Impossible only for The New York Times.
The unstated conclusion is that heterosexual priests, who outnumber their homosexual counterparts, would commit more offenses if only they had access to more girls, hence the Times' effort to exaggerate the number of homosexual priests to as high as 75% of the priesthood. The calumny implicit in this is as perverse as the growing acceptance of homosexuality is in the American Roman Catholic Church.
Homosexual priests overwhelming are to blame for these crimes against children, but we're supposed to feel all torn up about the homosexual priests' emotional health.
No wonder there's an exodus from the church (weekly attendance is half what it was in the 1970s), and from the readership of The New York Times (55% of what it was in 1993).
The idea that gay priests are responsible for child sexual abuse remains a persistent belief, especially in many conservative Catholic circles. For years, church leaders have been deeply confused about the relationship between gay men and sexual abuse. With every new abuse revelation, the tangled threads of the church’s sexual culture become even more impossible to sort out.
Study after study shows that homosexuality is not a predictor of child molestation. This is also true for priests, according to a famous study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the wake of revelations in 2002 about child sex abuse in the church. The John Jay research, which church leaders commissioned, found that same-sex experience did not make priests more likely to abuse minors, and that four out of five people who said they were victims were male. Researchers found no single cause for this abuse, but identified that abusive priests’ extensive access to boys had been critical to their choice of victims.
