How The Extreme Religious Right Is Spinning The Foley Scandal To Its Ridiculous Purposes

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Since I heard Tony Perkins and other nutcases at the Family Research Council pontificate Monday night, I've waited for someone, anyone in the MSM to call them out. From Bonnie Erbe at US News:

Of all the reactions to the Foley case, here's my personal favorite: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, he the leader of the über-right, Onward Christian soldier" league, used the occasion to (what else?) bash gays and promote the "link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse."

Forget about House Speaker Dennis Hastert's characterization of some of the now disgraced former Representative Foley's E-mails to teen male pages as "overly friendly." Forget about former Representative Foley's admission that he was sexually abused by a priest as a young teen. These were not Perkins's most pressing concerns. In fact, he wrote, the GOP leadership's laissez-faire attitude toward Foley E-mail exchanges with House pages wasn't the real issue.

The real issue, in Perkins-Land, anyway, is that. Foley's now public E-mail perversions would not have besmirched the Republican Party had Washington not fallen prey to "pro-homosexual activists." Puh-leeze!!!

It gets worse. The FRC's website quotes President Perkins as saying, "Now that his E-mails and messages to teenage male pages have been revealed, it appears clear that Foley is a homosexual with a particular attraction to underage boys. While pro-homosexual activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. Although almost all child molesters are male and less than 3 percent of men are homosexual, about a third of all child sex abuse cases involve men molesting boys–and in one study, 86 percent of such men identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual."

Oh, I get it. If there were no gay men in the world, there would be no pedophilia. Hmm. Does it then follow that since Charles Carl Roberts (who this week slaughtered five Amish schoolgirls and shot five more) was a heterosexual father of three, fewer schoolgirls would be murdered if there were fewer fathers of three children who drove milk trucks for a living? The latter makes as much sense as the former; in other words, neither makes sense. They're both contorted thinking. Mine, on the one hand, is a confabulation. Perkins's, however, is serious.