Letter to the Editor

In Herald columnist Wallace Alcorn’s Monday, Feb. 25, piece regarding gays in the Boy Scouts of America (Decision to allow gays in scouts up to BSA), he makes several glaring errors which need correcting. He states: “I have never recognized scouting as being anti-gay.” Really? If forbidding gay boys from joining this national organization isn’t an “anti-gay” act, then why has it become a national issue? The organization’s official position is to “not grant membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals.” (July 2012 News Release from National BSA Legal Issues Website). The BSA’S 1993 position statement reads: “We do not allow for the registration of avowed homosexuals as members or as leaders of the BSA.” (New York Times, July 17, 2012). Does Reverend Alcorn still believe, therefore, that the BSA is not anti-gay?

A more erroneous claim by the learned professor is in his seventh paragraph, in which he pontificates with his usual self-assuredness: “That scouting has a current problem with pedophiles abusing boys is consequent to the increasing permissiveness of our society. These pedophiles are, of course, gay” — whoops, hold it right there! Where is your evidence, Dr. Alcorn?

Social scientists since the 1980s have reported consistently that a large majority of male-to-male pedophilia is committed by heterosexual men, not homosexual. Dr. Gene Abel, who studied several hundred molesters found nearly 80 percent of adult male abusers were heterosexual. He explains this by saying: “Offenders attracted to boy victims typically reported that they were uninterested in or repulsed by adult homosexual relationships and found the young boys’ feminine characteristics and absence of secondary sexual characteristics appealing.” (Abel, G. (1988) Deposition, Infant). As a medical diagnosis, pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder and certainly not caused by “permissiveness of our society,” as Alcorn ridiculously purports.

Dr. Alcorn must realize that people in his position are held to a higher standard when it comes to dealing with the truth, simply because of his credentials as a minister with a Ph.D. and also as a weekly columnist; people tend to find such writers as more believable than the average Joe. Therefore, it behooves him to be accurate when he makes pronouncements that sound like truth, but are actually based on bias instead of authentic documentation.

In Alcorn’s Nov. 5, 2012, column (No lie in marriage amendment), he admits: “If a person can tell a lie with a straight face and no hesitation in his voice — and keep telling the lie despite the facts being known and even against valid contradiction, eventually people will begin to believe the lie even when they don’t recognize they do.” A good job of self-evaluation, Dr. Alcorn.

Dean Bishop

Austin