Sorry about any misleading statements in my paragraph linking dear Ann’s column. It was an attempt at over-the-top hyperbole, something I’m not particularly good at – although I get the impression that most responders other than yourself recognized it as such and disregarded it.
I think the key issue is the one which SM targeted: that behavior and orientation are not necessarily identical, and that child molestation, regardless of sex, does not equate to an adult-adult consensually-expressed sexual orientation, hetero, homo, bi, or anything else. I would have no fear that you, as a civilized adult of presumably heterosexual tastes, might molest my nine-year-old niece; likewise I would have no fear that Esprix might molest my seven- and five-year-old nephews. Sexual attraction to a given category of adult is not correlative to sexual attraction to a child.
It might be worth noting, since it’s been addressed in passing, that the categories implying orientation to people of a given sex are not particularly descriptive – there are men (and women) who are attracted to very svelte young brunettes, buxom redheads, overweight middle-aged blondes, elderly women with physical handicaps, and every other sort of descriptor you care to add to the category “woman” and likewise with categories of men. I suspect that I would be in no more “danger” of an unwanted sexual advance from the gay contingent here than from the heterosexual contingent, as I fit nearly nobody’s idea of what an attractive sex partner ought to look like.
Final observation, in re priestly molestations, is that my distinct impression is that no one is suggesting that pedophile priests could be “cured” by marriage, but rather that there has been a concentration of pedophiles in the priesthood by the probable fact that priestly celibacy has led men who might have felt a call to the priesthood but who were not graced with the charism of celibacy to turn to other pursuits where they could exercise their sexuality. I.e., if 1% of a population is “undesirable” in a given role (e.g., pedophilia), but 75% of the base population is diverted from that role on other grounds (e.g., the requirement of celibacy eliminating heterosexual males without a call to celibacy), you have concentrated that 1% to 4% of the remaining population.
My new word for the day! This is almost like reading Reader’s Digest.
Per dictionary.com: charism - A miraculously given power, as of healing, speaking foreign languages without instruction, etc., attributed to some of the early Christians.
I think what a lot of you are missing is that she is making a connection between the Boy Scouts decision to exclude homosexual men from leadership positions PRECISELY because of the potential for a molestation problem. Think about it for a second. I’m a normal 36 year old male. Would you want me or any other heterosexual male to take your 8-14 year old daughters camping? If not, why not? Because you would rightly be concerned that I might be tempted by their youthful femininity and might use my authority position to take advantage of them. Now you put me out with a group of boys the same age, and the fact that I have absolutely zero attraction to males would lead one to believe that the chances of something untoward happening, while maybe not zero, are remotely smaller than with a group of girls. Now if you want to let homosexual men take a group of girls camping, you are probably safe there too. Is any of this sinking in?
See the connection? Gay priests + young boys = increased risk of sexual abuse. Straight scoutleaders + young boys = decreased risk of sexual abuse.
You see, she is pointing out the stupidity of those that persecute the Boy Scouts for protecting their boys from abuse. She is also pointing out that the liberals will blame anything to keep from admitting that it is homosexuals who are doing the abuse of these boys. Thus her comment that if the liberals had succeeded in forcing the Boy Scouts to accept homosexual leaders, and subsequently more boys were abused, then the liberal conclusion would be that it COULND’T be because of the gay man/young boy connection, CAMPING itself must be the culprit. You see, sometimes you have to read someone’s essay and allow yourself to THINK, rather than just start into the liberal mantra “homophobe, bigot, racist…<repeat>”
I find it telling that most of you do not address the actual points that Ann raises. Instead you just hope that by changing the subject you can deflect attention from what is a salient point.
From the posts I have read on this thread, I don’t expect that anyone will get through mine and have actually stopped to think about what I said instead of giving the usual kneejerk reaction. Apologies to the few I have read that understood what her point was. I expect that the average age of the reader here to be about 17, am I right?
Your (and Ann’s) reasoning here is flawed, as pointed out by various posters. The gender of the victim is a non-issue to the child molester. Sexual orientation does not relate to pedophilia.
And the fight against ignorance… marches on! [sub](Eat Snakysmores!)[/sub]
Hudley, I can name at least five heterosexual males who post on this board whom I’m sufficiently well acquainted with that I would entrust Amanda to for a camping trip, overnight excursion, or similar event, if I were in loco parentis, to her, with absolutely no worries for her safety. And at least three homosexual males that I feel I could do the same with for the two boys with equal confidence.
I don’t know you from Adam, and your post gives a subtle implication that you would feel attracted to a young girl and find it difficult to avoid getting into a seduction mode (though I’m not accusing you of same, simply inferring from its tone) – but if I came to know you well enough and felt reassured that this was not the case, I would add you to that list.
The point here was that attraction to adults, of whatever sex, does not equal attraction to prepubescent children, of whatever sex. Are you disagreeing with that? Or have I missed your point altogether?
Just as a celibate priesthood concentrates the presence of pedophiles in the priesthood (Poly demonstrated the logic of that quite nicely, I thought), it has also concentrated the presence of gays in the priesthood. (That effect probably still holds in sexually conservative parts of the world.)
While gay priests don’t constitute a problem in my mind, they obviously do to the likes of Ann Coulter. So it’s important to point out that gays have congregated in the Catholic priesthood precisely because (a) hetero males not called to celibacy were staying away, and (b) during the dark years when gays had to keep their orientation invisible anyway, the priesthood was as good a place to do this as any other. (Better, actually, in one way: people don’t constantly ask Catholic priests when they’re going to meet a nice girl and settle down.)
So if 75% of Catholic males who felt a priestly calling were straights who stayed away because they didn’t believe themselves called to a celibate life: if 5% of Catholic males are gay, you’d have a 20% gay priesthood.
And that’s if the appeal of the priesthood as a potential refuge for gay Catholic men didn’t actually increase the number of gay applicants, during those years when gays saw no safe way out of the closet. (And I’ll bet it did.)
So if the Ann Coulters of the world don’t want gay priests, but do want a celibate priesthood, they deserve to be reminded that their desires clash, since they’re refusing to deal honestly with that.
Yes, it does speak volumes. It says that you care less about the welfare of your child than you do politically correct policies. I would be careful about any adult that I left my child with. I am not saying that all pedophiles are gay. I am not saying all gays are pedophiles. I AM saying that a person is negligent if they expose their children to any more risks than are necessary. I suspect that if you were a parent your feelings would be different. Its easy to theorize.
And I did read your posts. Polycarp’s first one said Ann’s point is that Gay sexuality is clearly at the basis of most of America’s problems. That isnt what she is saying at all. She is saying that the liberals are hypocritical in their willingness to admit that homosexuality may be a causal effect of abusing children, in these particular cases.
Shayna, you said that Ann believes that only men are child molesters, and they only molest boys. I reread her article and found no such assertion. I believe you are putting words in her mouth, words that no reasonable person would agree with so that your position looks more reasonable. I don’t know where you got your statistics. They look reasonable to me, but I’ve seen a lot that are greatly afflicted by the bias of the surveyor. One thing I will disagree with you on, and I hope you will aknowledge, is you state that pedophiles are attracted to children period. I am sure there are some cases, but the vast majority of serial molestation cases I have heard of involve an adult abusing one sex of child or the other, not both.
In polycarp’s next post, they state that he/she would not be the victim of an unwanted sexual advance as they are no one’s ideal of a attractive partner. Just as rape is not necessarily about sexual attraction, I do not believe pedophilia is either, entirely.
Polycarp, I find it amusing that both you and Shayna would attempt to discredit my opinion by implying that I would be guilty of molesting children on the basis of the “tone” of my post. My point was that you as a person should be concerned about whom their children are left with. I challenge either of you to elaborate through your gifted insight into just how you came to the determination that I shouldnt be trusted with children. You state that there are a number of men that you would feel comfortable in leaving your child with. I agree with you. However those people are ones that you probably know very well, have had enough experience around them to trust in a number of areas besides not being the type to take advantage of a child. Like not thinking that a fun game to play would be to shoot empty beer cans off your kid’s head with a crossbow (I guess somehow my “tone” will imply that I have a prediliction for that behavior too, eh?). However people like Scout Leaders may not necessarily be known well to a parent. They are aquainted, but not as well as should be before being trusted with kids. In the case of these priests, when it became known in an area that the priests couldn’t be trusted, they were transferred to somewhere where the unknowing parents accepted him because he was a priest and they trusted the church to protect them from those who would prey on their kids.
Actually, the number of posters under 18 on this board is fairly small, and we also have very few over-60 posters. But we’ve got plenty of posters in all age brackets from college-age through 50-somethings. From what I know of the posters here, you’ve got a reasonable mix of age ranges in this thread.
So if your point is that you’re talking with a bunch of people who are either (a) too immature to work their way through your sterling logic, or (b) are kids with their heads full of abstract ideas, but who have no real-world experience (looks up at name of forum - yes, we’re in the Pit, by cracky), you can stick that one where the sun don’t shine.
RTFirefly, my point was not that they were incapable of grasping my logic. I’m not attempting to set myself up as the ideal of logical thought (today anyway!). However the reason for my assertion was that when I see a lot of jingoistic statements that have nothing at all to do with the article in question I have found that quite often it is a bunch of young liberals who seem to revel in self righteous platitudes whenever someone challenges the tenents of liberalism. I’m not just referring to this board, but most anywhere.
I hope you wont mind if I refrain from replying in kind to your crude suggestion.
First of all, I made no accusations either stated or implied that you had a propensity to molest children. Get your posters straight or I won’t bother with you anymore.
Secondly, don’t you dare tell me “[****I] care less about the welfare of [my] child than [****I] do politically correct policies.” Just who the hell do you think you are? You know NOTHING about my politics or my level of care and/or concern for children, be they mine or anyone else’s.
And lastly, the only point I care to address from the utterly stupid crap you’re spewing is this: by saying “I AM saying that a person is negligent if they expose their children to any more risks than are necessary,” and then saying “Gay priests + young boys = increased risk of sexual abuse,” and further saying that gay scout leaders = increased risk of sexual abuse, that what you are really saying is homosexuals = potential pedophiles to you - all of them. Your denial of that is ridiculous, when held up against your actual words.
I will repeat for the last time… there IS NO “potential for a molestation problem” with gay scout leaders. HETEROSEXUAL MEN are more likely to sexually molest children than gay men. That makes YOU more of a risk than any gay man anywhere on the planet.
On second thought, scratch my opening statement. I think I’ll make sure my children are never exposed to you because you scare the hell out of me.
Oh, one more thing… learn how to click links and you’ll know exactly where my statistics came from.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Shayna *
What [Ann Coulter] doesn’t take into account are the following facts:
[ul][li]"Girls [are] sexually abused about three times more often than boys, under both the Harm Standard and the Endangerment Standard." And since more men than women (89% vs 12%) sexually abuse children, it is therefore logical to conclude that heterosexual men sexually abuse children in far greater numbers than homosexual men. [/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Actually, these numbers suggest that, though “heterosexual men sexually abuse children in far greater numbers than homosexual men,” it is simply because of their advantage in numbers to begin with. But, switching gears:
Regardless of what assumption we reach about the gender of the children that women molest, the children molested by men are between 2.5 and 6 times as likely to be girls than boys. This leads to a couple of conclusions:
Since children of either sex are molested nowhere near equally, the orientation of the molester has something to do with the gender of the victim. But:
since the gender of children molested by men is nowhere near the roughly 20-1 ratio of straight to gay males in the larger population, the orientation of the molester doesn’t absolutely determine the gender of the victim.
So if these stats are reliable, the gender of the victim is much more likely than not to match up with the gender that the molester is attracted to in adult relstionships, but that’s a far cry from always.
Not for pedophilia, but as I understand from past straightdope threads, paedophilia and ephebophilia are two completely different animals that fall under the same banner of child molestation. And if I understand it correctly, ephebophilia is gender specific. Read http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=22487&highlight=ephebophilia
I have read reports that a majority of the Catholic church child molestation cases involve post adolescence cases. That assertion was made admittedly on anecdotal evidence. What I do know is that I never was approached for sexual purposes until I was 13/14 and several times during that period.
Which is really only to say that heterosexual men who are child molesters will molest little girls and gay men who are child molesters will molest little boys. DUH.
That absolutely, positively does not mean that gay men have a propensity towards pedophilia or child molestation. There simply is no correlation between sexual orientation and whether or not one will be a child molester. None.
And, in fact, more heterosexual men molest children than do gay men, so if you want to draw that conclusion, you should actually be advocating expelling heterosexual men from all contact with little girls. And that would be utterly ridiculous and you know it.
There were a couple of such statements, which have since been qualified or retracted in an adult fashion. And then there were a very large number of statements that had everything to do with the essay.
But not of the conservative persuasion. How interesting. Guess young people are clear-headed only if they’re on the right.
But you made the statement about the posters here. On the basis of a mere handful of posts (and apparently little time lurking).
Hey, I don’t care what you do. But your path to your hypothesis that you were debating a bunch of 17 year olds, now that you’ve explained it, is quite illuminating. Thanks.
Shayna, you said "First of all, I made no accusations either stated or implied that you had a propensity to molest children. Get your posters straight or I won’t bother with you anymore. " However previously you said “I don’t have any children, but I’d have no problem at all with a male as a scout leader for any daughter of mine of any age. The fact that you’d apparantly have a problem with that speaks volumes” If you meant something else, by all means clarify. It sounds like your buddy’s accusation that my “post gives a subtle implication that you would feel attracted to a young girl and find it difficult to avoid getting into a seduction mode (though I’m not accusing you of same, simply inferring from its tone)”
Unfortunately I won’t be around to read your reply, my work day is ended and I’m about to begin my weekend.
One last note. Part of what angers Ann and many conservatives is that liberals do not believe that they have the right to decide for themselves who are proper role models for their children. It is not just a molestation issue. Role models are important, and “Big Gay Al” just isnt one that many want for their kids. If you are fine with that, thats great. No one is telling you that you cant give your children simpering gay men as role models, so why are you telling the rest of us that we must do the same???
