John Gretchen's April 9 letter says allowing Catholic priests to wed would "almost end child molestation." Really?

Comments like that show a complete lack of understanding of the problem of child sexual abuse in our culture and in the Catholic Church in paricular. We all agree clergy abuse in the Church was horrific and inexcusable, and the guilty priests should perish in prison.

However, sexual abuse of minors is not isolated to the Catholic Church, and allowing priests to marry would not have prevented the abuse. I cite two reasons for this: First, the root cause of the problem is our oversexualized culture, not priestly celibacy, and, second, 81 percent of the cases of abuse in the Catholic Church were perpetrated by homosexual predators, not heterosexual priests.

I'll address the second reason first.

According to research published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 81 percent of clergy abuse cases were perpetrated by priests who molested boys at or above the age of puberty. The study's authors concluded the scandal was mostly caused by "homosexual" predators in the priesthood, not pedophiles and not ephebophiles. This doesn't make the abuse any less horrific, only factual.

The liberal, pro-homosexual media elite have orchestrated a virtual "black out" of information regarding the culpability of homosexuals in the sexual abuse of minors. The favored term of the New York Times, et. al., is "pedophile priests" to describe clergy who molested young teenagers. It's a misnomer. Allowing married priests would not curb the sexual aggressiveness of men who prey on teenage boys.

While the Church scandals were characterized by homosexual abuse, sexual abuse in our country is by no means isolated to the Catholic Church. Some facts:

In the U.S., there are 39 million cases of