Yep millstone of the week
Went into our local town’s Espicopalian church recently, because its a lovely old historical church and I had never been inside it.
It was clearly in need of all kinds of maintenance. I was greeted by an overweight pink-haired female “pastor.” It was in a bad neighborhood too, so I doubt it got more than a handful of congregants
It made me sad when I thought about the social and political leaders, intellectual and religious elites and wealthy patrons who built it 150+ years ago with such a unity of purpose.
When I went through an MBA program in finance, I decided to avoid what I considered the touchy, feely courses in sales and marketing and instead took some in quantitative methods. There I encountered a psychology professor who was frustrated about the direction his concentration in abnormal psychology was moving. He was into the rigorous application of statistics for any doctoral committees on which he served, so he strongly opposed a recent decision of his association.
In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from the 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, under-votes, and apprehensive responses for a third of APA’s 17,000 plus membership to approve removal.
Psychology and Psychiatry always had a tenuous hold on claims they were sciences with the standing of Chemistry and Physics. On the scale of intellectual rigor, their research more often resembles alchemy and/or oral history, and seldom, if ever, approaches the determinism found in a Chemistry laboratory.
Psychology and Psychiatry have chosen to abandon all pretense of scientific rigor in exchange for popular societal and political acclaim. The barriers erected to meaningful research about homosexuality remind me of Genesis 3:23-24. In these verses the Lord God banished humanity from the Garden of Eden and placed an angel in the Garden to keep humanity away forever. By their actions, Psychology and Psychiatry appear content within their own Garden of Eden. They seem to consider the accoutrements of a religion to be more attractive than those of a science. 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.
This is horrible. God is not mocked.
Sodomy is a religion that cuts across traditional organizational lines.