aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

FRC: blame gays

Predictable and pathetic, they and their acolytes won’t let the facts get in their way:

Democrats seeking to exploit the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) are right to criticize the slow response of Republican congressional leaders to his communications with male pages. But neither party seems likely to address the real issue, which is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse. Foley, an unmarried 52-year-old representative, had always refused to answer questions about his sexual orientation. Now that his emails and messages to teenage male pages have been revealed, it appears clear that Foley is a homosexual with a particular attraction to underage boys. While pro-homosexual activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. Although almost all child molesters are male and less than 3% of men are homosexual, about a third of all child sex abuse cases involve men molesting boys--and in one study, 86% of such men identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual. Ignoring this reality got the Catholic Church into trouble over abusive priests, and now it is doing the same to the House GOP leadership. They discounted or downplayed earlier reports concerning Foley’s behavior--probably because they did not want to appear “homophobic.” The Foley scandal shows what happens when political correctness is put ahead of protecting children.

Significantly and demonstrably, it’s the repression they want that exacerbates the problem. In this case, Foley’s closeted life. The FRC apparently knew, too, prior to this the open DC secret that he was gay. What did they do?

To state what by all that is good should be obvious, when a man abuses a young girl, the problem is not heterosexuality and we don’t characterize the abuse as a heterosexual act similar to consensual sex between an adult man and woman. If a male boss sexually harasses a female employee, again, the problem is not heterosexuality, but sexual harassment.

But it’s of no use arguing them. They’re telling us loud and clear what they truly believe. I urge you to listen closely and consider their words. Gays are the new Jews:

Ah, yes. The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament. It’s all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews’ stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They’re the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.