Posted on 06/25/2004 7:32:18 AM PDT by scripter
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. 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.
Ping
to paraphrase something I heard once.. "Homosexuals need to get healed, cured or fixed".....
I always wondered what many African-Americans thought about the equating of gay rights with the civil rights movement that goes on in much of the media.
It strikes me as odd that, given so much of sexuality is learned behavior, scientists should hold our homosexuality as genetic absent any evidence.
The article mentions Dr. Spitzer, who changed his mind and now believes homosexuals can leave the lifestyle. Here's what he said that points to the problem:
Science progresses by asking interesting questions, not by avoiding questions whose answers might not be helpful in achieving a political agenda.That political agenda kills.
This is great news! Lets hope all people of homosexual origin see articles like this and pursue more healthy lifestyles.
I find that the evidence is overwhelming on both sides of the debate. When that happens I usually try to rely on logic to come up with the most likely answer.
Although I have no doubts that there are ways to 'reprogram' early stage homosexuals I find it hard to believe that young kids would choose a homosexual lifestyle over a heterosexual one.
Until someone can adequately explain that one I will continue to disbelieve that homosexual is totally behavioral. There HAS to be more to it.
Even if it WERE BIOLOGICALLY programmed, I still think that the decision to "go along" with your biology or chemistry is in your own hands. I'm biologically programmed not to get out of bed before 8 a.m., and to eat chocolate all day, but that doesn't mean that I sleep in and eat bonbons in bed. In order to be a healthy and productive member of society that gets to contribute and enjoy our standard of living, I GO AHEAD AND FIGHT against my biological nature and haul my a55 out of bed each day and try to eat healthy.
It's really great news, and makes for a great tag line. :-)
I agree. And there's no way I could "unlearn" my heterosexuality, no matter how hard I tried. I'm just not into other women, never have been, and can't see how I could make myself be. If it's all learned then sexual preference should be alterable in both directions. Who of the straights among us believe that we could learn to be gay and like it?
I believe that that the true story is a combo of sociological and biological factors, in different proportions for different people. Even gays I've met have had different explanations for how they are who they are.
. One is convinced he was born that way (or became that way very early on). Another thinks he could have ended up either way but a difficult home life, abuse, and a very weird relationship with his mother sent him over to bat for the other team. There's no consensus even among gays, when you talk to them one on one (and I don't mean the vocal PR groups).
LQ
Well said. To use an over used example to make the same point: If pedophilia were biologically programmed would we be more tolerant of their behavior? Especially with some trying to lower the age of consent...
Well they don't "choose" schizophrenia or other psychological disorders either. Mental illness comes on for many complex reasons, overt choice usually isn't one of them.
I have always found that this argument to be particularly obtuse, disingenuous and racist.
How can one equate the color of your skin with a clearly controlled behavioral activity.
Even if it is true you are born gay, you don't have to engage in it's activity. You make a decision not to have gay sex. You can't make a decision not to be black, unless you are Micheal Jackson.
If I was a black person, I would be completely offended by the idea.
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