Under Chairman Paul Cameron, the mission of the Family Research Institute is “to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse.”
The “research” produced by FRI has been widely discredited by social scientists and earned the organization a designation as an anti-gay hate group from the Southern Poverty Law Center, but is nonetheless routninely cited by other anti-gay Religious Right organizations.
Yesterday, FRI released its latest “scholarly” investigation into how the education and entertainment industries are “disproportionately populated by homosexuals and are in the midst of boy-molesting scandals” … which can all be traced back to the introduction of the birth control pill:
Universities have a preponderance of heterosexuals. But, the perhaps 8% or so of employees who practice homosexuality are responsible for the great bulk of the child molestations! Everyone knows that homosexuals go ‘where the boys are.’ Thus the Boy Scouts and Catholic Priest scandals. But the University and Hollywood scandals exhibit another rule — ‘where gays cluster, boys suffer.’
Everyone knows ‘the pill’ freed heterosexuals from social control — but it also (indirectly) freed those who practice homosexuality. Before the 1960’s, ‘everyone’ had to conform to a norm that guaranteed a future — each citizen was responsible to get married and produce children. This social milieu was self-reinforcing: ‘If I must be disciplined in my sex life, then everybody else should be as well!’ Thus the citizenry generally worked to suppress those with deviant sexual habits.
But that changed radically with the invention of ‘the pill.’ Shielded by the anonymity of modern life, the pill assured that those with heterosexual tastes could live their sex lives almost free from social discipline. Pregnancies would no longer reveal your liaisons, and no one knew whether you were childless by fate or choice. Good news for homosexuals, because if heterosexuals could ‘do whatever they wanted’ sexually, the notion of fairness inevitably pushed heterosexuals to agree with ‘why punish those with other harmless sexual tastes?’
Of course, ‘harmless’ is the operative word. Is homosexuality indeed harmless?
Evangelizing for homosexuality, the entertainment industry (joining the psychiatric professions) began to flood the media with the message that ‘homosexuality is different, yet harmless.’ Hollywood asserted that homosexual practitioners were just as stable, just as worthy of marriage, just as worthy of parenthood, etc. The combination of these two new realities — the pill and Hollywood promotion of homosexuality — is the key to understanding where we are today.
