Publishing the journal Pediatrics, Carol Jenny and her colleagues used the misclassification error described above to arrive at the preposterous conclusion that a child's risk of being molested by a relative's "heterosexual" partner is "over 100 times greater than by someone who might be identifiable as being homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual."
The study was based upon review of medical records of children evaluated for sexual abuse. The authors reached their conclusion by making the default assumption that an alleged offender was "heterosexual" unless openly identified as gay or lesbian within the community. There is no better evidence of their intellectual dishonesty than that which is provided by their own words as they attempt to justify rejecting the offenders' actual behavior as the basis for classification by sexual orientation:
If sexual behavior was used as the means to determine sexual orientation, a detailed sexual history would be compared with a predetermined standard of what constitutes a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual orientation. This method leaves important questions unanswered. How does one classify a man who identifies himself as gay, and who leads a homosexual lifestyle, but whose only sexual behavior is limited to an occasional heterosexual contact;
A more important question emerges: how does one classify a "researcher" who would use the phrase "homosexual lifestyle" to describe a man who only has "heterosexual contact"? How is it that such tortured reasoning as this is even allowed to appear on the pages of journals presuming to be "scientific"? Jenny continues:
or the prisoner who has sex with men, sees himself as heterosexual, and who is defined as heterosexual in his community? These examples point out the difficulties in using a strictly behavioral definition of sexuality.
For researchers with no pro-gay ideological agendas, these difficulties do not exist. A male who chooses to have sexual contact with another male is either homosexual or bisexual. He is not heterosexual. Only those allied with the political endeavors of gay advocacy organizations perceive any "problems" in the obvious notion of classifying subjects on the basis of their desires and deeds instead of their self-chosen labels.
After rejecting classification based on behavior, Jenny concludes that "socially determined perception of how one presents himself to the community" should be the "standard by which we can determine the alleged offender's sexual identity." Using this "standard," 46 of the 47 alleged offenders counted in Jenny's study as males molesting boys were called "heterosexual." For most of them, Jenny attempted to justify this because each offender had a presumably sexual relationship with a woman. Nonetheless, on this question she admits to uncertainty:
The majority (222/269 = 82%) of children in this sample were suspected of being abused by a man or woman who was, or had been, in a heterosexual relationship with a relative of the child.
If these adult relationships were indeed sexual, then the males should have been classified as bisexual. It is also noteworthy that Jenny does not admit to the possibility that the male participants in these suspected “heterosexual” relationships were closet homosexuals feigning interest in women in order to gain access to their male children. She also assumed that all of the female offenders were heterosexual, unless they openly identified as lesbian in their communities.
Using these bizarre classification principles, Jenny and her colleagues were able to reach the conclusion that only two "identifiable" gay or lesbian individuals were offenders, and that children are at 100 times greater risk of being molested by heterosexuals.
Jenny, at least, was honest enough to bring her ideological motives out in the open while conducting this atrocity under the pretense of science. In the first two paragraphs of her article, she unabashedly expresses her concern about the fact that supporters of antigay legislation and referenda frequently assert that homosexuals are more likely to molest children than heterosexuals. Finding this problematic, Jenny and colleagues set out to prove otherwise, created a tortured classification scheme to facilitate their endeavor, and slaughtered the Western rational tradition along the way.
Michael P. Wright was graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a BA in political science (1969) and MA in sociology (1976). He has been published in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and AIDS Education and Prevention.