If you will recall, there’s the American Academy of Pediatric, made up of 60,000 legitimate pediatricians from across the United States, verses an specifically anti-gay fake group known as the American College of Pediatricians, which is made up of a few dozen anti-gay activists. It was the latter group that sent a letter to school superintendents loaded with massive distortions of legitimate scientific research to warn school leaders against allowing LGBT-supportive policies in the schools.
Timothy Kincaid examined a number of those distortions when the letter was announced. Now, one of those researchers who found his work among those twisted beyond recognition has denounced the ACP for “Implicating me in this chicanery.”
Truth Wins Out has the entire letter by Dr. Gary Remafedi, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan. After correcting the ACP for what his research actually said, Dr. Remafedi demands:
Please immediately remove any reference to our work from the website. As a suitable remedy, I also would urge you take the following actions:
1) Publicly retract your references to our research with a written statement posted on the home page of your website;
2) Until then, any donations made to your organization since the “Facts about Youth” website was launched should be either returned to the donors or contributed to the LGBT youth research fund of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.
and the response to that? crickets… crickets…
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Oh, but you’ve just got to love an angry scientist!
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May I ask a question in good faith? What is the response to the charge that molestations of underaged teenage males are committed by homosexuals, not heterosexuals?
As I understand it from Tim Kincaid’s prior piece on this, molestation of pre-pubescent boys is done by hetero males. But when one looks at teenage males under 18, it is homosexual males who are tempted to molest:
“They noticed that for those gay men who were attracted to males under 18, they tended to be attracted to young men who were well past the age of puberty (age 15 or older), with fully-developed adult genitalia and other features that were characteristically masculine. But when heterosexual men showed an attraction towards younger males, they tended to be attracted to pre-pubescent males (ages 9-11)”
Since most of the molestations in the Catholic Church have involved teenage males, not preteens, doesn’t that mean that it really is a gay problem, as the Church insists?
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Do you have a source for that?
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According to the John Jay report:
From Wikipedia, the victims were:
6% – 7 years of age or younger
16% – between age 8 and age 10
51% – between age 11 and age 14
15% – were 16 to 17
This doesn’t add to 100%. Maybe the other 12% were 15.
But in any case 73% were 14 or younger.
I hardly think that gay men are defined as being attracted to boys under the age of 14.
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@Tim, assuming the “in good faith” part.
The John Jay reports (paid for by the U.S. Catholic Bishops) etc make it quite clear that victims 15+ are the minority. 60% were aged 10 to 14 at the time the abuse started, with the average age being about 12.
There are also two types of paedophiles: fixated and regressed (roughly 50/50 in numbers, although fixated paedophiles commit a much higher % of abuse. Regressed paedophiles tend only to have 1 or 2 victims, and don’t persist in molesting across their lifetime.)
Fixated paedophiles have no interest in adult relationships — they couldn’t be described as ‘gay’ under any stretch of the imagination. Some show a gender preference, but most do not. Regressed paedophiles are nearly always heterosexual in their adult relationships (see Jenny et al, as example), but their victims may be of either sex.
In short: the age preference appears to overwhelm any gender preference. A minority of paedophiles have a gender preference.
Next, as with all crimes, outcomes are a result of not only the motivations of the perpetrator but also the opportunities that present themself.
The relative proportions of male v female victims is largely the result of who paedophiles had access to in the first place. Overwhelmingly, paedophiles within the Catholic Church has access to males. Hence, most victims are male.
(Think about that for a moment: how many boys get sexually abused in the Girl Scouts?)
The John Jay researchers recently presented an update to the Catholic Bishops and in their own words made it quite clear that neither ‘homosexuality’ nor ‘homosexuals’ were not a factor. It is about paedophiles, not gay men.
Actually, it’s not even about paedophiles in my opinion. The scandal is not that some paedophiles managed to gain access to children and youths within the Church. Anyone who works with children knows that molestors are drawn to such environments, and it requires constant vigilance to keep children out of their grasp.
No, the true scandal is that known paedophiles were never stopped. That is where the Church broke the trust given to them, and that is the reason Catholics are disgusted and outraged.
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@Grant and Tim K.:
Thank you very much for that information. I honestly did not know those stats, but I did hear the Catholic activist Bill Donahue emphatically say that the vast majority of cases involved teens. He took out a newspaper ad saying just that. It makes me wonder what he based his statement on.
Anyway, assuming that victims are 15% teen males (16+), that certainly kills any charge that it is a “gay problem”. However, that is still a disproportionate percentage relative to gays in the US population (2-4%).
I suppose some of this can be explained by the “access” issue, i.e., priests have better access to males than females. And maybe there is a higher percentage of gays in the priesthood than in the general population, which logically would yield a comparably higher percentage of homosexual molestation cases.
So the only remaining question in my mind is, after adjusting for the “access” issue and after accounting for the higher percentage of gays in the priesthood, have we accounted for the entire disparity or do we have to admit that there is some heightened risk when gay priests are concerned?
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Tim, the figure of 2%-4% of people being gay in the U.S. is always questionable given that many, perhaps most gays are in the closet and wouldn’t acknowledge their same sex attractions to pollsters.
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@Tim have we accounted for the entire disparity
I did, at least to my own satisfaction. (And that’s all that matters, right? In my defence, unlike Bill Donahue I try not to make a habit of talking out of an enormous posterior.)
Linked below is a (rudely compact) way of calculating what proportion of victims will be male or female in some selected environments. It’s an update of something I prepared for a report about 10 years ago. You can experiment by adjusting the green cells.
Download here.
As you can see… it all appears to come down to opportunity. Even given a higher proportion of priests that are potentially ‘regressed adult homosexuals’, it’s the relative access to boys that skews the outcome.
I ran the numbers when the John Jay report was released in 2006 and estimated that about 80% of victims would be boys. And guess what?
The calcs are necessarily a bit lumpy, because of the need to squish things into nice neat categories, but what is arbitrary in one category may be matched by one in another. Overall this means the gross categorisation may not make much difference. You can fiddle around with them in any case.
There are also a few ‘extras’ I might re-visit and add (such as, Abel indicates that fixated paedophiles may have a higher number of victims per head)… but I was actually surprised how closely the results matched the reported figures. Stunned in fact.
Given this, I may take Occum’s advice and leave well enough alone :)
ps: the calculation for the victimisation rate makes the assumption that paedophiles in the particular environment have a ‘career span’ that matches what they could expect in the general population. Such as, they get identified and removed at the same rate. Use that figure with caution, particularly if you already know that paedophiles get excused or overlooked by others within the environment. When that sort of thing happens paedophiles may have a much longer and much more damaging career length…
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Tim: in response,
“It makes me wonder what he based his statement on.”
He based it upon his own church-sponsored fear and ignorance. In other words (pace, Grantdale) he pulled it out of his voluminous ass .
“have we accounted for the entire disparity or do we have to admit that there is some heightened risk when gay priests are concerned?”
that makes several assumptions; 1) that gay priests– and there are many per this link ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-james-martin-sj/its-not-about-homosexuali_b_537810.html )have any interest at all in teenaged boys. I’m sure that there are some that do, because in my whole life and the thousands of gay men I have known, there was one that liked teenagers.
2) the seocnd assumption is that a man who likes teenaged boys is homosexual. But what do you call a man who likes teenaged girls? Charlie chaplin? Heterosexual? Child molester? Deranged? Perverted?
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What do you call a man who likes teenaged girls? Usually, “nice Mr. —- who volunteered to drive for the overnight field trip. It’s too bad those girls overreacted to an innocent, unwanted hug and a whole lot of unwanted tickling — they’re being a little egotistical if they really think a fifty-three year old man would have any sexual interest in them whatsoever. Probably had a little crush on him — what ninth-grade girl can resist a balding, paunchy dentist?”
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“I hardly think that gay men are defined as being attracted to boys under the age of 14.”
Oh come on Tim! Look at popular gay pornstars! With their bulging muscles, hairy chests/bodies, defined abs, piercings, goatees, and sexy tattoos — they look exactly like 14 year old boys!
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