In an article oddly titled First Person – Homosexuality, child sexual abuse, and foster care, Alan Sears, CEO of the Alliance Defense Fund, is riling up the Baptists again with fear mongering about letting gay people adopt. The argument? That gay foster parents are more likely to sexually abuse children.

Here’s how he comes by this:

The results of an Illinois study released in March revealed that 34 percent of child sexual abuse cases by foster parents in the state were committed against children that were the same sex as their molesters.

He quotes Concerned Woman Robert Knight:

“Since one-third to one-half of all child molestations are committed by men against boys, and homosexual men comprise less than 2 percent of the population, this means that the ratio of child molesters among homosexuals is far, far higher than among the rest of the population.”

And, of course, the political outrage:

When pressed, an agency official noted DCFS classifies potential foster and adoptive parents only on their marital status and that “there is no law that says a gay or lesbian person cannot adopt” in Illinois.

Sounds horrible, right? The logical thing would be to ban gay foster parents, right?

Except for one thing. No one has told us if a SINGLE ONE of those kids was molested by an openly gay person. And, rest assured that if there were any known cases of openly gay people molesting foster kids, any where, at any time, AgapePress and Baptist News would have told us in vivid detail.

It is a given that in the vast majority of cases (if not all) in which foster children were molested, it was by a “happily married” person. I doubt that a single case would have been eliminated by banning gay foster parents. In fact, considering the level of screening and follow-up that gay people go through, placing a foster kid with a gay person lowers the odds of molestation.

And Alan Sears and Robert Knight know it. And don’t care.

It’s but yet another example of the deceit propagated by the Christian right.

Categorized in: