Why Gay Marriage is a Bad Idea: Part 2 - Pedophiles

Creepy enough? No? Carry on reading then...

Last week I slammed Buster Wilson's argument saying same-sex marriage will lead to bestiality by actually asking the world's most radical animal rights activists what they thought about marrying their pets.

This week I'm going to be addressing the argument used by "Christians" which consists in saying that "all gays are pedophiles".

Well let's just start by saying that pedophiles are sexually attracted to children, whereas we're just sexually attracted to the same sex, so for a start there's a problem.

Holy crap

Lets pick a fight! Who with? I know! How about Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone? This man stirred up some sh*t back in 2010 by saying that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia, allowing him to fulfill his role as the Pope's number two (Urban Dictionary definition here).

Pedophilia

Basically he's saying "Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia". Just after this, he said that the evidence is "right there in psychological documents".

Sounds like he knows what he's talking about! Interesting, seeing as homosexuality was removed from the list of mental illnesses in the 1970s. If we were all pedophiles then yeah! Too right we shouldn't have the right to marry! But we're not.

Pause for a giggle. Does anyone else think he looks like a vulture?

I think it's the eyes... Just as well he's chosen a life of celibacy or that would be bestiality, my friends.

No, but seriously, back to the proper criticism. Cardinal Bertone called homosexuality a "pathology" and said we like to sexually abuse children. So is he trying to say that an estimated 4% of the priests that constitute his boss's Church are gay? Because statistically, that's possible. But to then say that "because 4% of the priests have raped kids, and 4% could statistically be gay, lets just blame the big rape scandal on the gays!"? That just won't do. I'm sorry, Cardinal, but if the hypothesis you made was weak, the theory you built off it was absurd. This is like saying "this apple is green, and so is this one, so they must be of the same variety and from the same tree". That's precisely how the human race ended up being taught rubbish like "the sun goes around the Earth" and "the world is flat" by you, the Roman Catholic Church.

Franco Grillini, an Italian gay rights activist, said at the time that "Because they have their own problems with the abuse crisis and don't know how to handle it, they are trying to pass their 'cross' from their shoulders on to ours". This is similar to what they did back in Medieval times when they looked at the sun, thought "it must be moving around us", and then tried to get the population to believe them so that they appeared to be knowledgeable. Nowadays, unfortunately for them, people are educated enough to smell a rat.

So are gays pedophiles? Let's ask some educated people just for the sake of it.

According to Dr. Fred Berlin, a Johns Hopkins University professor who founded the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma in Baltimore, Md., pedophilia is a distinct sexual orientation marked by persistent, sometimes exclusive, attraction to prepubescent children. The simplest understanding of this, and a very correct understanding, is to see that sexual abuse isn't about sexual orientation or sexual attraction. Unattractive people are victims of sexual abuse and sexual violence too. Sexual violence and abuse is about power, domination, and control. It's not about sexual attraction.

Nice humps Bryan!

The life of Bryan

It'll be no surprise to those of you who know Bryan Fischer (ah! At last! I've been waiting to use this image for so long!) to hear that he has compared homosexuality to pedophilia in the past. He also says that giving marriage rights to same-sex couples is "special treatment". Well Bryan, you believe in God and I don't, yet you have the right to practice your religion even though I don't want to avail of that right, so is that special treatment? Yes! Do I care? No!

Fischer cited a study that says 86% of men who molest boys identify themselves as gay or bisexual with no breakdown of gay or bisexual perpetrators. The study Fischer references is strongly criticized by the consensus of experts in this field. The paper he's referencing is Erickson et al. (1988), Behavior patterns of child molesters, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 17, 77-86. The paper does claim in passing that 86% of molesters of boys identified as gay or bisexual, but the paper does not describe how this data was gathered, nor how it "ascertained" the sexual orientation of these men. Therefore, it has zero credibility because there is no proof that this data is genuine.

"But wait!" You might begin. "If men molest boys aren't they necessarily gay?" The answer is no. Because, for one, sexual orientation isn't about behavior alone. For example, when Governor Jim McGreevy feigned heterosexuality most of his life and formed a heterosexual family, and presumably engaged in heterosexual behavior was he a heterosexual all of that time? Or was he simply a closeted gay man? Behavior isn't always consistent with sexual orientation and attraction. Pedophiles are attracted, primarily, to children. The sex of those children matter less than that they are children. The sex of victim has more to do with access than sexual orientation.

The US Catholic Bishops commissioned a study on priestly child sex abuse from John Jay College. John Jay researcher Margaret Smith reported back to the Bishops on early findings from their study. She said "we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and the increased likelihood of subsequent abuse from the data that we have right now [...] It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior. Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity".

Even the Pope said, when addressing the public about the priests rape scandal, "I do not wish to talk about homosexuality, but about pedophilia, which is a different thing" (S). But that was 2 years prior to Cardinal Bertone making the link between the two in a Chilean press conference. It seems the Church itself doesn't have a clue what it's talking about. Proof it's a load of old claptrap that changes slowly over time, or quickly to suit the situation and the amount of backlash they receive.

I believe there's a word in Italian, which is similar to the English one, that describes people like you; "disperato" - desperate.



I'll be back next week slamming more anti-gay arguments!