The Difference Between a Homosexual and a Pedophile
I apologize for not having been very active as of late to all six of my readers. I got busy and it became very easy to just disregard the ol' blog. I'll see if I can pick it up a bit as we near the mid-term elections.
I'm posting today on something that has been irking me the last couple of days. Former Representative Mark Foley is a dispicable human being and deserves what he gets. However, the discourse surrounding his conduct has been driving me nuts. All the punditry I've been hearing and reading keep referring to the "homosexuality" of Foley as if that means a damn. It's an old assumed argument: Foley was a predator to this male teenager because he is (presumably) a homosexual.
It's complete nonsense. Foley was a predator to that male teenager because he is a pedophile.
It is a common myth that same-sex pedophiles are homosexuals. That is simply false. The vast majority of same-sex pedophiles are, in fact, heterosexual. All those Boy Scout Scoutmasters that get busted for abusing their scouts? I'm yet to hear of one that was gay. They have all been heterosexual men, usually married, and the community is always shocked, shocked! when it happens.
The key here is that the sickness isn't homosexuality; the sickness is pedophilia.
Mark Foley should be denounced because he is a pedophile. And we should stop talking otherwise.
I'm posting today on something that has been irking me the last couple of days. Former Representative Mark Foley is a dispicable human being and deserves what he gets. However, the discourse surrounding his conduct has been driving me nuts. All the punditry I've been hearing and reading keep referring to the "homosexuality" of Foley as if that means a damn. It's an old assumed argument: Foley was a predator to this male teenager because he is (presumably) a homosexual.
It's complete nonsense. Foley was a predator to that male teenager because he is a pedophile.
It is a common myth that same-sex pedophiles are homosexuals. That is simply false. The vast majority of same-sex pedophiles are, in fact, heterosexual. All those Boy Scout Scoutmasters that get busted for abusing their scouts? I'm yet to hear of one that was gay. They have all been heterosexual men, usually married, and the community is always shocked, shocked! when it happens.
The key here is that the sickness isn't homosexuality; the sickness is pedophilia.
Mark Foley should be denounced because he is a pedophile. And we should stop talking otherwise.
posted by cc at
12:28 PM
2 Comments:
Lisa here. So glad to see you are back at it, Steve. I've wondered what in the world to do with my office hours without you.
I have nothing intelligent to add, other that I agree wholeheartedly with your comments.
Doug here, Steve. I certainly agree with the central theme of your post, which is that the revulsion shouldn't be based on the fact that Foley was consorting with boys (as opposed to girls), but rather that he was a guy in his 50's consorting with mid-teens.
Having said that, I don't think it's a completely clear-cut issue. For one thing, as I mentioned on my blog, it's not illegal to have sex with 16 year olds in either DC or the page's home state, or in many states for that matter. In light of that, I'm not sure it can really be called "pedophilia", which to me is more about having sex with children. I don't consider a 16 or 17 year old a "child", necessarily. I certainly didn't think of myself as trying to get with a child when I was hitting on my peer group at age 16 or 17.
What makes the Foley situation "icky" is the completely skewed power dynamic at play, him being an older man, specifically an older CONGRESSMAN, and these kids being in a position where they very likely feel they can't come out and say anything about it. I mean, obviously these are kids who aspire to be involved in politics at some level. Foley and others like him had to feel pretty bulletproof about their advances going awry. The parallels to the priest abuse scandal are many, and one of them is once the secret gets out, people lose their fear of feeling like they will be persecuted if they come forward. And now, of course, we're seeing the floodgates open with lots of revelations about Foley's past.
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