Like other Religious Right activists, Mission America president Linda Harvey is using the Penn State child abuse scandal to demonize gays and lesbians, floating claims that gay rights advocates want to normalize pedophilia and that people become gay as a result of child abuse. However, the American Psychiatric Association found that “no specific psychosocial or family dynamic cause for homosexuality has been identified, including histories of childhood sexual abuse. Sexual abuse does not appear to be more prevalent in children who grow up to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, than in children who identify as heterosexual.”
Harvey writes in the American Thinker that progressives helped create a culture without boundaries that is now “confused about child-adult sex.”
The public is appalled at the failure to protect these youngsters, and it's far more important than any football legacy. The inaction of adults in authority may have cost a number of young men their innocence and their trust.
What is curious is our culture's mixed messages about early child sex and who the "partner" of that child is. The party line for years to kids in middle school or in "gay" materials pushed on teens has been promotion of early sex while providing either fuzzy or improper guidance about the age of the sex partner. Kids are supposed to be "empowered" now to choose to have sex starting around, oh, age 12. And if it's with someone older, isn't that their business?
Not all people who are involved in homosexuality, nor all progressives, think that this is okay. Problem is, plenty of these age boundary-smashers do populate advocacy groups, schools, influential teachers' unions, and youth counseling. Through serial neglect, obfuscation, and deceit, leftists have given youth a culture that is confused about child-adult sex.
There's even a line of thought among some homosexual advocates that says that young guys need to rethink those first fumblings initiated by the coach, the uncle, the family friend down the street. The boy isn't necessarily a victim, and it wasn't really criminal -- it might have been the boy's first "gay" encounter.
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School board members, teachers, and parents are buying the concept of first, the "gay teen" and now, the "gay child." It's clear that the real message from many progressives is, "You're on your own, kid!" When a child begins acting out with age-inappropriate heterosexual behavior, the first suspicion is molestation. When a youth begins calling him or herself "gay" and reveals early sexual experience, why are we not asking that same question?
The on-campus student riot in support of Paterno made me wonder if today's teens and young adults fully understand the harm of child sexual abuse. Many may not realize the criminality of these adult-child interactions, and perhaps it's time for youth education on this subject.
There's never a time when adult-child sexual relationships are anything but horrific. America needs to stop talking out of both sides of its mouth.
