UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Michael D’Antonio

As in American politics, where every campaign season sees a revival of Republican race baiting, every twist and turn of the long-running Catholic sex abuse scandal brings another round of gay baiting. High churchmen and their supporters note that most victims are male, like the offending priests, and hastily conclude that the problem is homosexuality. Of course this claim ignores the fact that gay men are no more likely to abuse that heterosexual men, and avoids the fact that abuse is not about sexual relations but about criminal behavior enabled by the church itself.

The gay baiting technique was deployed most recently by Peter Turkson, a cardinal from Ghana, who has been much-mentioned as a successor to Benedict XVI. In an interview with CNN, Turkson blamed gays for the abuse scandal and said that Africa has not been affected by the crisis because…