Right-wing Catholic activist Bill Donohue has long been dishonest about the issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church — eager to heap blame on the supposed excess of gay priests when the reality is that many were crimes of opportunity than of sexual orientation — and he’s made it clear he will continue to be dishonest about. Donohue complained in a Nov. 8 CNSNews.com column:
Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson recently released a “Report on Clergy Sexual Abuse” that bears scrutiny. There are many aspects to it that are seriously tainted.
In the Executive Summary of the report, it says that in August 2018, Peterson’s Department of Justice announced that it was seeking information from “individuals who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a member of the clergy or an adult in a position of authority.”
Why were the clergy singled out for an investigation and not anyone else? The report offers no explanation. It cannot be that there has been a rash of news stories on current cases of clergy abuse — there has not been.
[…]As I detail in my new book on this subject, “The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes,” sexual abuse of minors is rampant throughout a wide range of institutions. Moreover, given the undeniable progress that the Catholic Church has made, it makes it even more indefensible to focus exclusively on it.
Donohue is playing dumb here. Most religious denominations don’t have the rigid structure and hierarchy that the Catholic Church does, which makes it easier to demonstrate the patterns of abuse and cover-ups that have been documented over the years.
Donohue then went to his go-to complaint, that gays aren’t being blamed:
Then there is the proverbial cover-up. Boys are mentioned 203 times in the 174-page report; girls are cited 16 times. That’s because, as always, boys were the most likely to be victimized.
When the report says that “Many of the victims of clergy sexual abuse were teenage boys,” it is being deceitful. When 91.5 percent of the victims were teenage boys, that’s not “many.” That’s almost all.
Why does this matter? Because 92.2 percent were postpubescent. And that means that homosexual priests were responsible for over 90 percent of the alleged cases of sexual misconduct. Yet never once in the report is the word “homosexuality” mentioned (there are four references to “homosexual” acts).
To be sure, the cover-up of the homosexual scandal in the Catholic Church is not unique to Nebraska—it’s ubiquitous. Now imagine what Peterson would have said, and the media as well, if over 90 percent of the alleged victims were teenage girls. It would have been trumpeted far and wide.
But as we’ve noted, researchers for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who compiled an independent study of the abuse, stated that no connection was found between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse and argued that the idea of sexual identity should be separated from the problem of sexual abuse, since one does not have to have a homosexual identity to commit homosexual acts. Indeed, Donohue offered no evidence whatsoever that any of the priests accused of sexual abuse identified as homosexual.
He then served up one of his favorite distractions: “I am calling on Attorney General Peterson to launch a probe of the sexual abuse of minors in Nebraska’s public schools.” He offered no proof that there’s any sexual abuse scandal or cover-up that rivaled what has happened in the Catholic Church.
In his Nov. 11 column, Donohue cheered a church report showing a reduction in sexual abuse reports, which he attributed to weeding out gay priests:
There is no other institution in society where adults regularly interact with minors that can match this record. But don’t expect state attorneys general to launch a probe of the sexual abuse of minors in any of them, especially the public schools, where it is sorely needed.
What has changed is a reduction in the percent of abuse committed by homosexuals. Typically, 8 in 10 cases of abuse involve male-on-male sex, the victims being boys. The latest data show that this figure has dropped to 6 in 10. The decrease makes sense: the seminaries have done a much better job screening for candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies.
We continue to deplore the failure of the media to cite data which contradict the false narrative that the scandal is ongoing. That is a lie.
Donohue concluded by plugging his new book on the subject:
As I demonstrate in my new book, “The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes,” the sexual abuse scandal effectively ended decades ago. The book also addresses the two major parties to the scandal: enabling bishops and homosexuals priests, and why they did what they did.
We can assume that Donohue’s is as biased and dishonest as his previous work on the subject.