On today's edition of nationally syndicated Public Radio International program To The Point, host Warren Olney chose to tackle the Penn State child rape scandal by devoting an entire show to the subject of whether or not gay and lesbian couples would make fit foster and adoptive parents.
What's the connection? The fact that Jerry Sandusky had "adopted many children and took in foster children" over the years. (Listen to it
http://feeds.kcrw.com/kcrw/tp">here.)
Right off the bat, this topic made me feel incredibly uneasy, for obvious reasons. Linking pedophilia to homosexuality is a tried-and-true tactic of bigots, just one example in a long line of history's unliked minorities being stereotyped as representing a threat to the majority's most vulnerable members. That the show spun the question in gays and lesbians' favor — i.e., "Shouldn't we reexamine attitudes towards allowing homosexuals access to children, seeing as how ‘macho'
Sandusky wound up defying stereotypes and raped them anyway?" — didn't really help matters. For starters, what does Sandusky's "macho-ness" have to do with the fact that he is a child predator? Where are these ridiculous "connections" being defined, except in Olney's own mind? That the debate was being had at all — and To The Point prides itself, to a fault, in offering ample airtime for every side of an "issue" to make its case — made it offensive. <snip> http://gawker.com/5858810/public-radio-host-uses-penn-state-case-to-debate-gays-fitness-as-parents">Gawker
I had to cut the article, but the long and the short of it is this: NPR introduced Jerry Cox, president of Arkansas' Family Council, a conservative group that unsuccessfully petitioned the state to pass a law that would prevent any child in the system from entering a foster home unless it was headed by "a married man and woman." The state shot it down, and the law was obviously bigoted, but it allowed him to speak, unchallenged and uninterrupted, for three minutes about how Sandusky was symptomatic of the problems with LGBT adoption. This despite the fact that Sandusky met what Cox--great name for a homophobic bigot!--met what he calls the "gold standard" for parenting: a mother and father in heterosexual marriage.
But that didn't stop NPR from feeding the fires. Yes, they had a gay couple from LA on to attest to their parenting abilities--and therefore present the issue with a sense of false balance (because homophobia and empirical facts about LGBTers ability to parent is "equal," apparently), but it was another example of NPR's repeated false equivalences, especially with LGBT issues. And it's a good reason to turn my back on NPR.
So, NPR, FUCK. YOU.