(Even when it comes to the acceptance policy of the Boy Scouts—I presume you mean the Boy Scouts of America—I’m not sure that this figure means their policy is rational. Does the organization reject all white males because (as jet said) most serial killers are white males?)

Why is that figure not relevant? If it turned out that 100% of all molestations of boys were committed by adult females—i.e., none by adult male homosexuals—that would be a very different scenario. It would be a good argument, for example, against the Boy Scouts’ policy on adult male homosexuals. But if most molestations of young boys are committed by adult male homosexuals, then the Boy Scouts’ policy looks like a rational (even if overdone) response to liability issues.

Are the Dobson acolytes concerned about the homosexual activity and gang rape committed in our wonderful prison systems as well? I’m thinking incarceration promotes homosexuality and therefore must be eliminated if we are to preserve our christian heritage. Who’s with me?

I can see you’re not Welsh.

Well, I don’t and maybe you don’t but maybe you’ve run across the phrase ‘testosterone poisoning’ thrown about? Or maybe Maureen Dowd’s treatise on the pathetic, endangered state of t he Y-chromosome?

Since most people who molest boys are men, and most people who molest girls are men, isn’t the problem . . . men . . . ? We should just tell children to keep their distance . . .

Many people have, haven’t they (though perhaps less now than during the ‘satanic preschool child abuse’ panics of 15 years ago).

Here’s the thing. It’s all semantics. In some obvious sense all male abusers of boys are ‘gay’ because…duh…they’re having sex with males. But we can’t have that because, although heaping abuse and derision on males in general is generally OK among left-leaners, doing so to gays is not OK (they are, of course, a protected minority). So we must change the semantics—men who have sex with boys arent ‘gay’ and therefore gays, by definition, don’t abuse boys. Of course the religious right come at it from the opposite point of view—if they can blame pedophilia mostly on gays, then they’re happy.

But of course what actually matters is that an extremely small percentage of males of any sexual orientation are abusers (or serial killers for that matter).

(Quoted from memory; anyone got her autobiography handy?)

Well, if you manipulate the data like that you can come up with any conclusion.

I’m also interested in their sexual relationships, if any, with adult men and women. This doesn’t seem to be a question that Erickson asked. From Greg Merek:

“Unfortunately, Erickson et al. did not report the actual number associated with this percentage (based on their data, the number appears to be approximately 54 out of 229 child molesters studied, or 24%). Nor did they differentiate homosexual from bisexual men, or report how many of the so-called homosexual men were heterosexually married (although some apparently were, based on the authors’ other comments). Of critical importance is the fact that the authors did not determine if the self-reported homosexual and bisexual men were involved in homosexual relationships with adults of the same sex, or whether the self-applied labels were used to describe the gender of their under-age victi ms (in Groth and Birnbaum’s [1978] terminology, whether they were fixated).”

What’s ludicrous is to take this study as evidence that we should beware of gay men because they’re likely to be child predators. That’s absolutely not an inference that can be drawn.