Posted on 07/09/2004 10:57:13 PM PDT by familyop
Recent findings that gays can go straight radically alters the debate on gay marriage, says David van Gend.
The Titanic of Gay Rights, leaving all in its wake, is about to founder on a large and immovable fact.
My concern is not for the glamorous first-class passengers - the prominent doctors and judges - or for the Mardi Gras exhibitionists leering and lurching across the deck, but for the unknown homosexuals down in their lonely cabins feeling sick.
These are the ones who want to stop the ship and get off. The homosexuals who do not want to be homosexual, but who are told that change is impossible, and that any talk of change is disloyal to the Gay crew, even mutinous.
The iceberg of clinical fact looming up in the dark is this: that homosexuals who want to become heterosexual can and do change, as authoritative medical research has now demonstrated.
Best news
Given the will, and skilled therapy, there can be an end to the nightmare of same-sex attraction. That is the best news for our heartsick friends down below deck, but it is doom for the complacent triumphalists of the Gay Titanic.
Doom for the tall tale that being gay is like being black, an immutable inborn identity. Doom therefore, in the debate on gay marriage, to false analogies with apartheid and Aborigines, since blacks cannot stop being blacks, but gays can stop being gay.
Homosexuality emerges in its truer light, not as a minority "genetic identity" but as a complex conditioned behaviour, which can and does change.
As to the exact causes of homosexuality, the medical jury is still out. But the baseless claim, promoted by Justice Michael Kirby and others, that gays are just born that way, is given no support by the American Psychiatric Association. Their Fact Sheet on Sexual Orientation (2000) sums it up: "There are no replicated scientific studies supporting any specific biological etiology for homosexuality".
Ability to change
As to the ability for homosexuals to change, late last year a remarkable research paper was published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour by one of America's senior psychiatrists, Dr Robert Spitzer.
Significantly, this was the same Spitzer whose reforming zeal helped delete homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's manual of mental disorders back in 1973. Now he has published a detailed review of "200 Participants Reporting a Change from Homosexual to Heterosexual Orientation". He writes of his research:
"Although initially sceptical, in the course of the study, the author became convinced of the possibility of change in some gay men and lesbians".
In his structured analysis of homosexuals who claimed to have changed their orientation through "reparative therapy", he concluded that the therapy had been genuinely effective: that "almost all of the participants reported substantial changes in the core aspects of sexual orientation, not merely overt behaviour".
Against critics who say that attempts to change sexual orientation can cause emotional harm to homosexuals, he notes: "For the participants in our study, there was no evidence of harm".
So our seasick travellers down below in the Titanic can take heart: the desire to shake off sexual disorientation can be, in this eminent and gay-friendly doctor's opinion, "a rational, self-directed goal", and for some it can be successful.
To our shame, some of these enforcers are health professionals. To them Spitzer says:
"Mental health professionals should stop moving in the direction of banning therapy that has as its goal a change in sexual orientation. Many patients can make a rational choice to work toward developing their heterosexual potential and minimising their unwanted homosexual attractions."
Gay activist Rodney Croome thinks back to the Aborigines and accuses the Prime Minister, who opposes same-sex marriage, of denying gays "the full humanity of a disadvantaged group".
"Apartheid"
Former AMA President Dr Kerryn Phelps likewise accuses the Prime Minister of "apartheid" against the gay "minority" in denying them marriage rights. But turning from that bogus racial minority model to Spitzer's therapeutic model, we see that gays can in fact marry, and in Spitzer's study many were married - but first they had to become biologically marriageable by successfully reorientating from homosexual to heterosexual.
The titanic illusion of homosexuality as a fixed inborn identity will take time to sink, but Spitzer's therapeutic iceberg will be more liberating than destructive.
Below decks are the passengers I care about, and they need to know that it is OK to want to escape the suffering of same-sex attraction, and possible to do so. And our health professionals, who alone can man the life rafts, owe them a duty of care in aiding that escape.
If the News Weekly is a paper newspaper, I would not doubt this paper will be fined for running this. They probably would be punished in Canada as it is now.
There does not seem to be any cure for child molesters. Proof that you can change some gays is not proof that you can change all gays.
If someone sees that the path they're traveling on leads to somewhere they don't want to go to, they can change direction. But if a person doesn't want to see the truth, they cannot change their life.
That's why it is so terrible that the "gay" activists (and how many disagree with their agenda?) and their supporters on the left silence the truth about homosexuality - that is not innate.
It's also true that the more someone indulges their baser desires, the harder it is to change. Child molesters should be executed, for everyones' good.
Actually, someone posted this a short while ago and I did ping it out. It is a very good article.
My time sense is really warped, lately - days, weeks, months - they're getting all compressed! So many articles, so little time.
And I actually have a life off of FR, hard as it is to rip myself away.
Homosexual activists are certain that bisexuals are really homosexuals who are afraid to "commit". Homosexual activists are also certain that anyone who is "curious" must be a homosexual. Why is it they have a hard time believing that some "homosexuals" may really be heterosexual?
Right, their new code word (well, new for some years) especially in their youth outreach is "questioning" - they always want to reach out to the "questioning" youth. As in, if someone's ever had a "gay" thought, "gay" desire or dream, or one "gay" experience they are now a carved-in-stone homosexual and can never change. They are now "born that way".
It's cruel, wrong and a dreadful lie, and a vicious tactic to recruit fresh meat and increase their numbers.
It's like saying if anyone has every fantasized about, dreamed about or once thought about murdering someone they are a murderer.
Neither is there any "cure" for gays either. They have to *want* to change. If the desire for repentence is sincere, God will turn away no one, regardless of how distasteful repentence may seem to you.
Gay activists are trying a different approach, what with the majority of the country siding on the side of morality. Their argument just isn't convincing enough, so they're attacking the majority from a different position.
Could someone tell me what aspect of homo/hetero-sexuality is NOT learned?
I believe I understand what you're trying to convey. What they see themselves as some sort of "ethnic minority". If that were the case, then the swingers and orgy participants, etc., would be screaming for equal rights as well.
Burdizzo?
Still, most liberals I've talked to are 100% convinced homosexuality starts at birth. If that were true, God would be evil, because He would be condemning innocent people--people who had no control over their behavior! Ah! But we already know ALL people are tempted to do evil acts of one kind or another. After all, a heterosexual male is tempted to have sex with women, so who are we to say men shouldn't have sex with as many women as possible (it IS the natural thing to do). Why strive to maintain some silly notion like monogamy--it isn't natural! Or, how can we tell a murderer not to kill someone, because they feel the urge to do so? After all, murderers are probably just born that way.
That is exactly the point. They have consciously decided to influence the public to support their practices by claiming that homosexuality is an identity - thus the use of the word "gays" and "gayness" (I have to fight nausea just to type those words) and their virulent suppression of the fact that there are thousands of ex-homoseuxals.
Sodomites and pederasts are really better words, as they are merely descriptive of the actual practices. And as soon as someone quits doing the acts, they aren't a sodomite/pederast any more.
There is no such thing as a homosexual, actually. Even that word was invented as a propaganda method, to make is seem as though men who liked to practice same sex sodomy were a "special community".
The whole "gay" agenda is based on nothing but lies.
Hey! Right on the money! I was a born liar and thief, so I should just go for it and demand equal rights! And no criticism, either.
Swingers are. And group sex people are, too. They call it "polyarmory".
Barf.
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