Jophiel wrote:
Whatever. This would be like arguing with your racist uncle; not fruitful nor amusing. Have fun being... whatever.
And by racist, you mean someone who argues that unfair discrimination against minority groups is wrong, but that those same minority groups using their minority status as a crutch for socio-political gain is wrong as well and that both groups represent part of the problem as it exists today. Because that's such a one sided and unfair assessment!
What I was trying to say (and perhaps didn't do a good job saying) was that the cycle of young/old gay sexual interaction is absolutely initially caused by anti-gay social pressures which cause teens to conceal their sexual orientation and be afraid to experiment with their peers as heterosexual teens do. This is why the percentage of gay men who's first sexual experience as a teen is abnormally more likely to be with an adult male instead of someone their own age when compared to heterosexual males (and females for that matter). But this is something the gay community doesn't like to talk about (for obvious reasons).
That cycle is very very similar to that of pre-teen boys and older men as well, and unfortunately the same mechanisms used to conceal the former also tend to conceal the latter (even if unintentionally). And the same social pressures apply as well. In the mind of someone like Sandusky, he's not doing anything more wrong than a gay man in his early 20s picking up a 15 year old runaway and introducing them to the lifestyle. It's just a matter of degrees unfortunately. Degrees that really ought to matter to us a hell of a lot, but because of the earlier mentioned tendency for data about sex with minors to be conflated for a variety of political reasons, we make it harder to pick out the truly problematic cases (like this one).
Put another way, the gay community's unwillingness to accept that there's any problem at all with their own actions and behaviors makes it easier for people like Sandusky to rationalize what they're doing *and* for others to possibly look the other way. And while I certainly heap a large helping of blame on the anti-gay social pressures out there which help such things along, we all know about those pressures already. Simply saying "those ***** haters really ought to stop making gay teens afraid to come out", while true, only addresses part of the problem and isn't really anything new. We can all sit around blaming one "side" of the issue, but that's not going to solve everything. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I look at the other aspects of the issue as well, and I'm going to point out the parts of the issue which most people don't look at. Because IMO we tend to over focus on the simple and easy positions to take, and a lot of times some equally important parts get lost in the discussion.