SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (BP)–For loving parents, the need to protect one’s children from harm — whether it be from extreme weather, poor nutrition or even “stranger danger” — registers first on the concern scale. Recent efforts to “normalize” homosexual behavior, however, have left many children exposed to the elements.
Take, for instance, children most at risk — ones who find themselves in foster care. They all too often face an additional risk stemming from the sexual behavior of those responsible for protecting them in states that allow the placement of children with same-sex couples.
This does not bode well for the already vulnerable, frightened and confused children now circulating through the nation’s foster care system. The results of an Illinois study released in March revealed that 34 percent of child sexual abuse cases by foster parents in the state were committed against children that were the same sex as their molesters.
Think that’s enough to merit trepidation on the part of Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services, which handles the placement of children in its foster care system? It’s not. When pressed, an agency official noted DCFS classifies potential foster and adoptive parents only on their marital status and that “there is no law that says a gay or lesbian person cannot adopt” in Illinois.
Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute with Concerned Women for America, clarifies that because men who engage in homosexual behavior comprise a small portion of the general population, their rates of molestation against boys are significantly higher than that of men who claim to be heterosexual: “Since one-third to one-half of all child molestations are committed by men against boys, and homosexual men comprise less than 2 percent of the population, this means that the ratio of child molesters among homosexuals is far, far higher than among the rest of the population.”
Knight is not the only one coming to such conclusions. In 2002, a study by Timothy J. Dailey and the Family Research Council also corroborated such a link:
“Studies indicate that, contrary to the inaccurate but widely accepted claims of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, homosexuals comprise between one to three percent of the population. Homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses: Individuals from the one to three percent of the population that is sexually attracted to the same sex are committing up to one-third of the sex crimes against children.”
Still, those whose goal it is to proclaim homosexual behavior as both loving and normal continue to deny a link between it and child sex no matter what the evidence. Nonetheless, even as America and the world slowly acquiesce to the spell of so-called “tolerance,” this tie is becoming more and more apparent. Sadly, among some, it is also becoming more accepted.
In a 1999 interview with the editor of a North American Man-Boy Love Association publication, Camille Paglia, an advocate of homosexual behavior, went so far as to frame child sex as a positive element directly related to the rise of modern culture:
“Contemporary gays who try to distance themselves from this issue of boy-love are in effect committing cultural suicide. They’re cutting themselves from all the highest achievements of gay men….. Because I am a woman, and therefore I cannot be charged with man-boy love, I felt I had a moral obligation — and I don’t recognize morality in most areas of life — a moral obligation to speak out against this kind of persecution in puritan Protestant culture, this persecution of a sensibility that as far as I can see has been intertwined with the highest achievements of art and intellect since the period of classical Athens.”
Statements like these illustrate the path down which the most radical purveyors of the homosexual agenda hope to tread in the years to come: Sex with boys by men is not only normal, but admirable.
Our culture has been fed the lie that nearly any sexual practice is acceptable so long as it is conducted in “privacy” under one’s own roof. It is up to the Christian world to remind them that each step related to “acceptance” is another step into danger, heartbreak and misery.
In truth, the move to “normalize” homosexual behavior will not, and is not, stopping at simply being allowed to commit “private” sexual acts. It will not stop until many more children who have no choice about who they live with are indoctrinated, abused and damaged physically and psychologically.
Of course, no one with any credibility would ever claim that every practitioner of homosexual behavior is a pedophile. And the behavior of heterosexual pedophiles is no less reprehensible than that of homosexual ones. But the cry of radical homosexual activists to deny the obvious facts that are seen in studies such as the one in Illinois is suspect at the very least. No one protects a child well when one’s head is in the sand.
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Alan Sears, a former federal prosecutor, was executive director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography under President Reagan. Alan E. Sears now is the president and CEO of the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance defending religious liberty through strategy, training, funding and litigation, online at www.alliancedefensefund.org.
