Views
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice
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It’s just not going to go away. In all the deserved media attention to the failings of priests and pastors who have molested children entrusted to their ministry, mainstream commentators continue to accept without comment the religious right wing’s scapegoating of gay men.
The right wing of the American Catholic Church, given voice by Bishop Wilton Gregory, among others, has indicated that to prevent future abuse, seminary candidates would be more carefully screened to avoid the creation of a “homosexual atmosphere” wherein heterosexual young men might fear “being harassed” or identified as gay. Others have consistently blamed the priestly pedophile scandal on the presence of gay clergy.
I kept waiting for someone to object or at least to offer an opposing point of view. I was sure that National Public Radio, at least, would have the resources and journalistic ethics to solicit comment from a responsible and knowledgeable gay source, or from Dignity, the gay Catholic organization.
It hasn’t happened.
Surely, I thought, someone would speak up, and any responsible journalist would get a comment from GLAAD or the Human Rights Campaign.
Not so far.
The wake-up call for me came in a phone message at the OITM office in Richmond from a woman, Kathleen, who identified herself as straight. She said it made her so angry to hear all these commentators and news people identify pedophiles as gay, when she knows that’s not true. She wondered where she could go to find some rebuttal information or a gay spokesman to refute that “confusion.”
Identifying pedophiles as homosexuals has been part of the bigotry of gay-bashers since forever. But here’s the truth: that the vast majority of gay men are interested in adult partners, not children. That homosexuality has nothing to do with pedophilia or hebephilia (lust for post-pubescent adolescents under the age of legal consent). That a large percentage of pedophiles and hebephiles who molest boys are in adult relationships with women and they identify as straight.
I know this from working in the sexual abuse field for 12 years with a Vermont-based national nonprofit agency promoting treatment for offenders. But don’t just take my word for it.
The Human Rights Campaign wrote in a press release: “While a few Church leaders have linked homosexuality to the crisis, the research is clear that the sexual orientation of an adult is not a factor in the analysis of child abuse.” The release cited the policy statements of such front-line child abuse prevention and treatment organizations as The American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the Child Welfare League of America affirming that “there is no correlation between homosexuality and child abuse.”
All of which is not to suggest that there are no gay pedophiles or hebephiles. I’ve met three in the last decade and a half. But as Dr. Fred Berlin, a well known and widely respected sexual disorders expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has said, there is also no evidence that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to molest children.
According to a 1994 study of 269 abused children (reported in the July issue of Pediatrics that year and also cited by the HRC), “a child’s risk of being molested by his or her relative’s heterosexual partner is 100 times greater than by someone who might be identified as a homosexual.”
The HRC’s Communications Director David M. Smith said, “What is particularly painful is that using gay priests as scapegoats is a smokescreen that may be allowing Church officials to avoid dealing with numerous types of abusive situations.” Those situations include reports from international Catholic organizations that female members of religious orders were frequently “seduced, sexually exploited and raped” by priests and missionaries in Africa, Brazil, Columbia, India, Ireland, Italy, New Guinea, the Philippines and the United States.
And Smith got the bottom line exactly right: “All abuse is wrong, regardless of the sexual orientation of the perpetrators.”
Whether the Catholic Church hierarchy is stigmatizing gay priests in order to screen larger problems or using the abuse issue to conduct a purge of gay priests, it is morally wrong and ethically indefensible. That the Church hierarchy in this case is being aided and abetted by an irresponsible American mainstream press is as inexcusable as the actions of the bishops who looked the other way while parish priests abused the children with whose souls they were entrusted.
Everyone was proud of the heroism of Father Mychal Judge, the gay Roman Catholic priest and NYFD chaplain who was killed on September 11 administering the last rites of his faith to another firefigher. He deserved our respect and our pride. So do all the other celibate and chaste gay priests who carry out their duties with integrity and love.
We, too, can be proud enough of ourselves and each other as gay men and lesbians, as transgender people, bisexuals, and queers to stand up and continue to speak out against the slanders directed our way by a repressive bureaucracy more interested in preserving its property rights and prerogatives of power than in comforting those it has abused and whose pain it has denied for so long. We are not the ones who should hang our heads in shame. We can be proud of the loving, vital, spirited and spiritual community we are, whether we express that spirituality publicly through an organized community of faith and worship or privately in whatever way we choose, whether we even believe in a creator-being or not.
Be proud, brothers and sisters and all in between and all our allies.
Be proud that we have survived against incredible odds, against the ovens of the Holocaust, the centuries of repression by religious conservatives and fundamentalists of all the monotheistic faiths, the denial and silence of Marxists and Maoists, the exploitation of the Mafia and the Capitalists, the purges of the military, the murderous rages of the ignorant and bigoted regardless of affiliation or rationale.
Be proud that we find love, that we work, that we serve our communities, our society and our country in all the large and small ways that we do.
Be proud that we are the ones who built AIDS service organizations, who walk and march and shout out loud.
Be proud that we are the ones who bring dinner and music and art and caring to the public and to our lovers and friends in need. Be proud.
We in Vermont, with our allies, have built an example for the rest of the country in taking steps toward abolishing state-sanctioned discrimination. But even we lag behind several European countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, among others – in achieving legal equality. And yet ...
And yet ... even there, in the mostly peaceful, tolerant and gay-friendly Netherlands, where same-gender marriages are legal and gay citizens have an equal right and responsibility to serve in the armed forces – even there, an openly gay politician, whose idiosyncratic, populist, anti-immigration, pro-liberal, pro-gay, pro-women party was poised to make large gains in national elections, was assassinated just last month.
The struggle is not over. As long as the forces of repression continue to restrict our legal and economic rights to full citizenship and participation, we have not yet won. Our most effective tactic is standing up for ourselves in public, naming our names and those of our beloveds, living lives of integrity, being proud.
Euan Bear,
Editor