Posted on 08/30/2004 5:48:44 PM PDT by tigerteam_ab
Not in my neck of the woods!
Does anyone else find that name just creepy and repugnant?
My personal belief is that a lot of gays are just wired differently, and for a lot of them I don't see it as them experimenting with a different lifestyle. Just as you and I can't explain why we are attracted to good-looking women, these people cannot explain what attracts them to the same gender. I know a lot of people still think of it as a perverted lifestyle choice, but I don't personally believe that.
It makes me sick that thes scumbags went after Rick Santorum, a fine man of integrity who has eloquently defended the sanctity of life against vampires like Barbara Boxer for years, and whose argument against overturning the Lawrence decision was exactly as the original justices stated it. That the LCRs could juxtapose Santorum with the "God Hates Fags" guy is truly despicable. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Then again, they clearly have no shame.
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. 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 bad news for the complacent triumphalists of the Gay Titanic.
Bad news for their tall tale that being gay is like being black, an immutable inborn identity. Bad news, in the debate on gay marriage, for their 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".
As to the ability for homosexuals to change, late last year a remarkable research paper was published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour (October 2003) 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. The enforcers amongst the ship's crew who accuse you of desertion, of "irrational internalised homophobia", are wrong.
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 minimizing their unwanted homosexual attractions."
Spitzer, once a medical darling of the Gay Rights movement, may now have to walk the plank, because his stubborn telling of the clinical truth has political implications.
The success of Gay activism has been due to portraying Gays as a persecuted minority group, identifying with historically persecuted minorities like blacks, women, Jews. This illusion cannot survive Spitzer's findings, that being Gay is a treatable psychological condition like any other, not an inborn identity.
In the current political debate about same-sex marriage, all talk is of persecuted minorities and human rights, while Spitzer's truth of a treatable condition is nowhere to be heard. 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".
In The Australian, Former AMA President Dr Kerryn Phelps likewise accused 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.
Dr David van Gend is a family doctor in Toowoomba, Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine, University of Queensland, and a medical advisor to the Australian Family Association.
excellent analysis...somehow it gets no run on the airwaves...hmmmm
[I know a lot of people still think of it as a perverted lifestyle choice, but I don't personally believe that.]
Is it a lifestyle you'd want your children to be encouraged to live?
Nonsense. They can still become a mother or a father. Just not as a homosexual. That's just how nature works.
I consider that a cosmic injustice.
Bah. Fat guys (unless they're rich "east-side" rappers) typically don't get sexy girls flocking to them. Is that a "cosmic injustice"? Hell, no. It means they don't have what it takes to get what they want. There's a lesson in that for the gays who want to be parents.
>>excellent analysis...somehow it gets no run on the airwaves...hmmmm
Disney owns ABC, ESPN...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=Disney+media+ABC+ESPN
Homosexuality is a psychological disorder. It has been for 3000 years, come next Tuesday.
A group of liberal shrinks juggle some since discredited studies for statistics to indicate otherwise.
A bunch of gays in Hollyweird see a chance to grab a lie and run with it.
A small pocket of rich, bored and over-freuded people from the Upper West Side take "gay" as the Cause Du Jour.
Suddenly, it's OK to have the Governor of the State of New Jersey running a Glory Hole in a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike...
Maybe for you, it's a demonstration of being a modern, 21st Century kind of guy, but I'll hold with the beliefs of my father, and his father before him.
Somethings are wrong. Pretending they are not does not change the basic wrongness.
Nonsense. They can still become a mother or a father. Just not as a homosexual. That's just how nature works.
I know that many have made the journey to a completely heterosexual life. But most will not. I think they are just that way and it is not the end of the world.
I wanted to be a major league baseball player, but I do not have any natural talent. No matter how hard I might have tried, that option was not available to me. I'll live, and so will homosexuals without becoming mothers and fathers.
I heard an interview with the leader of the log-push-in-republicans this morning and they were showing solidarity. What happened? Perhaps they couldn't get Broadway tickets on the cuff??
I saw their commercial. I was only half paying attention and thought it was something from Moveon.org
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