People like Buchanan assume that molesting a child of a curtain gender means that person is attracted to adults of that gender. That is an incorrect assumption, as the two are independent of each other.
1. Many (Most?) child molesters are not attracted to adults at all.
2. Most are attracted to ALL children, but many molest boys because of opportunity.
3. Many child molestations happen not because of attraction to children, but simply as way for a person to have power over another or because a situation allows the person to get "sex" they couldn't get elsewhere, like with prison rape or rape in general sometimes.
4. Studies show that self-IDed gays and lesbians (people who are attracted to adults of the same gender) are equally or even less likely to molest children or be attracted to children than self-IDed heterosexuals.
http://www.robincmiller.com/gayles4.htmIn 1978 psychologist Nicholas Groth screened 175 men who had been convicted in Massachusetts of sexual molestation of children and referred by a court for psychological evaluation. He found not a single gay man in this sample. Every one of the perpetrators was either an exclusive heterosexual, a bisexual with a predominantly heterosexual orientation, or a fixated pedophile with no sexual interest in adults.<4>
His conclusion? That "the adult heterosexual male constitutes a greater risk to the underage child than does the adult homosexual male."
In the same year, researcher David Newton reviewed the scientific literature and found no reason to believe that anything other than a "random connection" existed between homosexual orientation and child molestation.<5>
Later research has confirmed these findings:
In 1988, renowned sex researcher Kurt Freund at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto studied two groups of paid volunteers and found that gay men responded no more to male child stimuli than heterosexual men responded to female child stimuli.<6> He later described as a "myth" the notion that gay men are more likely than straight men to be child molesters.<7>
In 1992, alarmed over claims made during a campaign for an anti-gay state constitutional amendment in Colorado, two physicians reviewed every case of suspected child molestation evaluated at Children's Hospital in Denver over a one-year period. Of the 269 cases determined to involve molestation by an adult, only two of the perpetrators could be identified as gay or lesbian. The researchers concluded that the risk of child sexual abuse by an identifiably gay or lesbian person was between zero and 3.1%, and that the risk of such abuse by the heterosexual partner of a relative was over 100 times greater.<8>
Child abuse, including sexual abuse, is a terrible reality in this country. According to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, established by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 90,000 children are sexually abused every year.<9> According to some researchers, the true number may be five times this.<10>
Approximately 80 percent of these sexually molested children are girls.<11> Persons focusing only on the remaining 20 percent of molestations--and, even then, only on the small fraction of these crimes committed by gay men--are not authentically concerned with combating sexual abuse of children. Their primary interest lies in perpetuating fear.
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