Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker opposes a proposed new policy by the Boy Scouts of America which allows openly gay adults to serve in leadership roles within the Scouts. He believes that discrimination against gay people who wish to serve in such roles “protected children and advanced Scout values,” according to a report by the Independent Journal Review.
Walker did not elaborate on why he believes that preventing gay people from serving as scoutmasters or in similar roles “protected children.” Perhaps he believes that gay scout leaders lack the ability to teach young boys how to pitch a tent that will protect them from inclement weather. Or maybe he fears that being gay prevents an individual from containing a campfire, raising a risk that scouts entrusted to a gay leader could be burned by a forest fire. It is likely, however, that Walker is echoing a common claim raised by anti-gay conservatives who support the Boy Scouts’ longstanding policy of discrimination — that gay scoutmasters will engage in “child sex abuse.”
In reality, the notion that being gay makes someone more likely to engage in child abuse is simply false. More than three decades ago, a review of the then-existing scientific literature concluded that “[t]he research to date all points to there being no significant relationship between a homosexual lifestyle and child molestation. There appears to be practically no reportage of sexual molestation of girls by lesbian adults, and the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.” More recent research has confirmed that “[t]he man who offends against prepubertal or immediately postpubertal boys is typically not sexually interested in older men or in women.”