OutRight

The Scarlet P
by Dale Carpenter

The Catholic priest scandal is just the latest instance in which the fear of pedophilia is used to justify gay oppression

You knew it would come back to us. As soon as you heard that some altar boys got molested by some parish priests, you knew they'd find a way, once again, to pin the scarlet "P" on all gays. The Catholic Church sex scandal is just another in a long line of controversies that show how the fear of pedophilia is used against gays. In one way or another, kids figure into almost every modern controversy involving gay rights.

Never mind that studies show gays are no more likely than straight people to be pedophiles, that is, to be sexually attracted to children. Nor are we more likely to be ephebophiles, that is, attracted to post-pubescent teenagers.

Gays and youth have always been a volatile political mix, and a potent weapon in the hands of those who oppose equality.

Remember Colorado's Amendment 2? In 1992, Colorado voters passed a state constitutional amendment in the form of a statewide referendum that repealed and forever forbade all civil rights protections for gays anywhere in the state. This meant, in practice, that local civil rights ordinances that protected gays from discrimination in public accommodations, housing, and employment were wiped out.

Such a law could have been defended, though not very persuasively, on libertarian grounds. Supporters of Amendment 2 could have emphasized that they were preserving the freedom of employers to fire people as they please, or protecting the religious freedom of landlords to rent only to those whose lives satisfied their moral scruples. They might have emphasized the virtue of avoiding the litigation costs that inevitably come with civil rights laws.

Instead, they acted as if local communities in the state were legalizing child sexual abuse and that a state constitutional amendment was the only way to stop the pedophiles. On the eve of the election, supporters of Amendment 2 distributed 800,000 fliers asserting: "Sexual molestation of children is a large part of many homosexuals' lifestyle-part of the very lifestyle 'gay-rights' activists want government to give special class, ethnic status." The fliers claimed "homosexuals commit between one-third and one-half of all recorded child molestations."

These assertions -even if they had been true, which they assuredly were not-had nothing whatsoever to do with the laws Amendment 2 repealed. But as political demagoguery, the image of child-molesting homosexuals was very powerful: Amendment 2 passed by a slim margin.

How about the controversy over the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have defended their policy of excluding gay scoutmasters on the ground that they have a constitutional right to associate or not associate with anyone they please.

Very well and good, but why would they not want to associate with gays? That's easy: According to the Boy Scouts of America, gay scoutmasters are not suitable role models for boys and teenagers because gays are not "morally straight" and "clean."

During the height of the debate over this policy, parents of Scouts across the country wrote their local newspapers to say that they simply would not trust gay Scoutmasters with their boys on overnight camping trips.

Then there's the ongoing cultural and legal tussle over gay marriage. The debate over gay marriage started out on religious terrain, with opponents of gay marriage saying that marriage is a God-ordained institution necessarily involving a man and a woman. When supporters of gay marriage pointed out that marriage is a civil institution, apart from any religious significance it might have, opponents shifted the terms of the debate.

Next they argued that gay marriage would somehow weaken heterosexual marriages. When no married couples stepped forward to confess how eager they were to dissolve their bonds and marry people of the same sex, this argument was discarded.

Now the debate has shifted largely to a discussion about how gay marriage would affect children. Opponents of gay marriage argue that gays aren't good at raising children, either because the children turn out gay (which is taken to be harmful) or because gay parents will model bad values or warp their children's development. Worst of all, gay couples will be more likely than straight couples to molest children they are charged with raising.

None of this is true, but arguments along these lines have had remarkable staying power in public debate.

Now, it seems, gays are somehow responsible for the crisis in the Catholic Church. Some church leaders have said explicitly that gay men should not be allowed to become priests. Detroit's Adam Cardinal Maida put it bluntly: "I think what the behavioral scientists are telling us, the sociologists, it's not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem."

I'm not sure what "behavioral scientists" or "sociologists" Cardinal Maida consults, but if they're telling him gay men have a disproportionate fondness for children and teenage boys, they're dead wrong.

It appears, from the anecdotal evidence so far, that most of the abuse cases involved priests and teenage males. But then it also appears that the Catholic priesthood is itself disproportionately homosexual. The abuse cases represent a tiny portion of all Catholic priests and a tiny portion of the homosexual priests.

Homosexuals are as capable of lecherous behavior as anyone else. We are as capable of abusing positions of authority and trust-as these priests surely did-as anyone else. We ought to be punished when we do things harmful to minors, as should anyone else. But we should not be scapegoated by a Catholic hierarchy for sins that are no more ours than they are anyone else's.