At its annual convention over the summer, the American Psychological Association (APA) endorsed homosexual marriage. The decision, made by the APA’s Council of Representatives, commits the organization to supporting gay marriage. Within the APA, it was the Working Group on Same-Sex Families and Relationships that developed the approved statement. This group is headed by Armand Cerbone, a Chicago psychologist.

William Donohue was quoted in an Associated Press story saying, “The only surprise in learning of this decision was why it took so long.” The AP story also quoted Donohue’s remark, “The politicization of homosexuality in this country is now all but out of control.”

We pointed out in a news release that the American Psychological Association was the same organization that in 1998 published the “Rind” study that took a kind and gentle look at man-boy sex. The study, which ignited public attention, said that “quite a few of the [molested] boys remembered their childhood sexual experiences positively.”

Now any organization that can essentially sanction pedophilia (its sister group, the American Psychiatric Association, last year toyed with the idea of removing pedophilia from its list of mental illnesses) is a sure bet to say it’s okay for Tom and Dick to get married. It has not yet said whether Tom, Dick and Harry should also be allowed to marry. No doubt that will be a matter of discussion next year.

The principal player behind this decision, Dr. Armand Cerbone, is not exactly a disinterested party. Cerbone and his gay partner, Michael, have been fundraisers for the Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Issues. So popular is Cerbone among Chicago homosexuals that he was nominated by the Advisory Council for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Issues of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations to be inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. He was inducted in 2003.

Cerbone is not the only disinterested party on the panel to give his blessings to gay marriage. Dr. Beverly Greene, for example, previously served as editor of Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Issues. Then there is Dr. Kristin Hancock, the person who developed the APA’s “Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients.” Dr. Lawrence A. Kurdek is another partisan, having served on the editorial board of Contemporary Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Psychology. But none of these so-called scientists is any match for Dr. Candace A. McCullough.

Dr. McCullough is a lesbian who has twice tried to produce a deaf child by artificial insemination, using sperm from a deaf donor. Why would she do this? Because McCullough and her lesbian lover, Sharon Duchesneau, are deaf, and they wanted a child who, as Duchesneau said, “is the same as us.” They got exactly what they wanted when Jehanne was born—she’s completely deaf. But they didn’t get the whole loaf the second time around: their son, Gauvin, is deaf in one ear and has severe hearing loss in the other.

In a sane society, such persons would be convicted of child abuse. But in the U.S. today, they are given influential positions to convince the masses of the wisdom of homosexual marriage.
It may be that no one but college students will be fooled by this game. But that is damage enough. These aren’t objective social scientists in pursuit of the truth. They are homosexual activists in pursuit of an agenda.

Look for the shrinks to sanction necrophilia—sex with the dead—before the decade is over.

In a syndicated column over the summer, gossip columnist Liz Smith said that the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky reminded her of the affair between John F. Kennedy and Judith Exner. Noting that Smith identified JFK’s lover as “the Catholic Judith Exner,” we commented as follows to the press:

“We’re disappointed that the lesbian Liz Smith didn’t identify the Jew Monica Lewinsky the way she did the Catholic Judith Exner.”

Days later Liz Smith said she needed to “explain” herself. What she meant, she said, was to say that “Judith was a devout and troubled believer who never failed to emphasize her pain in being denied the sacraments. I was trying to describe her as she often described herself to me.” Yeah, that’s real close to what she first said.

“No slur against Catholicism was intended,” she opined. Smith closed by saying, “We have all fallen short of glory.”

We trust she got the message.

The Church That Forgot Christ
By Jimmy Breslin. Free Press. 239 pp. $26
Reviewed by Kenneth Woodward

Ostensibly, this is a book about the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. But like everything Breslin writes, it is really about himself. Or rather, it is about him writing a book about clergy abuse. He wants us to know that he has lost faith in the church of his childhood. “I need no person wearing vestments to stand between God and me,” he proclaims up front, as if that were the clergy’s function. Still, he wants us to believe that writing this book has caused him considerable pain. Having been taught by nuns in grade school to believe everything the church says is true, he now finds he can believe nothing that the pope and the bishops have to say.

Who cares? Breslin has produced an incoherent rant that tells us nothing new about the abuse crisis, much that is demonstrably false and more than anyone would want to know about his loss of a very literal and childish faith. In chapters that read like a string of his newspaper columns, his rage erupts in spasms of paralyzing bathos. Among other self-indulgences, we get an imaginary interrogation of the pope, a running gag about consecrating Breslin bishop of his own church, and juvenile statements of outrageous scorn: “The church of Rome today cries ‘abortion!’ to distract us from crimes by all their pedophiles and pimps.” Abortion is very much on Breslin’s mind. In a typically implausible scene, for example, he reports a baptism in which the priest uses this intimate family occasion to denounce pro-abortion politicians. “We have been ordered that at every liturgical ceremony, we must make a statement against abortion,” the unnamed priest replies when questioned by one of Breslin’s friends. I’ve covered the Catholic church for as long as Breslin has been writing, and I don’t believe this ever happened. If a priest ever did make such a claim, a serious journalist would investigate whether such a policy existed, not simply tell a story. But there are no footnotes or identifiable sources in this screed, nothing that would suggest that Breslin has done much more than wing it.

On issues surrounding the clergy abuse scandal, Breslin is single-minded in his prosecutorial approach. Most of the cases he discusses have been reported better and at length by others. What he gives us is a columnist’s rewrite job. As a result, his book bristles with errors large and small.

For instance, Breslin consistently calls the predators “pedophiles,” a term used to describe adults who are sexually fixated on pre-pubescent children. But in nearly all cases the victims have been adolescents—a very different syndrome that requires different treatment for both the victims and the victimizers. And many are clearly cases of homosexual rape, a fact Breslin simply ignores.

As to causes, Breslin points to one—priestly celibacy—that he claims was suddenly forced on secular clergy by ecclesiastical fiat for purely economic reasons. In fact, celibacy was the Christian ideal for centuries before the church made it mandatory for secular clergy—a decision that owed as much to the influence of monasticism as it did to problems the medieval church had with married priests bequeathing church property to their children. Breslin apparently knows nothing of this history, still less of the numerous recent studies by Andrew Greeley and others showing no connection between celibacy and child abuse. In fact, most child abusers are men living with women.

Like any ordinary Catholic, Breslin is angry with bishops who transferred known predators and failed to protect the faithful and their children. But he makes no mention of priests falsely accused, including the famous case of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. But then Chicago is a long way from Breslinland. He mocks the bishops for relying on canon law: Clearly, he does not realize that church law—like civil law—grants the right of due process to priests accused of misconduct.

The abundant mistakes in this book suggest that Breslin long ago lost touch with the Catholic Church. He complains that the church’s anointing of the dying is no longer a sacrament. It still is, only the name has changed, from Extreme Unction to the Sacrament of the Sick and Dying. In outlining his new non-church Catholicism, he ascribes to St. Francis of Assisi a famous saying of St. Benedict—”to work and to pray”—and even gets the saying wrong. He dismisses Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who works in the “scheming” backrooms of the Vatican, as an Uncle Tom “who hasn’t been in Africa in twenty years.” The truth is that Arinze, an Ibo, spends every summer in his native city of Onitsha. Breslin is even careless in identifying close friends, describing writer Eugene Kennedy as a former Jesuit when in fact he was once a Maryknoll priest. And so it goes.

Sexual abuse is not the worst sin Breslin puts on exhibit. To paraphrase Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the entire book smells of mendacity.

Kenneth L. Woodward is a contributing editor of Newsweek. This article is reprinted from the August 1, 2004 edition of the Washington Post, with permission.