Protect the Children (and

mean

it)

I had a long email exchange about hate crime statistics with a "heteroseparatist," and Itold him 4% of the population is openly gay. Out of the blue, he turned that into a blogpost about gays abusing kids. And he called it "The Tisinai Formula", using my unusuallast name. I thought that was pretty vile, attaching my name to this disgusting crime.But I shouldn't have been surprised. That's where a lot of our opponents go. So weneed to be armed with the facts, especially gay men, who are the main targets of thesesick lies and accusations.And then I realized this blogger had done me a favor. His post serves up their twistedreasoning in a way that highlights every mistake and false assumption they makeHe claims 33% of girls are molested, along with 14% of boys. Then, using the 96 to 4straight to gay ratio he asks, "If a village of 960 men molests 33 girls, and a village of 40men molests 14 boys, which village is more dangerous to children?"He's trying to make the point that the gay village is more dangerous, but actually he'srepeating the mistake at the heart of so much anti-gay propaganda -- the assumptionthat girls are molested by straight men, while boys are molested by gays. The realpicture, though, looks more like this. Men who abuse boys rarely come from this 4%group. They come from here. Our opponents don't want to admit that, the generalpublic doesn't seem to know it, but the facts don't lie.Dr. Carole Jenny and her colleagues at Denver's Children's Hospital looked at 50 boyswho were molested by adults.

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37 were molested by man in a heterosexual relationship with one of the boys'relatives.

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3 were molested by their mother or grandmother.

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5 by both parents.

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3 were molested by male family friends with no history of sex with men.

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1 by an uncle, also with no history of sex with men.

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Finally, 1 boy was abused by a man who was possibly but not clearly identifiedas gay.All of these cases are tragic. But there's no reason to single out openly gay men as aspecial threat.So who are these non-gay men abusing boys? Some of them aren't straight or gay,aren't sexually attracted to adults at all, but are attracted simply to children. These arepedophiles. They're fixated on kids. Others have a history of being straight, but underthe wrong circumstances, regress back to kids.