What's Gay, What's Abuse, and What's Just Crazy

Apparently we need a sex education brush up, or possibly an English lesson. So here it is: contrary to what certain elements within the Catholic Church would like to claim, “gay” and “pedophile” are not the same.

Bill Donohue, of the Catholic League, thinks that because much of the abuse reported has been male-male, the perpetrators must necessarily be gay. “The Times continues to editorialize about a ‘pedophilia crisis,’" he says, "when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis."

Wrong. Also wrong is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, who claimed yesterday that "many [psychologists and psychiatrists] have shown ... that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia."

This is not true. The Cardinal is misinformed. To be fair, he begins the above quote by saying that psychologists and psychiatrists have shown there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia, and on this point he's right. But to then go on to claim a link between being gay and being an abuser is not only unsupported by the evidence, it's repulsive.

And it’s important for us to say so, because while few in the mainstream would go so far as to espouse these extreme views, the common wisdom is still murky about exactly where the dividing line lies between normal gay behavior and completely inappropriate sexual abuse. This is both infuriating and terribly destructive to LGBT progress. If, when we’re struggling for causes like marriage equality and adoption rights, voters somehow suspect that we and our community do not have clear boundaries about appropriate, healthy behavior, especially in regard to children, we’ve lost the fight before we’ve begun.

The root causes of sexual attraction to children are not well understood, but for an adult to force any kind of sexual activity on a child is, beyond question, one of the most terrible, destructive, and devastating things one human being can do to another. It is rightly a crime, and defined as an illness by every reputable psychiatric and medical organization.

Homosexuality = attraction between two members of the same gender. Pedophilia = the attraction an adult feels for underage children, regardless of gender. See the difference? Two people choosing to be together versus one person forcing his/her attentions on those who have no ability to refuse him.

This is why, in one case, we call the two people involved “partners” while in the other we call the one person a “perpetrator.”

As a side note, this also shines a light on why equality and legal recognition of gay relationships absolutely cannot lead to things like legalized pedophilia, bestiality, or any of the other bugaboos Pat Robertson so loves to crow about. Gay marriage is about a committed relationship between two equal partners. All these other activities are about one person forcing their attentions on some other being who (or which) can’t defend him/her/itself. This has absolutely nothing in common with what we in the LGBT community are fighting for.

The institutional Catholic Church appears to be doing everything it can these days to confuse these issues, as if making excuses and throwing baseless accusations at others would lessen the damage caused by a few of its priests and by its leadership's refusal to deal with or, now, take responsibility for them. If the Church wants to retain the respect of the world, not to mention offer healing to its hurting members, its leaders need to show humility rather than arrogance, and they need to demonstrate a willingness to change in order to prevent the same things from happening in the future — all of which, by the way, is the perfect definition of “repentance,” something the Church knows all about. The Vatican should remember that, and give up on its attempts to distract attention from its own failures by sowing confusion and calling names.

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