Why are “traditional-values groups” interested in the just-released report on the Sandusky sex abuse scandal? They saw an opportunity to use it as a weapon against gays:

And there are aspects of the entire case that both Gramley and Barber say cannot be ignored. “Through all this we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Sandusky’s victims were all young boys. We can’t ignore the homosexual aspect of this,” Gramley offers. “And through Graham Spanier’s tenure as president, he has brought more and more homosexual-oriented programming and events to the campus than ever before.” Adds Barber: “There also is an element of political correctness run amok here,” he explains. “Anytime homosexuality is involved — even though in this case it’s a homosexual predator preying on children — people seem to have this innate fear that they are going to be crushed by the sexual anarchist lobby if they speak out against it.” Yet Barber says it is a fact that percentage-wise more sexual crimes are committed against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals.

Yeah, because “homosexual-oriented programming” includes, um… child rape.

First of all, let’s not fall for the misconception that the gender of a child molester’s victims necessarily tells us anything about their sexual orientation. Contrary to what some may expect, men who molest children are, almost universally, not primarily attracted to adult men – yes, even the men who molest boys. Many consistently engage in relationships with adult women, not men. As pre-pubescent boys lack male secondary sex characteristics, heterosexual men who are attracted to them are apparently responding to their feminine qualities.

Devout homophobe Peter LaBarbera dismisses these findings and says, “Who cares if a guy is married? If he’s into molesting boys, that’s homosexual behavior. It’s academic nonsense to talk about these people as heterosexuals.” Ironically, this takes an academic dispute about the definition of homosexuality and prioritizes it over recognizing the reality of the situation. It means ignoring the facts about what sort of people actually molest children, in favor of perpetuating baseless hate against gays. And it means mistakenly eyeing the two gay guys down the block with suspicion, while believing that the heterosexuals around you could pose no risk to kids. Apparently it’s more important to attack gays than to understand what’s really going on here.

But even if we did agree that Sandusky is gay, and even if he did have a history of relationships with adult men (which there appears to be no evidence of), so what? You know what we call it when a straight person gets caught sexually abusing children? Tuesday. Anti-gay groups seem to want to assign supporters of equality a strawman position that gay people must be saintly, transcendent angels who are incapable of any wrongdoing. I suspect this is the flip side of their inability to see us as fully human – they deeply and comprehensively fail to grasp that LGBT people actually are just like everyone else, warts and all. Yes, sometimes gay people are going to molest children. And that’s unspeakably horrifying. But this doesn’t constitute an argument against homosexuality, any more than straight people who abuse children are an argument against heterosexuality.

As for the claim that anyone would be afraid to report child sexual abuse because the abuser was (supposedly) gay and some all-powerful gay lobby will destroy anyone who tries to stop gay people from raping children: Where does this come from? What basis could this possibly have in reality, however remote and tenuous? Has this ever happened? Even for the anti-gay movement, this is an extraordinary allegation. What is their evidence of a “sexual anarchist lobby” that seeks to intimidate people from taking action against ongoing child abuse? How can they possibly justify suggesting that gay people support the unhindered raping of children? And what makes them so certain that scary, scary gays were the reason that Sandusky was able to continue preying on children for so long?

What?

If you’re looking for a real “sexual anarchist lobby”, how about the thousands of Penn State students who were so irrationally devoted to a fucking college football program that they literally rioted when Joe Paterno was fired? They weren’t rioting in protest of his failure to take appropriate action on reports that Sandusky had raped a child. They were rioting in support of him.

These aren’t the gays you’re looking for. You utter twits.