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Gay rights activist who ran pedophile ring gets life sentence

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The story originally broke in May 2009. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Here’s Sky News on the initial arrests.

Excerpt:

Eight men in a Scottish paedophile ring have been found guilty of a series of “horrific” sex offences against children and babies.

[…]Two of the men – convicted sex offender Neil Strachan and gay rights campaigner James Rennie – were convicted of sex attacks on children.

Strachan, 41, and Rennie, 38, both from Edinburgh, were also found guilty of conspiring to abuse youngsters, as were three other members of the gang.

[…]The jury found Rennie, the former chief of LGBT Youth Scotland, an organisation dedicated to helping young gay people, guilty of molesting a young boy over more than four years.

The child was just three months old when the abuse began.

The updated story from October describes the sentences handed down.

Here is the story from the London Times.

Excerpt:

The mother of a six-year-old boy who was subjected to what a judge described as “truly appalling” abuse from a man she had regarded as a close friend said yesterday that her child had been “shaped and moulded” for life by the experience.

Welcoming the life sentences passed on James Rennie and Neil Strachan, the woman said that she had moved on from feelings of anger. “My focus is about my son, about how to support him and loving him for who he is. And who he is now has been shaped and moulded by what’s gone on.”

Rennie 38, the former chief executive of a gay youth organisation, was responsible for “a colossal breach of trust”, Lord Bannatyne said at the High Court in Edinburgh. He had abused the boy — identified as Child F — almost from birth to the age of four years. He distributed images and films of his attacks to a gang of seven other men.

Please pray for the victims and their families.

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Polemics

Why do people oppose same-sex marriage?

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UPDATE: The research paper seems to have expired from the FRC web site, but you can see the whole thing here.

I found this research paper at the Family Research Council web site. The paper compares same-sex couples and heterosexual married couples, in the following ways:

  • relationship duration
  • monogamy vs. promiscuity
  • relationship commitment
  • number of children being raised
  • health risks
  • rates of intimate partner violence

Are there really significant differences between the two arrangements? Let’s take a look at the some of the data.

Relationship duration

% of Marriages Remaining Intact
% of Marriages Remaining Intact

Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2001)

Length of Current Homosexual Relationship
Length of Current Homosexual Relationship

Source: 2003-2004 Gay/Lesbian Consumer Online Census

Monogamy vs Promiscuity

% Reporting Sexual Fidelity
% Reporting Sexual Fidelity

Sources:Laumann, The Social Organization of Sexuality, 216; McWhirter and Mattison, The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop (1984): 252-253; Wiederman, “Extramarital Sex,” 170.

Rates of intimate partner violence

Intimate Partner Violence
Intimate Partner Violence

Sources: “Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence,” U.S. Department of Justice: Office of Justice Programs: 30; “Intimate Partner Violence,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report:11.

Conclusion

Marriage is a relationship that has a specific purpose. That purpose is to bind together two opposite natures and to produce children that are biologically linked to the parents. The children gain the benefits of being parented by the two different natures, so they get two perspectives. The fact that the children are genetically linked to two parents helps to ensure the stability of the commitment, as we see in the animal kingdom where animals protect their young.

The goal of marriage is not to increase the happiness of the adults, or to “recognize” the love of adults. The goal of marriage is have two people enter into a relationship where they understand that it is not about adults being fulfilled. Marriage is about people having a goal of raising children, which are tremendously stressful to raise. Marriage requires self-denial and sacrifice in order to raise those children – that is the main point of it. It also requires fidelity and chastity, so that the environment is kept stable for the children over a long period of time.

Children benefit from the stability that is more common in traditional marriages than it is in other arrangements, including heterosexual co-habitation which is similarly unstable (50% greater chance of divorce, more domestic violence, etc.). Therefore, it is important to keep the concept of marriage separate from other kinds of relationships so that the focus on commitment for the sake of the children is clear to those who contemplate marriage. Society needs to give special recognition to married couples, in view of their child-focused commitment.

I apologize in advance if this post causes anyone any harm or distress, I am just trying to explain why people have that opinion. They could be wrong, but that is the case they make. Obviously, married couples fall short of the goal, but that is their goal.

Further study

Two much bigger challenges to marriage are big-government socialism and especially no-fault divorce. I also wrote about same-sex marriage and co-habitation before, in the context of European states like Sweden and Norway.

You may also be interested in a recent post about whether homosexuality is caused by a “gay gene”.