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.
Please let me know if you have any questions as you read. And your screen name just made sense to me.
From that, he appears to invite us to draw an unwarranted conclusion: that it's all environment, and none of it's due to having a psycholoigical pre-disposition. Which is, as I said before, pure crap.
Hmm. That seems to be a common theme on this thread...
I don't know that it's genetic....or not genetic.
Like I said, the evidence/arguments on both sides of this debate are overwhelming and both sound credible.
I found the article in post #14 to be interesting and credible. You might want to read it.
Maybe, I dont claim to know it all about a subject that no one really knows all that much about. Its not something though that I am dying to learn about, its just not at the top of my agenda, this "what makes a person gay" thing. I don't like the gay political agenda, REGARDLESS of what makes them that way.
Two thoughts. First, genetic mutation/problems/diseases occur all the time throughout nature. These haven't "died out" over history.
Second, a personal observation. I grew up knowing a pair of male twins. One was kinda girlish (e.g. liked to play with dolls), the other more masculine (more interested in sports and all). I think there's a genetic component to gay behavior - not the only explanation - but part of the puzzle.
The author writes:
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.He calls "born that way" baseless. He also states:
Homosexuality emerges in its truer light, not as a minority "genetic identity" but as a complex conditioned behaviour, which can and does change.
He writes:
As to the exact causes of homosexuality, the medical jury is still out. Their Fact Sheet on Sexual Orientation (2000) sums it up: "There are no replicated scientific studies supporting any specific biological etiology for homosexuality".From that, he appears to invite us to draw an unwarranted conclusion: that it's all environment
No, he doesn't. He states the exact cause is unknown. Science tells us the major factor in determining homosexuality is environment. You can read about it if you care, as already pointed out.
I can completely understand that.
Work beckons... I'll be gone for awhile.
I don't see how homosexuality could possibly have a genetic cause. If the gene or genes hypothetically responsible for homosexuality cause the likelihood of reproduction to be even 1% less than that for a heterosexual, then the gene or genes would be weeded out of the gene pool in a few dozen generations (i.e. 1,000-2,000 years). This lower likelihood can take the form of a complete failure to reproduce (i.e. the individual never has sexual relations with a member of the opposite sex, or does, but so infrequently as to fail to produce offspring), or a partial failure (i.e. instead of having 2, 3 or 4 kids, the homosexual will only have 1, 2 or 3). In either case, less people in the following generation will have the gene or genes responsible, less in the following generation, and so on until the gene/genes effectively disappear.
Nope, it is a learned behavior. Which means that a different set of lessons can also be learned in order to overcome the faulty behavior.
In case anyone misinterprets me, I want to go on record as stating that every person has certain basic rights - period. While I believe that homosexuals suffer from a mental disorder, this is absolutely no reason to deny them any rights (nor is it a reason to give them special privileges). Skin color, religion, national origin and sexual orientation are simply irrelevant to this view. Regarding marriage, it is an institution that has always, and across all societies, been between one man and one woman. Any homosexual who is old enough to make an informed choice has the right to marry a member of the opposite sex, just as heterosexuals do. Living with a person of the same sex is a matter of choice for them, but I think that anyone who believes that society must call such a relationship a "marriage" is seriously misguided.
What does biology have to do with anal sex?
Are you saying that homosexuality is like a mental illness or is a mental illness? If so I'm not sure that I would go that far in deccribing it but I do believe it may be based on certain inherited 'traits' that may become overwhelming as a young adult matures.
Again, the article in post 14 is a good one.
Who would want a used homosexual?
Did you ever try to push a string?
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I beat Rush to that by frequently posting that theory here over two years ago. In an e-mail to him in early 2002 I predicted that it would end abortion and the dems at the same time. Not only would the gays cry extintion but they would demand protection in the womb that would fight the fems "it's only a blob with no rights' argument. If a gay blob has rights all do. If no blobs have rights then TS for the gays....think of the battle.
So, do you think it's entirely behavioral?
Are these twins "Identical Twins" or "Fraternal Twins"?
Which is why being Gay is the in thing these days.
Unless the weight of evidence strongly shifts in the opposite direction, I'll have no reason at all to support abortion rights.
Of course, you have no way of knowing this. I doubt you've even tried (thank God) to do the kind of theraputic work that Dr. Spitzer's homosexual subjects did. Nobody said that changing orientations is easy; on the contrary it was quite difficult work.
If it's all learned then sexual preference should be alterable in both directions.
That would be the logical conclusion, yes. So what?
One is convinced he was born that way (or became that way very early on).
And that parenthetical is the key. Nobody remembers anything about their birth, certainly not their sexual orientation at the time. It is entirely possible that his orientation was determined early in his childhood, without his understanding. That would explain why it is so hard to change, in fact. And if we can identify the environmental factors that led tot that decision then we could seek to arrest it by educating parents.
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