Posted on 02/07/2004 2:26:21 PM PST by quidnunc
Among America's culture wars, one of today's most intense controversies rages around the issue alternatively identified, depending on one's point of view, as "normalizing homosexuality" or "accepting gayness." The debate is truly a social-ethical-moral conceptual war that transcends both the scientific and legal, though science and law most often are the weapons of choice. The ammunition for these weapons, however, is persuasion.
This article explores how gay rights [3] activists use rhetoric, psychology, social psychology, and the media — all the elements of modern marketing — to position homosexuality in order to frame what is discussed in the public arena and how it is discussed. In essence, when it comes to homosexuality, activists want to shape "what everyone knows" and "what everyone takes for granted" even if everyone does not really know and even if it should not be taken for granted. [4]
The first strategy of persuasion is to establish a favorable climate for your message so that the communicator (marketer) can influence the future decision without even appearing to be persuading. Pratkanis and Aronson refer to this as pre-selling. [5] This is at the heart of the homosexual campaign: to get consent via social construct today to determine whose idea of personal freedoms will prevail in our legal codes tomorrow.
Part II of this article provides a brief overview of the social climate and politics that ultimately led to the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) imprimatur of homosexual behavior. The declassification of homosexuality as a disorder by the APA provides context for the propaganda war proposed by Kirk and Madsen's homosexual manifesto fifteen years later. The section ends by reviewing the main elements of the campaign including the call to specifically discredit, intimidate, and silence opponents with particular attention paid to conservative Christians.
Part III presents the connection between persuasion and democratic processes. Rhetoric, persuasive communication, propaganda, and social psychology theories are foundational to the concept of selling homosexuality as presented in this article. The purpose of this section is to provide a greater understanding of why persuasion works in order to strengthen the later discussion of how it is applied in the mass persuasion techniques evidenced in today's "gay rights"-style marketing.
Part IV moves to the "4-P's" of the traditional marketing paradigm — Product, Price, Place, and Promotion — to deconstruct and to illustrate how homosexuality is packaged and sold as a competitive product in the marketplace often through education [6] and through positive media coverage. "What is pitched is different — a product brand versus an issue — but the method is the same. In each case, the critical thing is not to let the public know how it is done," [7] states Tammy Bruce, a self-described lesbian feminist and ex-president of the Los Angles chapter of the National Organization for Women. [8]
Part V presents several real examples of how this strategy is employed in five important markets of social influence. The areas examined, which touch every citizen in America, are government, education, organized religion, the media, and the workplace.
Part VI concludes by recapping some achievements of the gay rights campaign and discussing what these may portend for their opponents and American society in the future.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at regent.edu ...
That includes a bashing of the APA for taking homosexuality out of the DSM. If you do that, you are saying you must have a scientifically valid reason for doing the bashing. There is none. That is junk science.
Sophistry.
Hint: Remember when validity and reliability in research were explained to you?
(Thousands? What the heck are you trying to say?)
I asked you a simple question. Is same sex behavior benign, or is it unhealthy and unnatural?
One word labels don't work.
Why not?
You know it. I know it.
I know that you are weasling out of answering my questions.
It serves no good purpose.
My purpose is to promote the truth that homosexual behavior is unhealthy, unnatural and immoral. What is your purpose?
And it certainly has nothing to do with the question of homosexuality and the DSM
The homosexual community's infiltration into the APA, in order to remove homosexuality from the DSM, is well documented:
An excerpt from: The A.P.A. Normalization of Homosexuality, and the Research Study of Irving Bieber
"Dr. Bieber was one of the key participants in the historical debate which culminated in the 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the psychiatric manual.
His paper describes psychiatry's attempt to adopt a new "adaptational" perspective of normality. During this time, the profession was beginning to sever itself from established clinical theory--particularly psychoanalytic theories of unconscious motivation--claiming that if we do not readily see "distress, disability and disadvantage" in a particular psychological condition, then the condition is not disordered.
On first consideration, such a theory sounds plausible. However we see its startling consequences when we apply it to a condition such as pedophilia. Is the happy and otherwise well-functioning pedophile "normal"? As Dr. Bieber argues in this article, psychopathology can be ego-syntonic and not cause distress; and social effectiveness-‹that is, the ability to maintain positive social relations and perform work effectively--"may coexist with psychopathology, in some cases even of a psychotic order."...
Dr. Bieber describes the deletion of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic and statistical manual as "the climax of a sociopolitical struggle involving what were deemed to be the rights of homosexuals."
Gay activist groups believed that prejudice against homosexuals could be extinguished only if, as homosexuals, they were accepted as normal. "They claimed that homosexuality is a preference, an orientation, a propensity; that it is neither a defect, a disturbance, a sickness, nor a malfunction of any sort." To promote this aim, Dr. Bieber reports, "Gay activists impugned the motives and ridiculed the work of those psychiatrists who asserted that homosexuality is other than normal."
A task force was set up to study homosexuality, but the members chosen included not a single psychiatrist who held the view that homosexuality was not a normal adaptation. There followed riots at scientific meetings by gay activists who increased the pressure on the Psychiatric Association.
Will preventive therapy for homosexuality be prohibited, Dr. Bieber wondered, when homosexuality is normalized?
Furthermore is it the proper domain of psychiatry to remove diagnoses to eliminate prejudice?
Dr. Bieber pointed out that there were several other conditions in the DSM-II that did not fulfill the "distress and social disability" criteria: voyeurism, fetishism, sexual sadism, and masochism. A.P.A.'s Dr. Spitzer replied that these conditions should perhaps also be removed from the DSM-II -- and that if the sadists and fetishists were to organize as did the gay activists, they, too, might find their conditions normalized.
Summary
The factors that determined the decision of the APA to delete homosexuality from DSM-II were summarized as follows:
- Gay activists had a profound influence on psychiatric thinking.
- A sincere belief was held by liberal-minded and compassionate psychiatrists that listing homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder supported and reinforced prejudice against homosexuals. Removal of the term from the diagnostic manual was viewed as a humane, progressive act.
- There was an acceptance of new criteria to define psychiatric conditions. Only those disorders that caused a patient to suffer or that resulted in adjustment problems were thought to be appropriate for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual."
An excerpt from: Psychology's sexual dis-orientation, by Gerald E. Zuriff, Ph.D:
"DIAGNOSING HOMOSEXUALITY
In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association formalized its system of diagnosis and published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Today, a DSM listing has practical consequences; whether treatment for a problem is paid for by health insurance companies or a psychological problem qualifies as a disability under various laws often depends on whether it is listed in DSM.
Not surprisingly, given the psychoanalytic theory shared by most clinicians, the DSM listed homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. Interestingly, it was classified as a sociopathic personality disturbance, meaning that the diagnosis could be made purely on the basis of the homosexuality alone, despite the absence of subjectively experienced distress. In the 1968 revision of the DSM, homosexuality was still included as a disorder but classified more descriptively under "sexual deviations" along with disorders such as fetishism and pedophilia. What followed is unprecedented in the annals of medicine.
The publication of DSMII coincided with the founding of a militant gay liberation movement whose goals included the normalization of homosexuality as a legitimate "lifestyle." Gay activists mounted a furious attack on the American Psychiatric Association for designating homosexuality a disease. Their most effective form of protest consisted of demonstrations at several professional conventions, most critically the 1970 disruptions in San Francisco. Over the next three years, the association was forced to reconsider not only the inclusion of homosexuality in DSMII but also the entire conceptual basis for defining a mental disorder.
The gay liberation movement considered the psychiatric designation of homosexuality a major basis for antihomosexual attitudes in American society. It justified a wide variety of antihomosexual legislation, ranging from laws barring homosexuals from immigrating to the United States or serving in the military to regulations in New York requiring homosexual taxicab drivers to undergo semiannual psychiatric examinations. In a broader sense, the designation reinforced the prevalent attitude that homosexuality is an "illness." According to the activists, this stigmatization not only justified bigotry but also caused gay men and lesbians to turn against themselves in self-hatred. The DSMII diagnosis was seen as a societal attempt to control human sexuality under the guise of a medical diagnosis.
After intense lobbying and debate, in December 1973, the Board of Trustees passed the proposal to remove homosexuality from DSMII. Because of the sharp disagreements within psychiatry, however, the board, as a compromise, replaced homosexuality with "sexual orientation disturbance" for "individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward people of the same sex and who are either disturbed by, in conflict with, or wish to change their sexual orientation." This compromise allowed homosexuality to be dropped as a disorder, giving the gay lobby what it wanted, and, at the same time, it allowed psychiatrists to treat homosexuality under the new diagnosis.
The board's decision unleashed a storm of counterprotest from many psychiatrists. Opponents saw the board's decision as a capitulation to gay activism rather than a reasoned judgment based on medical evidence. They forced the leadership to submit its decision to a referendum of the organization's membership. After an intense campaign, of the approximately ten thousand votes cast, the proposal passed with 58 percent. In retrospect, it seems shocking that the question of whether a condition is a psychiatric disorder should be decided by a vote, but a closer look at the debate indicates that a vote is not as strange as it seems...
THE POLITICS OF HOMOSEXUALITY
Thus, the decision whether homosexuality is a psychopathology is really a social-cultural question rather than a scientific one, and settling the matter by debate and a vote is not as bizarre as it initially appears. Scientific studies may inform the discussion, but the final decision must be a societal value judgment. Accordingly, the continuing controversy in the mental health profession over this issue merely reflects the cultural divergences in our wider society over homosexuality, and politics within the profession have been critical in every stage of this debate.
With the decision voted upon, homosexuality was dropped in the seventh printing of DSMII, and "sexual orientation disturbance" was substituted. In DSMIII, further refinements were introduced. First, "sexual orientation disturbance" was replaced with "ego-dystonic homosexuality" as a term to diagnose clients persistently distressed by their homosexuality and wishing to have heterosexual relationships. This change clarified that only homosexuals were intended and emphasized the impairment in heterosexual functioning. Second, the stated causes of this disorder consisted of the negative attitudes of society toward homosexuality and/or desire for heterosexual life of family and children. Thus, contrary to psychoanalytic theory, the causes were presented as entirely social rather than internal conflicts or family dynamics.
Eventually, even this revised compromise was opposed. Critics charged that the new terminology singled out only homosexuality as an orientation that might lead to distress. Second, it suggested that homosexuality itself can still be considered a disorder rather than a normal variant of human sexuality. Third, it failed to recognize that in the United States, almost all people who are homosexual normally pass through a phase in which their homosexuality is ego-dystonic. Consequently, yet another compromise was devised. In DSMII-Revised, even ego-dystonic homosexuality was omitted. Clients with a "persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation" would now be diagnosed with "sexual disorder not otherwise specified." The term homosexuality no longer appeared..."
My own personal opinion is that I don't much care what they do as long as they keep their lifestyle to themselves.
But a good part of the queer community insists on rubbing everybody else's noses in it with their bizarre camping.
And a goodly portion of them want to be mainstreamed so they can get a crack at fresh meat without getting rousted.
While I was still acrtive as a cop the local pony baseball league for boys too old for Little Leage practices and played at diamonds in a couple of the city parks.
A number of middle-aged queens used to regularly sit in the stands ogling the boys and whispering to each other like straight old goats watching girls' beach volleyball.
I surely wouldn't want them as scoutmasters for my sons.
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