Gay Boys To Gay Men
by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative:
A friend e-mails, about the current scandals:
I have some liberal-ish Christian friends who seem to be losing the scales from their eyes. “Wait, you mean to tell me all that stuff fundamentalists said about gay men being disproportionately likely to molest minors was actually true? What are we to do?” One friend in particular woke up to this after reading [Mary Eberstadt’s 2002 essay] “The Elephant in the Sacristy.” He could hardly believe that the figures were so well established, so long ago.
By now you readers should know that I do not believe that homosexuals in the priesthood are the sole explanation for the chronic scandals in the Catholic Church. I believe that celibacy and clericalism both play roles here, as well as homosexuality. The three are tied together in a synergistic bond. What seriously makes me angry is the unwillingness of the secular media to pay attention to the homosexual dynamic present in the phenomenon. You cannot understand the scandal without it, any more than you can understand the scandal without accounting for clericalism or celibacy.
According to the 2004 John Jay Report, 81 percent of the victims of clerical abusers were male. The overwhelming numbers of those were not children (pedophilia), but older boys (ephebophilia). It is unjust and inaccurate to say that all gay men seek sex with boys that age, but it is foolish to say that it’s not a big part of gay male culture.
This 2017 essay from Chad Felix Greene, an out gay man in his 30s, sheds a lot of light on this phenomenon, and is well worth reading in context of the abuse scandal. Here’s how it starts:
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