When he wasn't busy giving colleagues the bird last week, Bill Heffernan was saying he doesn't mind gay people. Oh, sweet relief. One of the great achievements of human existence is to be not minded, particularly if you're not minded by a certifiable Liberal senator from Junee.

If only he'd stopped there. But in the Great Hall of Parliament House during a ''celebration'' of the fifth anniversary of the legislative ban on gay marriage, he allegedly told a protester: ''I don't mind gay people, I just want you to stop f---ing the kids.''

Heffernan later denied using those exact words, but the long history of confusing homosexuality and pedophilia means to even mention the two in the same breath is to link them.

Despite his form, it is tempting to dismiss Heffernan's comments as the obsession of a family man who likes saying it how it is. But it's not how it is: study after study has found the idea that gay men are more likely to molest children to be complete bunkum.

In 1994, the respected medical journal Pediatrics published a study of 352 suspected victims of child abuse in Denver - 276 girls, 76 boys. It found 269 were abused by adults, two of whom were gay. Two. In 222 cases, the offender was a straight partner of a close relative. In other words, a child within that group was 111 times more likely to be abused by someone straight they knew, than by a homosexual, known to them or not.