India health minister calls homosexuality disease (AP)

NEW DELHI – India's health minister has derided homosexuality as an unnatural "disease" from the West, drawing outrage Tuesday from activists who said the comments set back the country's campaign for gay rights and its fight against HIV.

The comments Monday by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad at a conference on HIV/AIDS in the Indian capital echoed a common refrain in the conservative South Asian nation that homosexuality is a Western import.

"Unfortunately this disease has come to our country too ... where a man has sex with another man, which is completely unnatural and should not happen, but does," Azad said.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi and a slew of government ministers were also present at the conference. There was no immediate comment from the health ministry, and the prime minister's office refused to discuss the Azad's remarks.

Anjali Gopalan, who heads the NAZ Foundation, a rights group that works with HIV positive people and promotes equal rights for homosexuals, said Azad's comments were deeply troubling coming from the health minister of a country fighting a tough battle against HIV infections.

"These comments help no cause. It's definitely not going to help in our fight against HIV," she told The Associated Press.

Roughly 2.5 million Indians have HIV, making it the country with the largest number of people living with the virus in Asia.

Experts say the marginalization of gay people keeps them isolated and makes it harder for HIV/AIDS awareness messages to reach them.

"If you're not going to invest in community building then gay people will continue to be marginalized," Gopalan said.

In 2009, the Delhi High Court struck down a colonial era law — Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — that made sex between people of the same gender punishable by up to 10 years in prison. While actual criminal prosecutions were rare, the law was frequently used to harass people.

The court ruling was noteworthy in a country where even heterosexual sex is rarely discussed openly.

Over the last decade homosexuals have slowly gained a degree of acceptance in a few parts of India, especially its big cities. Many bars have gay nights, and some high-profile Bollywood films have dealt with gay issues. The last two years have also seen large gay pride parades in New Delhi and other big cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata.

Still, being gay remains deeply taboo in most of the country, and many homosexuals hide their sexual orientation from friends and families.

"How can the health minister say something so unscientific and irrational?" Nitin Karani, a gay rights activist told a television new channel. "He needs to apologize immediately or he needs to go."

This is not the first time Azad's words have embarrassed the government.

A few years ago, he suggested Indians watch more late night television instead of having sex as a means to stem population growth in the nation of 1.2 billion people.

Study: Homosexuality, celibacy didn't cause abuse (AP)

WASHINGTON – Researchers commissioned by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to analyze the pattern of clergy sex abuse so dioceses could better identify offenders have concluded that homosexuality, celibacy and an all-male priesthood did not cause the scandal.

The study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York instead said that the problem was largely the result of poor seminary training and insufficient emotional support for men ordained in the 1940s and 1950s, who were not able to withstand the social upheaval they confronted as pastors in the 1960s. Crime and other deviant behavior increased overall in the United States during this period, when the rate of abuse by priests was climbing.

"The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in society generally," the report's authors said. "Factors that were invariant during the time period addressed, such as celibacy, were not responsible for the increase or decline in abuse cases over this time."

Victims' groups dismissed the report as an attempt to focus blame for the scandal on priests, instead of on bishops who allowed offenders to stay in ministry without warning parents or police. "They want us to fixate on abusive priests, not callous bishops," the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

The report, set to be released Wednesday, is the third study commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, when the abuse crisis erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston and caused what church leaders have called the deepest crisis in American Catholicism. A person close to the bishops provided an early copy to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity since the person was not authorized to release the information.

The scandal has cost U.S. dioceses nearly $3 billion and has spread to Europe and beyond. Just this week, Vatican officials instructed bishops worldwide to develop discipline policies for abusive priests within a year.

The debate over why priest-abusers were kept in ministry in the U.S. often fell along ideological lines. Liberals blamed mandatory celibacy or the lack of women in the church hierarchy, while conservatives blamed gay priests, since the overwhelming majority of known victims were boys.

The John Jay researchers, however, said that the offenders chose to victimize boys mainly because clergy had greater access to them. The study notes that gay men began enrolling in seminaries in larger numbers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the rate of abuse was declining.

The authors, in findings first reported by Religion News Service, said they found "no single cause" of child sex abuse by priests and no "psychological characteristics" or "developmental histories" that distinguished guilty priests from clergy who did not molest children.

Although the victims studied by the researchers were all minors, the authors said only a tiny percentage of accused priests — less than 5 percent — could be technically defined as pedophiles. The John Jay researchers define pedophile as an adult with an intense sexual attraction to prepubescent children. However, victim advocates have disputed that classification by age, since boys ages 10 to 14 were the largest group of known victims, which could include children who had not yet gone through adolescence. The American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia as attraction to children, usually age 13 or younger.

According to previous studies conducted by John Jay and other surveys commissioned by the bishops, U.S. dioceses have received abuse claims from more than 15,700 people against about 6,000 clerics since 1950. Abuse cases peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society general gained awareness about molestation and its impact on children, the study said.

Dioceses reported that nearly all of the allegations they received were reported after 2002 in response to intense news coverage of the problem and after child victims gained courage as adults to come forward. John Jay researchers said this means that the bishops were not aware of the true scope of the problem until then, an assertion victims' groups say is naive.

Critics argue the study cannot be trusted since the raw data was provided by the bishops.

In February, a Philadelphia grand jury alleged that the local archdiocese kept 37 credibly accused clergy in public ministry, despite repeated pledges by the nation's bishops that no offenders would stay on duty. In response, Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali suspended about two dozen clergy and hired a former prosecutor to review the cases. Ana Maria Catanzaro, the head of the Philadelphia review board, which was formed to advise bishops on abuse cases, said last week that the archdiocese had "failed miserably at being open and transparent" and had kept some cases from the board.

"What Philadelphia does is reveal the flaws in the process," said Ann Barrett Doyle of the advocacy group BishopAccountability.org, which is compiling a public database of all records related to the scandal.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the bishops' conference, said church leaders fully cooperated with the $1.8 million study, which was funded by the bishops, Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. Dioceses have spent tens of millions of dollars since 2002 on child safety programs that include background checks for people who work with children and training for adults and children to identify abuse.

"John Jay was chosen to do the study because of its independence from the church," Walsh said. "John Jay was free to consult whomever they wanted and they did so."