I TRUST that any responsible editor of a reputable publication would be deeply disturbed if that publication was being used as a medium to vilify a vulnerable group by the use of bogus “statistics”, and discredited claims.  Thus, if someone sent you a lengthy letter “proving” that black people had smaller brains than white people, or that the Holocaust never happened, and backed it

up with misrepresented studies, pseudo-scholarly articles that have since been retracted, and discredited sources known to be unreliable, you would rightly reject it.
But when the target is homosexuals, and the author your frequent contributor, that obsessive letter-writer from Ontario Paul Kokoski, such vile material is accepted without comment.  I refer to his lengthy contribution “Homosexuality is a troubling moral and social phenomenon” on June 2.  As an internet search will reveal, Kokoski has been peddling this item, or variants thereof, all over the internet for months now.
I hope you will permit me to explain why nothing he says can be trusted, so that you and your readers will be forewarned next time they come across one of his hate-filled diatribes.
After initial fear-mongering about homosexuality, and the victim narrative about poor homophobic Christians finding it harder to express their prejudice, Kokoski takes Francis Collins out of context.  Collin has at least twice complained about his words on genetics and sexuality being misused by homophobes.  He said that homosexuality is not “hardwired” but there is still a genetic component, with genes predisposing a person to be gay, but not predetermining it.
Dr Jeffrey Sattinover, whom Kokoski endlessly refers to, is regarded as fringe and out of date by reputable workers in human sexuality.  Outside of the religious right, he has little credibility, and it is difficult to take seriously his notion of a professional body like the APA changing its opinion because of pressure from a few noisy activists.  Besides, all professional bodies in the developed nations have long stopped listing homosexuality as a disorder, not just the APA.

The 1992 study Kokoski claims showed that “homosexual men are three times more likely than straight men to engage in paedophilia” showed nothing of the sort.  In fact, on p.41 of the study, the authors, Drs Wilson & Freund dismissed this idea as a “myth”.  In Freund’s obituary, Wilson reported how distressed Freund was that their work was misrepresented in this way and he said bluntly that the notion that gay men are more likely to molest children “was not a finding of our research, period”.
Kokoski’s claim that: “A 1988 study of 229 convicted child molesters published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour found that 86% of paedophiles described themselves as homosexual or bisexual” is false.  It was 86 % of those who had offended against boys who so described themselves, but most had offended against girls.  As only 63 had offended against boys, the correct figure should be 23.6 %.  But even then it was a reference to their preferred gender of child, and says nothing about their interest (if any) in adults.  For all we know they could have been enthusiastic heterosexual Cassanovas who also abused boys.  The expression “lying with statistics” comes to mind.
Kokoski cites a study published in 2000 as finding that “among paedophiles the rate of homosexual attraction is six to 20 times higher than among the male population generally”.  So, male paedophiles are more likely to be attracted to boys than men are to other men.  So what?  The idea that people with same-sex adult attraction are more likely to be paedophiles does not follow.  It is a non-sequitur.  For someone with a philosophy degree. Mr Kokoski’s logic is very sloppy.
Kokoski quotes controversial psychiatrist Fitzgibbons as saying that, “Every priest whom I treated who was involved with children sexually had previously been involved in adult homosexual relationships.”  Now I could point out that Fitzgibbons has been caught misrepresenting research, and his impartiality and competence were cast in doubt when he declared that Fr. Shawn Ratigan was “not a paedophile” shortly before Ratigan was convicted of making indecent photos of girls as young as 2.  But instead I’ll just quote the 2011 official report by John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which was commissioned by the Catholic Church: “The data do not support a finding that homosexual identity and/or preordination same-sex sexual behaviour are significant risk factors for the sexual abuse of minors” (p.64).
Kokoski attributes a claim “that 37% of all gay men admitted to having sex with children under 17 years of age” to Alfred Kinsey.  But this comes after telling us that Kinsey’s “data was fraudulently skewered by blatant population sampling bias and the badgering, and even bribing, of its imprisoned and largely otherwise institutionalised subjects.”  If Kinsey’s work is that bad, why does Kokoski cite it?
He claims: “Gay activists Jay and Young also reported in 1979 that 23% of gay men preyed on adolescent or younger boys” but Kokoski does not tell us that Jay and Young’s 16 page questionnaire attracted a mere 1% response rate, and nearly half of those respondents were subscribers to a porn magazine.  A more biased data set would be hard to come across.  As the authors conceded, they did not have “a scientific or representative sample of lesbians and gay men”.  A caveat overlooked by Kokoski.
Gay men are no more likely to abuse boys than heterosexual men.  When responses to erotic stimuli are objectively measured it is found that gay men are no more aroused by underaged boys than straight men are by underaged girls (Journal of Sex Research, 26(1), 1989, p. 107-117).  A 1978 study of 175 child sex offenders in Massachusetts found not a single gay man in the group (Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 7(3), 1978, p. 175-181).  A review of 269 cases of molestation in Denver found only two of the perpetrators that could be identified as possibly gay or lesbian (Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 18(1), 1992, p. 34-43).  Researchers in the field are agreed that there is no such link, but hate literature abounds in which bogus “studies” are cited, or legitimate ones misrepresented, to portray gays as a threat to children.  It is all disturbingly reminiscent of the old libel that Jews sacrificed children, now it is gays abuse them.
Kokoski cites Michelle Cretella of the discredited and bogus outfit the American College of Paediatricians.  When this roughly 200-strong fringe group hiding behind a pretentious name, set up a website and sent out their homophobic hate-literature to thousands of USA schools in 2010, they were promptly denounced for multiple distortions and misrepresentations of the scientific literature on sexuality, and the 60,000 strong professional body, the American Academy of Paediatrics issued a statement distancing itself from its pretentious near namesake and accusing it of ignoring the science.
Kokoski also misrepresents the Laumann report, a copy of which I have and it does not say what he claims it does.  In fact, the words Kokoski uses to misrepresent it are not even his own, but are copied from an article by the aforementioned Jeffrey Satinover.
Kokoski gets it wrong again when he claims that “Social Science Research” is the “most prestigious peer reviewed publication of its kind”.  No, it is ranked 177th.  But Kokoski never has been one to let the truth get in the way of his hateful campaign against gay people.  His mendacity continues with the statistics he cites from that journal even though the paper they came from was retracted in the November issue because it was so badly flawed as to invalidate its conclusions.
Kokoski asserts that statistics “which compare homosexuals with ethnic minorities exposed to racism” indicate that increased rates of psychiatric problems are not due to discrimination, but does not reveal his source.  It does not stand up anyway as gays face difficulties not encountered by racial minorities.  Racial minorities do experience not face rejection by their own families, by their faith communities, or face discrimination enshrined in law.  Gays encounter all these difficulties.  Anyone trying the “it can’t be homophobia” argument by comparison with racism does not understand what it is like to be gay.

It is bad enough that Kokoski should peddle such malicious nonsense in every newspaper, in print or on-line, that will accept it, but he actually knows it is all bogus.  I have pointed his falsehoods and distortions out to him over and over again, yet still he repeats them.  What Kokoski is doing is despicable, disgusting and dishonest.  I hope that, whatever your readers think of homosexuality, they will at least value truth and recognise Kokoski’s poison for what it is: hate speech.