Advocates touting homosexuality as a civil right seek foundational scientific credibility in the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removing it as a mental disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Removal followed a two year campaign Newsweek described as ongoing disruptive, chaotic attacks on psychiatrists and physiologists. Yet throughout these disruptive attacks, no academic papers arose at conferences refuting any research previously done.
Eventually onslaughts forced sufficient abstentions and apprehensive responses for a third of APA’s 17,000 plus membership to approve removal. The under-voting and public attacks support the understanding that the DSM is as likely to accumulate political manifestos and marketing brochures as attempted scientific expositions.
After this decision, activists targeted leading individual researchers such as Dr. David Reuben to ensure perpetual sanctity for the APA action. No research papers would again arise to confirm initial therapy success rates of 30% to 60 %, substantiating that 7 of 10 homosexuals could eventually walk away from the lifestyle. Persistent activism over 37 years enabled ubiquitous infiltration of academia ensuring pre-ordained theses, acceptable flexibility in research design definitions, suitable human data points, and enchanting statistical enhancement. The result has been social alchemy.
Psychology and Psychiatry chose to relinquish scientific rigor for popular societal and political acclaim. With studies concerning homosexuality freed from objective analysis, advocates can rely upon base antidotal politics to dominate debates.
Great information...that’s the point I make all the time...they removed it from the DSM for political reasons. Dr. Fittzgibbons has a lot of good research. This is a big issue and we have to stay on top mof it no matter what the naysayers think...because this issue is going the same way abortion is...eventually the court is going to legislate homosexual marriage.