Link: Catholic Abuse? Blame Gays | News | The Advocate
According to the antigay Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the incidence of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests has been exaggerated by the media, and the abuse that has occurred should be blamed on gays in the priesthood.
The Catholic League makes these claims in a full-page ad in Monday’s New York Times. Signed by Catholic League president Bill Donohue (pictured), the ad cites a study indicating most of the victims of sexual abuse were adolescents, not younger children, and therefore with male-on-male incidents, “the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.”
Donohue quotes psychiatrist Paul McHugh as saying, “This behavior was homosexual predation on American Catholic youth, yet it’s not being discussed.” (McHugh, a retired Johns Hopkins University professor, has previously stated that he does not believe in a gay gene and that acceptance of gay people is “part and parcel of the pandemonium that the permissive movement has brought.”)
The Catholic League’s ad also contends that there is no sexual abuse crisis in the church, saying many of the accusations are not credible and that most of them are decades old, dating from “the heyday of the sexual revolution, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s.” Donohue says some of the reports of abuse have surfaced because of “the unseemly practice of attorneys searching for new ‘victims’ in bars and prisons.”
Donohue concludes by blaming the public perception of a crisis on bias against the Catholic Church. “If its teachings were pro-abortion, pro–gay marriage and pro–women clergy, the dogs would have been called off years ago,” he writes.
