Sodomists Need Not Appply

If you have a large organization rocked by a scandal where a number of men have been found to have been sodomizing teenaged boys, a rather obvious first step towards fixing this would be to try to screen out men who'd be more likely to desire sex with teenaged boys. That seems just so sensible as to defy further discussion....Read more

Au contraire. The Vatican is proposing to do just that and the reaction is anything but ho-hum.
Objections on the grounds of "fairness" are prominent:

"Do you want to work for an organization that barely tolerates your existence and says that people like you can no longer be accepted?" asked one New York priest who described himself as homosexual and chaste. "What kind of self-hatred is necessary to continue in a place like that?"
Priests rail at Vatican's upcoming ban on gays - Newsday.

And the presumed irrelevancy is another common theme:

Reliable studies show that pedophiles (those adults who sexually abuse children) are overwhelmingly heterosexual. In fact, homosexuals are statistically underrepresented as those who sexually abuse children.
Letter to the editor - New York Times

This latter claim is often made, and never are any of these allegedly "reliable" studies ever actually referenced. If you Google on "pedophilia homosexuality" you will find 266,000 links most of it clearly agenda driven. Here's where Your Lying Eyes (figuratively, I hope) should rule the day, which in this case requires an "Affirmed" to the proposition: "A homosexual man is more likely to engage in sexual activity with a teenaged boy than a heterosexual man."

But, BUT (yes, that's a big but, not to be confused with this), the Roman Catholic priesthood presents a little twist that does confuse things some: celibacy. What celibacy does is remove normal relations with women from the mix, and that results in a rather unstable brew.

A critical distinction needs to be made between homosexual behavior and homosexuality itself - i.e., gayness. When deprived of women, while at sea or in prison, for example, otherwise heterosexual men will resort to homosexual behavior (in particular the strong will prey upon the weak). What's remarkable about gay men is not that they will have sex with men - under the right (i.e., wrong) circumstances, men are capable of having sex with anyone or anything - but that they do not want to have sex with women under any circumstances.

In the ancient world, man-boy couplings were not uncommon, and it is not hard to imagine that in those days common adult women might not have been the most attractive creatures to have walked the earth. Teenaged girls, on the other hand, were the most valuable treasures a man could own, and thus not generally available. Steve Sailer has pointed out that it was Christianity's great achievement to have eliminated much of this willful homosexual behavior. "The triumph of Jerusalem over Athens came both by negative sanctions on vice but also by the increased status of women under Christianity, which made companionate marriage the ideal."

But for priests in today's church, companionate marriage is not the ideal - and so one wonders: are the priests who fondle boys gay or are they straight men excercizing a time-"honored" alternative to sex with women? How ironic that the very institution most responsible for eliminating sodomy-as-choice could be still encouraging it among its own clergy.