(Cross posted from Truth Wins Out…)

The Washington Post dug itself a little deeper into the gutter the other day (I guess that’s still possible), when it allowed Bill Donohue, of the One Man Catholic Defense League, to repeat in its pages one of the older and more enduring lies in the kook pew’s arsenal…

Alfred Kinsey was the first to identify a correlation between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of minors. In 1948, he found that 37 percent of all male homosexuals admitted to having sex with children under 17 years old.

This is why I own a copy of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior In The Human Male. Nobody but other sex researchers, and those of us with an interest in fact checking the bigots, actually takes the trouble to go through its page after page after page after page of dry, meticulously documented tables. Which makes it an easy book for the bigots to to lie through their teeth about. In fact, Kinsey said no such thing as, happily, some of the comments to that Washington Post column are pointing out. What Kinsey discovered, was that 37 percent of all males had some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm, sometime between adolescence and old age.

Notice the difference? It’s not even 37 percent actually had sex when they were teenagers. But never mind that for a moment. If having had gay sex with a teenager, when you yourself were also a teenager makes you a pedophile (and yes, remarkably, some of them will insist even that is so), then tell me what percentage of the heterosexual population are also pedophiles? Is everyone who ever took a roll in the hay with their high school sweetheart a pedophile now? The line to register as a sex offender is going to be a tad long then. Maybe we can all just check a box off during the next census.

This kind of mendacity doesn’t happen accidentally and this one is actually quite old now. I saw them dispensing this back in the 80s, when all the kook pews had to vent on was the letters to the editor page and Usenet. I don’t know if Paul Cameron floated this one first but it has his touch written all over it. Call it an early example of how to employ real scientific research for a bit of deft hate mongering by omitting one small bit of information…like in this case, that Kinsey was talking about sexual experience over a lifetime (and wouldn’t you know, teenagers tend to have sex with other teenagers when their parents aren’t looking…). It’s been debunked so often that the instant Bill puts it out there people start filling the comments with its rebuttal. But you can see here, and it’s almost sad to look at, how the anti-gay industrial complex doggedly keeps all the old lies in their tool kit. Because ultimately, even when they don’t fool anyone at all anymore, repeating them still gives the faithful something to scream at the world, whenever it looks like the world isn’t listening to them anymore.