Politically Incorrect Maureen Dowd?: Homosexuality a Cause of Child Sex Abuse
The New York Times' Maureen Dowd's most recent anti-Catholic hit piece (Sun., 5/19/11) contains a number of falsehoods. However, her article's biggest eye-opener is her apparent claim that homosexuality is a direct cause of child sex abuse.
Dowd's article lashes out against New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan's stance against the implementation of gay 'marriage' in New York. Dowd takes issue with a recently released report commissioned by the United States Catholic bishops that sought to examine the "causes and context" of the Catholic Church abuse scandals from past decades. Dowd belittles the report and writes, "It concluded, absurdly, that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were causes."
Whoa! Her opinion seems pretty clear: Homosexuality was a direct cause of the sex abuse of minors in the Catholic Church.
Indeed, the heralded 2004 John Jay report, which thoroughly examined Church abuse data from 1950 to 2002, reported that over 80 percent of abuse victims were male, and the vast majority were teenagers. (In society as a whole, most abuse victims are female.)
Most clear-headed observers reached the obvious conclusion that the scandals largely entailed criminal homosexual priests preying upon innocent adolescent boys. However, you would be hard-pressed to hear that conclusion in the politically correct "liberal" or "progressive" circles in which Dowd resides. (Even the authors of the study went out of their way to publicly state that homosexuality was not a cause, even though their own data suggested otherwise.)
Will Dowd be criticized for "demeaning" and/or "stereotyping" gays? Will there be a demand that Dowd retract her claim?
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A couple other quick points:
1. The all-male/celibacy requirements had nothing to do with the scandals. Dowd is wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever that Catholic priests abused more than clergy of other denominations where celibacy is not a requirement. (One of many sources: Newsweek, 4/7/10.) In addition, there are massive abuses and cover-ups happening today in our public schools. Obviously there is no celibacy requirement to be a teacher.
2. Dowd refers to the scandals as an "unending horror" to imply that abuse is still a rampant problem in the Catholic Church today. It isn't. In 2010, there were seven credible contemporaneous accusations of abuse against Catholic priests in the entire United States. While even seven is seven too many for any caring person, this figure is indicative of an organization that has worked hard to put a serious problem behind it. (In 2009, the number was six.)
-- Dave Pierre is the author of the book, Double Standard: Abuse Scandals and the Attack on the Catholic Church. Dave is also the creator of TheMediaReport.com and is a contributing writer to NewsBusters.
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Comments
You go, girl
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 8:37pm.
We were wondering who would take up the mantle of Helen Thomas.
It's a vicious circle
Submitted by HockeyKid on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 8:47pm.
child abuse contributes to homosexuality; homosexuality contributes to child abuse.
But I'm sure MoDo didn't mean it the way she wrote it. After all, it's not like she writes for a living or anything.
"Beauty is only skin deep, but liberal's to the bone." - me
the scandal was ...
Submitted by markinirvine on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 10:09pm.
... the RCC's cover-up. Surely some priests were homos, and most likely some were not; perhaps some of the kids were homos to begin with, and most definitely some were not and did not become homos as a result of the abuse. Whatever the proclivities of the several abusing priests, the bottom line is the same: these adults had no business whatsoever sexually abusing anyone under the age of adulthood, and should not have been playing sexual games with any of the people in their parishes or schools or any people who looked up to them as so-called "men of G-d". Getting bogged down in blaming an entire group for the crimes of individuals is irrational overgeneralizing.
Dave, I commented on this
Submitted by motherbelt on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 10:20pm.
Dave, I commented on this in the earlier thread on this subject this morning. What caught my eye was this line:
The church refuses to acknowledge the hypocrisy at its heart: that it became a haven for gay priests even though it declares homosexual sex a sin, and even though it lobbies to stop gays from marrying.
I then wondered what Dowd would be writing if the RCC was actually turning away young men on suspicion or knowledge of their being gay. Wouldn't she argue that just like heterosexual men, homosexuals are capable of living in celibacy?
But her admission that it was a homosexual problem, not a pedophile problem, is indeed liberal heresy.
Libs at it again...and again..and..
Submitted by jaywl on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 10:50pm.
Dowd gets tangled up in her own dislike of the numbers and results of the report. She dismisses as absurd one conclusion, the celibacy of Priests not contributing to abuse, and forgot she had to include its corollary of queers not contributing to the abuse as just as absurd.. The last is such an error in liberal dogma that I am surprised that it reached print. Surely some editor at the Times realized her words would imply that gay men, and not just sicko child abusers who happened to be queer, were actually actually a big, big problem. It looks like the the writers of the report didn't like the data and made up parts of the report and Dowd didn't didn't like part of the report and mentioned numbers on her way to a misguided and thoughtless column based on her own liberal perceptions.
I started the evening with Special Report and heard Juan Williams use numbers to advance his agenda. Concerning the Wal-Mart court ruling against the use of a class action with three aggrieved women trying to bring along 1.3 million women, he said that while women are 70% of the Wal-Mart workforce they are only 33% of the managers. Simple enough. Except he actually said "but 70% are in the workforce and are not getting this opportunity (to become managers)". Classic obfuscation. Everyone is for opportunity! and those poor women are not getting it. But that was not the truth and it never is when these people confuse results with opportunity.
I watched a rapper named Lupe Fiasco on O'Reilly use a smooth delivery of big words to reach conclusions with no basis in truth. In BOR's Bernie Goldberg segment they showed the pretty NBC starlet White House correspondent O"Donnell use numbers in a study or something to show I am stupid because I watch FOX. Then I realized her primary subject, our President, was using numbers and a smooth, glib delivery of big words convince those young,educated viewers of MSNBC and those young, impressionable listeners of Fiasco that the reason they and all their friends don't have jobs, can't afford gasoline, and ( I believe ) fear the future is because of that guy Bush who got elected when they were 10 years old and left office when they "Got Out" of High School three years ago. There is hope for these kids. I have seen many realize, at varying ages, what is really happening and begin the process of re-education and awakening to the real world.
So you're saying that abuse cases are up in 2010?
Submitted by CO2Maker on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 6:11am.
Cases of abuse of children by Catholic priests rise by 16% in 2010 over 2009.
Wow. Why haven't we heard any headlines yet?
[ g ] <-- obligatory Internet G-spot
Mr. Pierre-
Submitted by GW on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 10:02am.
It would be helpful to have some comparison numbers to ground the 6-7 credible cases of abuse. Could you also list the number of credible abuse cases for some public school district for 2009/2010?