thomascwaters.com

The Catholic Church has had a rough decade or so, due in no small part to the burgeoning priest sex abuse scandals that rocked pretty much every parish across the country. By its own numbers, 14,000 cases of molestation have been reported since 1950 and abuse-related costs have reached above $2.3 billion in the same time period. Of course, the greatest damage has not been financial, but rather the lives damaged, both of the abused youth as well as the ways  the crisis has pushed the church to lash out against homosexuality in seminaries and among priests.

Within the GLBTQ community, we have been saying all along that the issue a is an abuse issue, and not a gay issue, and now, a church organized and funded study shows exactly that.

The full report by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice won’t be completed until the end of next year. But the authors said that their evidence to date found no data indicating that homosexuality was a predictor of abuse.

For me, one of the most interesting pieces of information is this:

The latest findings affirmed previous reports that the rate of clergy abuse has declined steeply since the mid 1980s. Researchers found that the abuse rate peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the claims being made now involve allegations from decades ago.

So, often, anyone opposing full equality for gay people, cite a need to return to family values, as if there existed pre- the great sexual revolution of the early sixties, some perfect and harmonious sense of family values. But if the greatest umber of abuse cases date to the ’60′s and ’70, that means that the majority of abusing priests were born and raised in the 40′s and ’50′s during a time when the family structure was supposedly strong and very Christian. The Ozzie and Harriet like family was supposedly the epitome of good family values. So what went wrong? How did so many male youth grow up in those Ozzie and Harriet families and become sexually abusive towards children?

Report: Homosexuality no factor in abusive priests | News Story on 365gay.com.