as they are unfit to lead, and we secularists will never be truly free until we have enough power to rule over our morally degenerate enemies. They live by fear, we must be strong enough to give them fear. We are already winning. Bruno got burned, Galileo got put under house arrest. That was one of our early triumphs.

    So given that religious conservatives don’t understand consent, it’s no wonder they are trying to blame this on Teh Ghey. But how do they explain sexual assaults by men on girls? How do they explain sexual assaults by women on minors of both sexes? And that last one is way undercounted because the only thing that counts as sexual activity is when something is happening to a guys dick.

    Fuck ’em all. There is no other solution to the religious conservative problem than a final solution. We must foster an environment and seek allies where the next generation of secularists can gain the power to make the religious right fear us. We have to make them more afraid of us then they are of their God.

    1. 13.1

      … Can you PLEASE not generalize like this, please? Considering the fact the you’re merely speaking of followers of Abrahmic religions here, rather than all religions, its highly offensive. And what about the religious gay? Please try to avoid becoming bigoted when denouncing bigotry.

    2. 13.3

      So basically your idea is to out-violence the violent nutters, and replace a society governed by irrational force with a society governed by irrational force.

      Yeah, no problems with that.

  10. 14

    If homosexuality had anything to do with pedophilia, why are girls only 50% of the child population but make up most of the the victims? According to the American Psychiatric Association, the chance of a girl under 18 being molested is 1 in 4, while only 1 in 6 for boys. And I’d bet the number of boys is overestimated; I’ve seen studies that say 1 in 7.

    http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/child-sexual-abuse.aspx

    Molestation is almost always a matter of children being available, not preference. Nearly all pedophiles are straights who can’t have a functioning adult relationship. And some studies say pre-pubescent males are targeted because they can appear feminine before the hormones kick in, again a straight preference for females. You’ll hear about teen girls being molested by adults, but rarely teen boys (unless it’s republican Mark Foley).

    http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html

  11. 15

    Groth and Birnbaum:
    “[of] 175 adult males who were convicted in Massachusetts of sexual assault against a child. None of the men had an exclusively homosexual adult sexual orientation. 83 (47%) were classified as “fixated;” 70 others (40%) were classified as regressed adult heterosexuals; the remaining 22 (13%) were classified as regressed adult bisexuals. Of the last group, Groth and Birnbaum observed that “in their adult relationships they engaged in sex on occasion with men as well as with women. However, in no case did this attraction to men exceed their preference for women….There were no men who were primarily sexually attracted to other adult males…”

    and

    Jenny et al:

    “Dr. Carole Jenny and her colleagues reviewed 352 medical charts, representing all of the sexually abused children seen in the emergency room or child abuse clinic of a Denver children’s hospital during a one-year period (from July 1, 1991 to June 30, 1992). The molester was a gay or lesbian adult in fewer than 1% in which an adult molester could be identified – only 2 of the 269 cases” (Jenny et al., 1994).

    http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html

  12. F
    16

    Gah. This again? These people will try to tell you that anything is related to homosexuality. Gay marriage? What’s to stop you from marrying a horse? Pedophile/ephebophile/hebephile molests children of the same sex? Teh ghey did it.

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