Sandy Rios of the American Family Association last week discussed Louis Freeh’s report on the Penn State child abuse scandal, and like countless other anti–gay activists, tied child abuse to homosexuality, a claim dismissed by groups like the American Psychological Association but commonplace on the far-right fringe. While likening the Penn State scandal to child abuse found in the Catholic Church, Rios said that Catholic seminaries were “just festering with homosexual activism” and “homosexual recruitment,” leading to child molestation:
I think that the point I want to make with this is this sounds stunning, it sounds a little bit like the priest scandal, doesn’t it? Where all of this stuff went on, where Catholic seminaries, it was just festering with homosexual activism—homosexual recruitment, I should say. A priest just turning the other way or engaging in it and not doing anything about it. So you might say, ‘well that’s shocking,’ but I think this is typical.
Naturally, AFA’s Dianne Gramley and Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber also linked gays to child abuse in the wake of the Freeh report:
Through all this we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Sandusky’s victims were all young boys. We can’t ignore the homosexual aspect of this,” Gramley offers. “And through Graham Spanier’s tenure as president, he has brought more and more homosexual-oriented programming and events to the campus than ever before.”
Adds Barber: “There also is an element of political correctness run amok here,” he explains. “Anytime homosexuality is involved — even though in this case it’s a homosexual predator preying on children — people seem to have this innate fear that they are going to be crushed by the sexual anarchist lobby if they speak out against it.” Yet Barber says it is a fact that percentage-wise more sexual crimes are committed against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals.
