Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

Fifth in a series of articles examining issues related to the homosexual rights movement.

June 1999– If there is one area of the debate over homosexuality that seems to make pro-family groups squeamish and homosexuals indignant, it is the issue of molestation. Do homosexuals pose a direct danger to children?

It is probably safe to say that, for most of this century most Americans intuitively saw homosexuals as a threat to their children. After all, homosexuality was by definition a sexual perversion, and where there was one perversion (homosexuality) there would likely be another (molestation).

But by the mid-1990s homosexual activists had succeeded in hijacking the public debate on sexual orientation issues, and a new creed had replaced the old: homosexuals posed no danger to children.

Is this true? Are children safe in the presence of homosexuals, or are they in danger of sexual abuse that may, in fact, lead them into the homosexual lifestyle?

Homosexuality and pedophilia
It should be said from the outset that a homosexual orientation does not automatically lead to pedophilia, and most homosexuals do not abuse children. Moreover, most homosexual activist groups publicly denounce pedophilia.

But that is not the end of the story. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover says in his book Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth that there is a “substantial, influential, and growing segment of the homosexual community that neither hides nor condemns pedophilia.”

One reason for this may be that the homosexual movement is based on the rather simple ethic of individual sexual freedom. In the activist magazine Gayme, writer Bill Andriette said, “The only standard for moral sex…is that it be freely and equally consented to by the persons involved.”

From that sexual ethic to one which includes intergenerational sex is but a short leap. Andriette said, “There is no question that blacks, whites, women, men, children, and adolescents can consent to sex …. If we want really to respect the authenticity of individuals we have to let people take risks, explore different values, and recognize that we will be challenged and threatened by what they discover.” (Emphasis added.)

This homosexual perspective was in full view nearly three decades ago, with the release of the 1972 Gay Rights Platform. Activists in Chicago, representing the fledgling homosexual movement, demanded the “[r]epeal of all state laws prohibiting private sexual acts involving consenting persons,” and the “[r]epeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent.”

Such homosexuals see society’s disapproval of adult-child sex as the transgression, rather than the adult-child sex itself. In The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent, lesbian author Pat Califia said, “Boy-lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers…are not child molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents who force their staid morality onto the young people in their custody.”

Moreover, for many homosexuals, this same-sex attraction to minors may stem from their own sexual experiences. Research shows that very often homosexuals had their own initial same-sex encounter with an adult while children. (See AFA Journal, May 1999.)

Writing in The Advocate, a magazine for homosexuals, Carl Maves agreed. “How many gay men, I wonder, would have missed out on a valuable, liberating experience – one that initiated them into their sexuality – if it weren’t for so-called molestation?” he said.

Perhaps the most notorious group advocating adult-child sex is the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). An unashamedly pedophile organization, NAMBLA wants society to appreciate, rather than deplore, intergenerational sex, and to abolish laws banning sex between adults and minors.

While most homosexual activist groups publicly denounce NAMBLA and its agenda, the pedophile group is still allowed to march in “gay” pride parades in New York, San Francisco and Boston under its own NAMBLA banner.

Furthermore, some suggest that public disavowal of NAMBLA by homosexual groups is a smokescreen. David Thorstad, a founding member of NAMBLA and former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance, says homosexual activists have suppressed pedophilia in order “to sanitize the image of homosexuality to facilitate its entrance into the social mainstream.”

Do homosexuals molest children?
Such talk of molestation enrages homosexual activists, eliciting charges that pro-family groups paint the entire homosexual community with too broad a brush. They argue that such pro-pedophile views are simply the perspective of fringe groups.

Homosexuals additionally charge that most molestation cases involve heterosexuals. One frequently-cited study, Jenny, Roesler and Poyer, 1994, published in Pediatrics, supposedly demonstrated that 98% of men who abused children self-identified as heterosexual.

But in a review of the Jenny study, Dr. Paul Cameron of Family Research Institute said the researchers merely examined hospital charts: “[N]either the victims, perpetrators, nor even those who prepared the charts were interviewed” to discover their sexual orientation.

In fact, said Cameron, in the only study (Erickson, Walbek, and Seely, 1988) in which perpetrators were asked to declare their sexual orientation, almost the opposite was found to be true: 86% of child molesters identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual.

If heterosexuals make up the preponderance of child molesters in raw numbers, it is not surprising. Heterosexuals, after all, make up more than 97% of the population.

A more accurate assessment, however, would compare ratios of population size to incidences of involvement in pedophilia. In this regard, according to the National Association on Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), in proportion to their numbers, homosexual men are more likely to engage in sex with a minor. 

Citing a study (Freund and Watson, 1992) which was reported in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, NARTH found that homosexual males were “three times more likely than straight men to engage in adult-child sexual relations.”

Cameron’s own research shows even higher rates of homosexual molestation. In the Nebraska Medical Journal Cameron said that when data from both genders are combined, homosexuals are at least 8-12 times more likely to molest children than are heterosexuals.

In the face of such overwhelming evidence, homosexual activists resort to a circular argument: since true homosexuals only desire sex with another adult, then pedophiles cannot be homosexual. In effect, activists have simply defined homosexual molestation of children out of existence.

But the words of homosexuals themselves betray them. Writing in the homosexual magazine Out, columnist Dan Savage mentioned that he lives near a park where some local high school soccer teams practice. “Some of the boys are really something else, and during practice they play shirts and skins. Any gay man who tells you he can walk by a boy’s soccer team without looking is a liar…,” Savage said.

Homosexual access to children
Such evidence has chilling public policy implications. The momentous changes in Americans’ attitudes towards sexual orientation are giving homosexuals unprecedented access to the nation’s children.

Parents, for example, were mortified when New York City’s WNBC-TV uncovered the existence of pedophiles within the public school system. According to an article by John Leo in U.S. News & World Report, the City Board of Education had known about at least one pedophile – teacher Peter Melzer – since 1984, but did nothing about it.

Melzer, as it turned out, is on the NAMBLA steering committee and the editorial board of the organization’s periodical, the NAMBLA Bulletin. In the past, the Bulletin has recommended the best tactics to its pedophile readers for seducing children into sexual encounters.

Leo said, “Child molesters don’t just hang around playgrounds. They apply for jobs at schools, camps, the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers, YMCAs. ‘Boylovers’ love to work where the boys are.”

When pedophiles strike, the results are often disastrous. A recent review (Holmes and Slap, 1998) of the research on the molestation of boys, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association showed that adolescent boys who were abused by men were up to seven times more likely to identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual.

Furthermore, research also shows a strong link between the sexual abuse of a child and that child’s later pedophilia as an adult. At the Connecticut Correctional Institution, for example, clinical psychologist A. Nicholas Groth, director of the sex offender program, said 85% of the pedophiles were themselves sexually assaulted as youths.

This casts certain parts of the homosexual agenda in a more sinister light – such as the drive to lower the legal age of sexual consent and to expunge sodomy laws from the books. It might also cause parents to wonder why homosexual activists are tireless in their efforts to use the courts as a crowbar to pry open the doors of the Boy Scouts to homosexual troop leaders.

Again, it would be unfair to imply that all – or even most – homosexuals are a threat to children. Nevertheless, there are some elements of the homosexual movement which openly endorse pedophilia. And opening the social “doors” to all homosexual groups will allow pedophile groups in as well.

Future shame
What will research show in ten years? Twenty years? Will we discover that we have handed over an entire generation, only to discover that homosexuality in this nation has doubled or tripled?

If it is true, as evidence suggests, that children can be recruited into the homosexual lifestyle, what will history say about a generation of adults that swallowed – hook, line, and sinker – the lies fabricated by the very ones who abused their children?  

For other articles in this series, see AFA Journal, February, March, April, and May 1999.