Eugene Volokh has a new post on
the homosexuals-and-Hindus as schoolteachers issue. This is focussed just on the
argument that homosexuals are risky as teachers because they are more likely to molest
their students (as opposed to the moral examplar argument, or the parental preference
argument). Professor Volokh says,
This allegation that male homosexuals are unusually likely to engage in sex crimes
against children is a pretty serious charge, and it seems to me that such serious
charges ought to be supported by some serious evidence (and not just by anecdotes),
especially if they are to be made the basis of government decisions that may hurt the
completely law-abiding. Prof. Rasmusen unfortunately didn't cite any such evidence --
can anyone point me to it? Again, I'm asking for specific pointers to specific evidence,
and not just news stories about a few incidents of molestation, or general assumptions
about what "everyone knows."
I might note that Professor Volokh is a polite person, and asked me in an email if I
had any evidence before he wrote his post, and I didn't have any. (In fact, a post by Iain Murray that he
later linked to says that there is no really good statistical evidence either way. If I
come across any, I'll post on it.) Why do I believe it, then? I actually think that
it's in the category of "what everyone knows", a category useful as a starting point for
discussions if everybody really does believe it (see the Intro to Nozick's Philosophical
Investigations for a nice angle on that idea). But if someone doesn't believe it, then
we do have to go on to reasons why we believe that male homosexuals are more likely than
male heterosexuals to molest children.
Let's start with a similar question: why do I think a man is more likely than a woman to sexually molest a child (someone under the age of 18)? It's not because of scientific studies. Rather, it's through what I've learned through life from various sources, including personal experience, newspapers, and literature, about how women and men behave. The belief I hold is strong enough that I'd base behavior on it: I would take it into account, for example, in hiring a nanny for my children.
A large part of my belief relies on the idea that men are more tempted by children than women are. Women are attracted to older men, and are also less aggressive and more faithful to their spouses, if they have them (There is numerical evidence on these points, by the way, but it didn't take a 20th century sociologist to make the discoveries.)
How about homosexual males (I don't have much idea about lesbians.) I think they are attracted to people under age 18 more than heterosexual males are I seem to remember Robert Heinlein saying that age at which a woman's beauty peaks is 22. Of course, the later Heinlein was odd about sex, but 22 sounds reasonable. Men are attracted to a young but physically mature woman. But what is the ideal for homosexual men? For some it is certainly the mature, broad-shouldered, hairy 25-year-old. But my impression is that the 16-year-old beardless boy would attract more votes. And the 16- year-old beardless boy is not so different from an 8-year-old beardless boy as the 16- year-old girl is from the 8-year-old girl, so we should expect homosexuals to be far more tempted by 8- year-olds than heterosexuals are. I could check this by looking up a large enough sample of pornography---but I'd rather not. It is noteworthy that in ancient Greece, pederasty was actually the common form of homosexuality. The kind of sodomy they accepted was exactly the kind we still make illegal; the kind they would have thought strange (two middle-aged men) is the kind we have made legal. It is also noteworthy that there exists a North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) (which, oddly enough, has on its front page, "The War in Iraq is Still Wrong!") Is there any equivalent demand by heterosexuals for legal access to girls?
This is not statistical evidence, and perhaps not serious evidence, but public policy cannot be based on statistical evidence alone. See my August 25 post on post on William James's "The Will to Believe." Often---perhaps most often--- we have to make policy without having a scientific consensus (at least, not one backed up by numbers). We have to either let homosexuals be teachers or not. If the numbers are inconclusive, we can't just say, "We'll postpone the decision till more studies are done." In the meantime, we are either hiring homosexual teachers or not, so we have made a decision.
An example I had a discussion with John Donahue about is right-to-carry gun laws. Professor Donahue is part of a statistical literature (of whom John Lott is the best- known author) that tries to measure whether such laws increase crime, decrease crime, or leave it the same. Although I like both Johns, and although they come to opposite conclusions from the same data (a fact of much recent controversy), I disagree with both of them. I'm skeptical that the data really is good enough to allow for a conclusive result. It is very hard to statistically measure the magnitude of the effect on robbery rates even of things like the number of young men and the length of prison terms that we are sure have an influence in a certain direction. Crime is hard to measure, there are lags to the effect of the variables, and there are a lot of things that affect crime simultaneously, some of which we can't measure at all ("strength of consciences"). It 's worth doing the research-- I've worked on crime data myself in trying to look at < A HREF= "http://Pacioli.bus.indiana.edu/erasmuse/published/Rasmusen_96JLE.stig ma.pdf" > stigma-- but the numbers are not necessarily the best thing upon which to base policy. Rather, we use our theories and qualitative impressions. And this is one of James's "forced decisions"--- we either have to allow people to carry concealed weapons or not.
Similarly, we must decide whether to allow homosexuals to be priests, scout leaders, and schoolteachers without good regression studies of whether they are more likely than heterosexuals to go after the youngsters under their care. But enough on that subject for now.
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