The results from two major studies of the recent revelations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have just been released. There's a lot of data, but for the moment I want to focus on one statistic.
More than 80 percent of the alleged victims were male and over half said they were between ages 11 and 14 when they were assaulted.As I see it, there are two possibilities, both of which may be true.
1) Homosexuals are over-represented among Catholic priests compared to the population as a whole.
2) Homosexual Catholic priests are more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual Catholic priests.
Of course, no matter what their sexual orientation, all Catholic priests are supposed to be celibate.
Approximately 3% of the general population is homosexual, so if the truth is exclusively (1) then homosexuals are over-represented among Catholic priests by almost 2700%. That's an astounding figure. If the 3% number is accurate and the US has around 280 million people, there are 4.3 million homosexual men in the country. There are approximately 110 thousand priests in the US, and if 80% of them are homosexual then they account for 2.1% of the total number of homosexual males.
Which brings us to (2). Considering that 28% of the population is Roman Catholic, it's not impossible that 2.1% of homosexuals are Catholic priests -- but it is unlikely since only 0.28% of Catholic males in general are priests.
There is some data missing from this report. Half of the abuse victims were between ages 11 and 14; presumably some were younger, and some were older. Minors over age 14, however, cannot be properly characterized as "children" and shouldn't be counted when discussing pedophilia (which only refers to an attraction to prepubescent children). All my numbers are based on the assumption that victims of homosexual and heterosexual abuse are distributed evenly across the age spectrum.
Personally, I think reality is a mixture of (1) and (2). The nature of the priesthood (public celibacy) would appear to select for men who have issues with normal sexuality. (Whatever your political persuasion, you have to admit that homosexuality is not statistically normal.) Further, there is other statistical evidence that suggests homosexual males are more likely to sexually abuse a child per capita than heterosexual males.
- Pedophiles are invariably males: Almost all sex crimes against children are committed by men.- Significant numbers of victims are males: Up to one-third of all sex crimes against children are committed against boys (as opposed to girls).
- The 10 percent fallacy: Studies indicate that, contrary to the inaccurate but widely accepted claims of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, homosexuals comprise between 1 to 3 percent of the population.
- Homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses: Individuals from the 1 to 3 percent of the population that is sexually attracted to the same sex are committing up to one-third of the sex crimes against children.
- Some homosexual activists defend the historic connection between homosexuality and pedophilia: Such activists consider the defense of "boy-lovers" to be a legitimate gay rights issue.
- Pedophile themes abound in homosexual literary culture: Gay fiction as well as serious academic treatises promote "intergenerational intimacy."
(Of course, the Family Research Council has an agenda, but it doesn't generate it's own statistics. They also tend to count teenagers as "children" in some cases, which is inaccurate with regards to pedophilia, as I mentioned above. Check its sources.)
Update:
Clayton Cramer has more.
