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.
Ahem - that would be "polyamory". Polyarmory is a group of people getting together to practice shooting, and that's a *good* thing!
Right. It's impossible to be "gay" without having sex with someone of the same sex. Therefore, their entire identity is merely a sexual perversion.
Common sense... bump.
Right and power of choice... bump.
The want to be "set apart" has to do with a desire to get the "bennies" that they've seen other "set apart" gimmee-grabbers get through government-sanctioned set-apartness. Quotas and jobs and promotions...
The majority of Americans see seem as what they are - abnormal, unnatural, and perverse. They're way too vile to get what they want. They're just thrashing around and raising a ruckus. ACT UP hasn't been heard from much lately, have they? They're a temporary annoyance and a nuisance factor - other than their raping and recruiting activities.
LOL, don't give these dirt bags any ideas.
I see your point better now. They do get a lot more inappropriate respect for choosing their deviate act than "orgy people", or "cocaine people" get. You've got a nontrivial anomaly identified. I'll mention it to people. FReegards
The issue is sodomy.
Since heterosexuals practice sodomy - and sodomy, in its strict legal and biblical definition is oral sex, not just anal sex - in a much higher rate since the "sexual revolution" of the sixties, straights cannot in good conscience deny homosexuals the right to do what they do.
Sodomy is the underlying issue at hand. Don't forget, the last case I recall hearing was that in 1938, a man was sentenced to jail in the U.S. for cunnilingus on his own wife!
Proof that you can change some gays is not proof that you can change all gays.
It just proves that it's their choice.
Maybe I shouldn't have kicked the alcohol habit, I just should have celebrated diversity with it.
The *cure* for child molesters is summary execution. Recidivism is almost 100% with them.
They did overreach, though. There is one reason and one reason only homo marriage is coming up in the Senate this week.
When homossexuals sarted comparing their struggle with the black civil rights struggle, a bomb exploded.
They shut up real quick, but it was too late - Republicans knew that they could split the Democratic base and have real outreach by not shying away from the issue.
Now the homosexuals may even lose their allies in the Dem party (at least publicly), and their agenda is effectively crushed. It will be interesting to watch.
They want medical bennies.
It's costly to be homosexual. They are pushing for socialized medicine because of it.
There've been several articles on FR lately that I've pinged people to about the increasing number of black people - especially religious people - who are sick of the homosexual radicals (and how many rank and file disagree with the radicals?) comparing themselves to blacks struggling for legitimate civil rights, such as the right to vote.
The voluntary practice of same sex sodomy has absolutely nothing in common with the neutral, unchangeable physical identity of being born a particular race. Nothing. And for the "gay" rights people to try to ride on the coattails of black Americans' struggle for civil rights a generation ago is insulting and offensive in the extreme.
Homosexuality:
Homosexuality is deviant sexual behavior and a mental illness.
Homosexuals: 1) subject their body parts to uses nature did not intend, such activities often presenting immediate risk to the participants; 2) are prone to greater suicide, depression and other mental disorders and deficiencies than the heterosexual population at large; 3) are prone to far greater sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, than the (normal) heterosexual population; 4) molest young people (pedophilia) at a far greater rate than heterosexuals; 5) engage in degrading sexual promiscuity, oftentimes engaging in risky sex with many partners during the same event; 6) are engaged in aggressive and widespread efforts to indoctrinate our children by introducing the homosexual lifestyle using public schools as the primary indoctrination “vehicle” and likewise, through the movie/music/TV industry, with the dual goals of gaining school-age acceptance of homosexuality and encouraging sexual activity among children, especially same-sex experimentation; 7) view most everything through a mindset heavily biased in favor of the homosexual lifestyle and culture, which renders them mostly useless when asked to opine on matters that normal heterosexuals better resolve.
The mental deficiencies described herein applying to homosexuals should not be confused with the mental deficiencies associated with the garden-variety left wing democrat (socialist/marxist/feminist/environmental/union boss wackos,) which have their own distinct set of mental disorders.
This doesn't even touch on what the Bible has to say about homosexuality.
Wasn't filing a suit against her hubby a little extreme If she didn't like it.
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