Olney apologizes for including gay parenting in Penn State show

During today's "To The Point" on KCRW and across the country, host Warren Olney read a comment regarding the controversy over his Friday show. That show had taken off from the foster parent scandal at Penn State to explore the shortage of parents available to needy kids, and included discussion of gay people as foster parents. The decision to link the two subjects — a sexual molestation scandal and gay foster parents — and to include anti-gay parent advocate Jerry Cox ticked off some listeners and pro-gay organizations. Here's what Warren said today:

Before we end today’s program, I want to apologize for something that happened on Friday’s “To the Point.” We reported that Penn State’s former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was allowed to care for foster children even though authorities knew he was suspected of child abuse.

With hundreds of thousands of troubled children in need, we thought it was a good time to point out that gay and lesbian couples are often prohibited from both fostering and adopting, even though they can provide loving homes.

But we failed to point out explicitly that pedophilia and homosexuality are not connected, and that led some listeners to think we were buying into an infamous falsehood.

Over the weekend, we received a lot of critical comments from people who thought that, by discussing both topics in one show, we had equated the two. We respect our listeners, and we want to respond. There is no connection between pedophilia and homosexuality, and we never intended to say or imply there is. But our failure to make that crucial distinction explicit was a serious oversight. We regret it, and we apologize.

Browsing through the comments on the KCRW site, I sense what sounds a lot like deliberate mis-reading of the show's content and slant. But I guess he wanted to apologize.