The tension was, of course, about how the bishops could and should address the recent child sex abuse scandals. In the past few months, the Catholic church has been rocked to its core by revelation after revelation that priests were having unscrupulous sexual encounters with minors.

While this was disturbing to Catholics, what was most upsetting to the public, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, were the lengths to which church leaders had gone to cover up abuse cases. For many, the obfuscation of the crimes was more upsetting and maddening than the fact that such crimes took place.

Initially, it seemed as if the church refused to learn its lesson, however. Rather than take responsibility for the misbehavior of its priests, as well as for the shameless cover-ups, the church hierarchy-in a trail leading all the way to Rome-instead chose to once again try to shrug its responsibility and find a convenient scapegoat to blame for its problems.

It was no surprise that the church’s first tactic was to try to blame the scandal point-blank on the gay priests in its ranks. Quite a few bishops adopted the approach either directly or indirectly-such as Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, who banned gay men from entering any seminary under his jurisdiction. But it was clear that the strategy of scapegoating gay priests had the full blessing of top officials all the way up to the Pope when Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told The New York Times that one element to solving the problem was to discover and dismiss all gay priests.

However, the Catholic church was in for a big surprise. Amazingly, ordinary Catholics refused to buy the line that the sex abuse problem was the making of gay men.

I first was sitting at the dining room table in my lover’s mother’s house when I first understood just how powerful Catholic public sentiment was on this matter.

My lover’s mother is a devout Catholic. She goes to Mass six days a week. She also holds fairly conservative political viewpoints. When my lover, Darryl, first told his devout mother he was gay, her response was, “Why are you telling me this? Go see a priest.”

Of course, at the time, she didn’t realize just how many priests are gay. She thought that counseling and prayer could change her son.

On many occasions over the years, her strongly held Catholic opinions about homosexuality have been cause for great strife in her relationship with her son, and with me. So I cringed when the topic of the sex scandals and gay priests came up around the dining room table.

As usual, Darryl’s mother was quick to voice her strongly held opinion. “What do you think of that?” she said in disgust. I figured her prior disdain for homosexuality was about to resurface. But I was dead wrong. “The two don’t have anything to do with each other,” she said matter-of-factly, and delivered a short tirade against the church’s continuing attempts to evade responsibility for the misdeeds of its priests.

I knew then that, amazingly, gay people in America had made incredible strides if my lover’s 68-year-old, politically conservative, devout Catholic mother wasn’t buying the Vatican’s it-was-the-gays-fault argument.

American Catholics bishops must have heard the words of my lover’s mother repeated a zillion times over around the country. Before the conference in Dallas, they clearly floated past American Catholics the trial balloon of blaming gays. Much to their credit, average Catholics refused to accept this flimsy pretext as an excuse for the church’s abysmal record on abuse and cover-ups.

I strongly believe the widespread rejection by the vast majority of Catholics of the “let’s blame the gays” approach had a huge influence over the official response by the bishops at their Dallas conference.

Though Bishop Fabian Brusketwitz of Nebraska, did try to include an amendment that targeted gays, the bishops overwhelmingly rejected it. In the end, the official statement-called the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People-that the 284 bishops adopted in Dallas made no link or mention whatsoever between homosexuality and child sex abuse.

For gay and lesbian activists expecting a possible showdown in Dallas, the bishops’ statement was a clear victory.

However, that doesn’t mean that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people should consider the subject closed. Church officials never retracted the earlier statements that were made linking homosexuality and child abuse. Furthermore, right wing bishops still would like to make the connection, and are far from giving up the fight to demonize gay priests and marginalize gay and lesbian Catholics.

The most immediate danger, though, can still come from Rome. The Vatican is set to send “inspectors” to all American seminaries, ostensibly to ensure that they are following the strict teachings of the Catholic church. But many gay and lesbian activists fear that sending the inspectors is simply a cloaked way to discover and eject gay priests.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people should not delude themselves into believing this unexpected victory at the bishops’ conference means the end to witch hunts and scapegoating of gay people in general, and gay priests in particular.