A radio host from the American Family Association, a group opposing LGBT rights, recently connected the Penn State child abuse scandal to "homosexual recruitment," claiming that it was similar to pedophilia within the Catholic church.
"I think that the point I want to make with this is this sounds stunning, it sounds a little bit like the priest scandal, doesn’t it?" Sandy Rios said on her Friday radio program. "Where all of this stuff went on, where Catholic seminaries, it was just festering with homosexual activism—homosexual recruitment, I should say."
"A priest just turning the other way or engaging in it and not doing anything about it. So you might say, ‘well that’s shocking,’ but I think this is typical," she added.
In the wake of a report on the Penn State scandal released last week by former FBI director Louis Freeh, the American Family Association's Dianne Gramley also linked pedophilia to the LGBT community.
"Through all this we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Sandusky's victims were all young boys," Gramley told OneNewsNow. "We can't ignore the homosexual aspect of this. ... And through Graham Spanier's tenure as president, he has brought more and more homosexual-oriented programming and events to the campus than ever before."
While fringe conservatives often promote the myth that gay men and lesbians are more likely to molest children, experts say there is no evidence to support the claim.
According to the American Psychological Association, "homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are."
Listen to this audio from the American Family Association via Right Wing Watch, broadcast July 13, 2012.
