Bill Donohue comments on the report released today on sexual abuse at Horace Mann School, an elite private school in New York City:
The Horace Mann sexual abuse scandal has much in common with the one in the Catholic Church: a) the abuse took place mostly between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s b) little or nothing was done about it c) most of the abusers were gay and d) the gay role was discounted.
Horace Mann started as a co-ed elementary and secondary school but in the 1920s it became a high school for boys; girls were readmitted in 1975, after most of the abuse had occurred. The graph on p. 33 shows that sexual abuse thrived during the 1970s, the heyday of the sexual revolution.
Just as the John Jay Study on priests tried hard to deny the role of homosexuals in the scandal—despite clear evidence to the contrary—the Horace Mann report strains to slight the role of gays. For example, it says on p. 6 that the abusers were both men and women, but this is deceiving: none of the case studies involve a female and only one of the abusers had sex with a female.
Nine case studies of molesting teachers are presented, and in the account of one of them, R. Inslee Clark, another molester is identified. Of the ten molesters, nine had sex with teenage boys. Yet the gay role is never cited.
Marc Fisher is a reporter for the Washington Post and an alumnus of Horace Mann. He is quoted today saying that the school was “something of a refuge for gay teachers.” He explains that “The Seventies were a time when sexual rules fell away in New York, and some teachers took advantage of the new freedoms, often inviting boys to spend weekends at their homes….” He calls them “pedophiles.”
The “some teachers” he is talking about are gay. Fact check: High school teenage boys are not victimized by pedophiles—they are victimized by gays. It’s time to stop the cover-up.
