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March 21, 2004

Gerald McDermott & Robert Benne: J’accuse! J'accuse! J'accuse! Part 1

The online version of Christianity Today has the following disclaimer:

Viewpoints published in "Speaking Out" do not necessarily represent those of Christianity Today.

While this begs the question of "then why do you allow them to be published there?", I'll nevertheless make the following disclaimer:

Viewpoints expressed (and defended) by me, Jon Darby, do not necessarily represent those of The World Wide Rant or its owners, of who I am not one. I absorb complete and absolete responsibility for the views that I am about to publish and assert that they were not formulated or influenced in any way by Andy, Tom, or anybody else.

I state this because my comments about Benne & McDermott, which in previous postings ranged from bitchy to ironic, are about to get really nasty. However, I believe that I will document my research sufficiently well that nobody will be able to accuse me of misrepresentation of any factual statements I will make.

PART ONE

In 1995 Charles Grapski was a 32 year old graduate student with a less than spotless past running for president of the University of Florida student body. His opponent, along with other members of Florida Blue Key (a University of Florida honor society portrayed in trial as incredibly corrupt and the power behind the throne of UF), was witnessed distributing anonymous fliers accusing Grapski of being a child molester, a completely false allegation. Grapski understandably sued, seeking $150,000 in actual and $500,000 in punitive damages.

The jury deliberated for only twenty minutes. Though they found in Grapski's favor, they did not grant him the $650,000 he sought in damages. They awarded him $6,000,000 instead. This act by a jury in Florida is an excellent example of just how seriously the false accusation of child molesting is deemed in the United States and most other western nations.

There are very few, if any, accusations that can be made of anybody that are more powerful and damning than the statement "He is a child molester." The as-yet-unproven accusation has been enough to irrevocably damage the career and reputation of Michael Jackson, while the fact that Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens was accused of possessing child pornography (a form of child molestation) has probably destroyed forever any chance he had for a comeback, even though the charges were dropped.

The sexual exploitation of children is commonly perceived, and not without justification, as literally the lowest and most vile criminal act. It is a stigma that transcends race, orientation, gender, age, class, nationality and every demographic possible. In maximum security prisons, convicted child molesters are more likely to be beaten, raped and killed by other prisoners than any other type of inmate, for even thieves, drug dealers, murderers and rapists feel a moral superiority to them. Child molesters are generally held to exist in the lowest rungs of the lowest rings of humanity.

For all of the reasons above and many more, to accuse a person or an individual of the most unholy of unholy crimes should require the most unarguable evidence gatherable. To accuse a person or a group of people of being more disposed to do this is not just to defame them but to endanger them.

I first mentioned the Christianity Today article written by Dr. Gerald McDermott and Dr. Robert Benne, both professors of theology at Roanoke College, in this post, and then began a (longwinded) deconstruction of the post here. In that article Benne & McDermott make the following claim (bolding mine; hyperlinks replicated from the Christianity Today article):

Research has also shown that children raised by homosexuals were more dissatisfied with their own gender, suffer a greater rate of molestation within the family, and have homosexual experiences more often.

Note the language: they do not say "Some studies indicate," or "some researchers believe," or "some research has shown" - their statement could not be more clear or affirmative:

RESEARCH HAS SHOWN

Semantics is important. Benne and McDermott are not expressing an opinion or proposing a theory, they are making a positive and definite declarative assertion: namely that it is a proven fact that children reared by gay parents are more likely to be molested, to be dissatisfied with their gender and to have gay sex than other children.

(While I believe that all three charges in the excerpt above are bogus, it is the molestation charge that I will address the most as it is by far the most damning.)

This is a mighty powerful and inflammatory allegation (certainly far worse today than being called a witch or a communist, neither of which is considered a pathology or even particularly harmful by most courts in the land). Benne & McDermott have just said that I, as a gay man, am more likely (implicitly significantly more likely) to sexually violate a child, or at very least that I am more likely to allow a child in my care to be sexually violated, than a heterosexual man would be.

Fighting words. They demand justification by evidence if they are to be seen as anything other than, to borrow a line of Jim's, the "blood libel" of gays, the 21st century equivalent of the assertion that Jews kill Christian babies to use their blood in occult rites. This is an accusation of such gravity that if it is true, gays should not be trusted with the young.

If it is false, then McDermott & Benne, two men who have earned the highest degrees awarded in academia and whose careers rely upon their understanding of research and integrity of publication- should lose their jobs, for they have clearly demonstrated that one of these two comments is true:

• They have no concept of what is and what is not reliable information and thus should perhaps reserve their writing for grocery lists and or white supremacist propaganda, neither of which require documentation

  Or...

• That they are so blinded by their personal prejudices that they would, in full knowledge of the damage their words could create, intentionally disregard integrity and knowingly perpetrate a vicious and dangerous lie.

And yet, with absolute and complete knowledge of the gravity of my accusation and the harm it could bring, I state in clear terms with no room whatever for equivocation of interpretation, I charge just that: in my opinion, McDermott and Benne are either thoroughly (if not criminally) incompetent in their research and writing, or that they are flat-out libelous homophobes who care more for spewing hatred than for the Nazarene they allegedly worship. Of these two, I do not know which is worse.

As I have said, powerful accusations demand powerful evidence, and while I have not accused Benne & McDermott of a felony like, say, child molestation, I have made a powerful charge nonetheless, therefore I must show evidence, so, as Dr. Lecter said to Inspector Pazzi, "Okey dokey. Here we go."

In the Christianity Today article, Benne & McDermott post two links to corroborate their statement. This is the first.

It is to Youth.org. From their homepage:

YOUTH.ORG is a service run by volunteers, created to help self-identifying gay, lesbian, bisexual and questioning youth. YOUTH.ORG exists to provide young people with a safe space online to be themselves.

YOUTH.ORG was formed to provide for the needs of GLBT youth; the need for a rare opportunity to express themselves, to know they are not alone, and to interact with others who have already accepted their sexuality.

On the surface you might think that Youth.org doesn't seem much like an organization that would make the claim that gays are more likely to be child molesters. You would be correct.

If you don't have the time or interest to read all of the page to which McDermott and Benne linked, use the Ctrl+F function available: it allows you to search for a particular phrase on any electronic document. (Hold down the Ctrl key while pressing the F key, then type in any of the following words or phrases: molest, gay parents, dissatisfaction, etc.) You will find, as I did, that there simply is nothing on this page to corroborate any of McDermott & Benne's three accusations. I honestly do not have a clue why they chose this page when this one offers just as much by way of corroboration and is far more visually impressive.

This is the second link. It is an abstract to an article on Sexual Scripts, a concept defined by a reviewer of the article as "a rough plan, or guideline, providing answers to the questions about what to do, with whom to do it, how often, when, where, and even why" sexually.

The article is 23 pages long. I have serious doubts as to whether or not McDermott or Benne read it at all.

I did.

(One reason I am so late in posting this is the time it took for me to secure a copy and read and re-read it.)

Archives of Sexual Behavior, in which the article appeared, is a scholarly, refereed journal written by and primarily for psychologists and sociologists dedicated to the research of human sexuality. It is clearly written for an academic readership- the 23 pages are filled with jargon and psychological & sociological terminology, as well as a few terms that may have been coined by its authors, Drs. Simon and Gagnon, themselves. The article is an elucidation of Simon & Gagnon's theory of the dual sociogenic and biological elements of the development of sexuality- it does not represent itself as gospel or as the last word on the subject, and, in fact, makes a call for more research on the topic, but most importantly:

NOWHERE IN ITS TWENTY-THREE SINGLE SPACED WELL DOCUMENTED PAGES DOES IT MAKE ANY COMMENT EVEN REMOTELY OR APPROXIMATELY SYNONYMOUS WITH ANY OF MCDERMOTT AND BENNE'S CLAIMS

If anything, it has less to do with the subject than Youth.org. The closest the article comes to mentioning gay parenting, and it isn't very close at all, is this sentence in a paragraph about the use of psychic metaphor when performing sexual acts when there is no real emotional arousal:

Such a response was typified by a transsexual who when asked how she could have fathered several children while she was a he, replied "There was always a penis there, but it was never mine."

(Simon & Gagnon, page 110)

There are only two additional references to homosexuality in any sense. They are these:

However- where sexual arousal is required as for example in the case of much of homosexual male prostitution, where the prostitute is paid to have an orgasm or in some instances to perform anal intercourse upon the client, the evoking of an erotic intrapsychic script become necessary.

(footnote, page 107)

And this one:

Suggestive of the expectation of this integration is the fact that for Kinsey, and virtually all others, conceptualization of heterosexual behavior have been organized in terms of marital status.

(page 113)

That's it. Remember- the three quotes above are the ONLY MENTIONS OF GAY OR EVEN TRANSGENDERED PEOPLE in a 23 page article on sexual identity. There is nothing about gay parenting (unless you count the transsexual father), nothing about the children of gays, nothing about statistics of any kind where gay youth or adults are concerned, nothing at all even remotely connectible to any of Benne & McDermott's claims. They would have better served their readers linking to the CIA World Factbook- - it offers no less support for their argument and at least there you'll learn who the prefect of the Isle de Reunion is (Gonthier Friderici, if you're interested- or, for that matter, even if you're not, for such is the nature of objectivity, a word seemingly unknown to Benne & McDermott).

So that's it for the Christianity Today online article- two sites that do not in any way directly or remotely say what McDermott and Benne claim that they say.

For most people in this nation, to make a statement of the gravity that Benne & McDermott made- to say that gays should not be allowed to marry because
THEY ARE FAR MORE LIKELY TO MOLEST CHILDREN and then to justify it with two completely meritless citations that say no such thing, would be, to invoke the vernacular, a shitty thing to do that in some western democracies countries would get your ass thrown in jail or bankrupted by litigation (ala David Irving).

For two college professors of theology, a field majorly concerned with moral truths, both of whom fully understand from their own DECADE of undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate education, both of whom would require that their students make no factual claims that they cannot clearly demonstrate, to do this is a disgrace on par with malpractice for a lawyer or for a "real" doctor (or the defrocking of an Episcopal priest, which McDermott is).

But wait "there's more!"

At the bottom of the Christianity Today article is the following sentence:

Robert Benne and Gerald McDermott, who both teach religion at Roanoke College, wrote an earlier version of this article for the Public Theology Project.

And this version, dear friends and readers, is where I got r-e-a-l-l-y pissed.

THIS RANT CONTINUED HERE