Yes, but it also requires a religion change...
Posted on 08/05/2009 2:34:41 PM PDT by greatdefender
NEW YORK – The American Psychological Association declared Wednesday that mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments.
Instead, the APA urged therapists to consider multiple options — that could range from celibacy to switching churches — for helping clients whose sexual orientation and religious faith conflict.
In a resolution adopted on a 125-to-4 vote by the APA's governing council, and in a comprehensive report based on two years of research, the 150,000-member association put itself firmly on record in opposition of so-called "reparative therapy" which seeks to change sexual orientation.
No solid evidence exists that such change is likely, says the report, and some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.
The APA had criticized reparative therapy in the past, but a six-member task force added weight to this position by examining 83 studies on sexual orientation change conducted since 1960. Its comprehensive report was endorsed by the APA's governing council in Toronto, where the association's annual meeting is being held this weekend.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Do psychologists offer a straight-to-gay guideline? (Sarcasm).
Yeah. I’m actually in support of this. If we start normalizing therapy to change sexual orientation it’s only a matter of time until people start talking about straight to gay therapy for “repressed” children and adults. Or straight to a “happier, more natural, and well adjusted bi-sexuality” for people. I’d rather leave the lid on this bowl of fish and say that people should work this out for themselves without psychologists poking their brains.
No one bats an eye when a straight guy goes gay but the thought of a gay guy going straight drives them bonkers.
Whatever happened to the human will? Oh, that’s right there is no such thing. Sorry, forgot.
Too late for that. The drive to normalize homosexual sex started with pressuring the APA (American Psychiatric Association) to remove homosexuality from their diagnostic manual.
Homosexuality was correctly (in my opinion) described as an abnormality or disorder to be treated. The homosexuals are the ones that pressured the APA into removing it from their DSM.
What they are actually seeing is that when a depressed person faces the negative conditions of their life and realizes that their headlong escape into the gay life is not "fixing" the depression, they start to recognize that they are depressed, and have been for years. Now that they are facing the horror of their situation, suicide may seem more attractive than years of effort to grow out of the pain that led them to choose high-risk sex in the first place. This is the place where real healing can begin, if the therapist can offer support and hope. But not if the therapist is determined to blame society and religion in order to keep the person in a pit of self-destructive sexual acting-out, rather than risk failure and back-sliding.
Besides, unhappy gay people are more lucrative than purposefully healing people.
No one can change deeply ingrained habits overnight. But being in the arts, I have known many gay people and I have actually seen people who have left it all behind over a period of years, with effort.
Sounds like the therapists have the agenda here.
These ghey boys are unable to handle rejection. They can’t stand it when one of their own dumps ‘em like a bad bowel movement. Wouldn’t be surprised if the APA offers therapy guidelines for the gheys who hate being left behind by those who choose to become normal.
Nevertheless, what you fear is already common practice. You can find psychologists and psychiatrists to encourage whatever sexual practice you "feel" like indulging. Hypersexuality, Asexuality, Bisexuality, etc.
I think it is a good thing for shrinks to try to drive the conversation back to a common sense position. Yeah, sometimes it may seem like a Sisyphean struggle, but it needs to be done.
The right way for Christians to handle this is to teach the importance of male/female relationships in the bible and urge folks who are same-sex oriented to live celibate lives. Just as not every heterosexual is called to marriage, not everyone is called to be hetero in orientation (as opposed to acts).
Historic Gay Advocate Now Believes Change is Possible: - The psychiatrist who led the team that deleted homosexuality from the diagnostic manual in 1973, now says homosexuality may sometimes be changeable.
His provocative new study drew worldwide media attention at the American Psychiatric Association's annual conference on May 9th.
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer's study was funded by his department's research unit. He is Professor of Psychiatry and Chief of Biometrics at Columbia University.
"Like most psychiatrists," says Dr. Spitzer, "I thought that homosexual behavior could be resisted--but that no one could really change their sexual orientation. I now believe that's untrue--some people can and do change."...
Yes, but it also requires a religion change...
Actually, you shouldn't support anything the APA advocates. It is a corrupt organization that spews out lies and non-science to back the gay mafia, who have taken over control of the agency.
The fact that homosexuals have changed orientation is a fact. Even the homosexualist, and closet homosexual, child abuser, Kinsey, stated that sexuality was fluid. It is all about sexual morality. Most homosexuals are emotionally damaged--either molested or/and mentally abused when a child--or complete pagan hedonists.
Do you honestly think that people who rape babies are "born" with that orientation? APA believes it is NOT a learned behavior..which is bullcr*p.
Primates, when denied their natural mother and a natural environment produce offspring, who not only are super aggressive and antisocial, they become sexually dysfunctional (think sexual deviants Gacy, Keppler, Dahmer, Roelm, Hitler, Manson, Kinsey, --it is endless..... Abusive parenting creates sexual deviancy. By advocating and encouraging homosexuality, you are advocating child abuse.
True, in Greek and Roman societies homosexuality was glorified as in many pagan societies...Plato even mused on the glories of man-boy sex, but without Judeo-Christian influence, that was the norm......and to think it isn't a learned behavior is absurd.
Really? Do you have a citation?
Just where can that gem of theological wisdom be found in the Bible? I've been a Christian for 34 years and never found it. (At least not the second half.)
I know of at least 2 men in our church that had fallen into the homosexual lifestyle in their younger years. They came to a place of repentance, found forgiveness and new life in Christ, and are now happily married with wonderful, well-adjusted kids. So, while I am not sure about "reparative therapy", one can certainly leave the homosexual lifestyle behind with the help of God. It is just another form of sexual sin,
I wonder how many of them are gay? I'll bet the percentage is much higher than the general population.
I am not a fundamentalist Christian but if you look into the post modern German philosophy, which includes Freud (vs. Classical philosophy.) It does NOT allow one to believe in God. Thus Nietsche's cry, "God is Dead!" Marx, Freud, and the whole gang's philosophy became popular in Europe in the late 1800's and led to Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany and Lenin's Russia. The German philosophy is referred to as The Culture of Death or the Nihilistic culture...which the Pope references.
This paradigm came to the US through the Progressive Era (today's liberalism) and has usurped the Founders more Classical philosophy which was largely influenced by Christianity.
Psychology has a few legitimate areas where they have made a positive impact. But the majority of psychologist are frauds and their ideology is warped...based on atheism and nihilism.
Why would a Christian advocate a pseudo-science that is pressured by political activists to change their labels, without relying on scientific facts or data to back up it statements..The APA lost me when they were taken over by the gay mafia.....by caving into the pressure of the militant homosexuals to take their lifestyle choice off of the mental disorder list proved it was not a scientific organization, but a political propaganda one.
Many readers think this is an insane assertion, but consider all that is readily-accepted reality today that would have been called outrageously impossible 2 decades ago.
The trouble is, that the evidence backs them up.
You may not like the conclusions, but that’s what the data says.
I’m sorry, but NARTH is not a scientific group, it unashamedly has a political agenda. It’s about as objective as Code Pink.
The evidence strongly suggests - I won’t say proves - that sexual orientation is about a inborn, and as changeable, as handedness.
A minority of people are born left-handed. A smaller minority born ambidextrous - though ambiclumsy might be more accurate in some cases. In any event, MRI scans show that the differentiation that gives most people right-handed dominance is sometimes reversed, and sometimes doesn’t happen at all.
We have similar data about gays.
The thing is, that as far as I know, major religions no longer condemn left-handedness as something sinister (pardon the pun). And there are no longer “reparative” therapies to “straighten out the sinister ones”. Because while they may modify behaviour, they can’t change the underlying neurology. No-one who is left-handed can acquire the same dexterity - sorry - sinisterity - in their right hand as their left, but decades of practice can change the brain somewhat, for some people, the same way that some stroke victims can recover from brain damage by training other parts to take over. It’s o longer considered ethical anyway, as the most likely result is someone who is quite impaired in co-ordination with either hand.
Homosexuality appears to be something along the same lines. But, despite what some people believe, my reading of the Bible is that it condemns homosexuality unequivocally. Not perhaps as much as it condemns remarriage after divorce, but still.
So while from an atheistic biological viewpoint, they are similar, from an Islamic-Judeo-Christian one, they are quite different. Both are inborn traits, highly resistant to change. But one is a natural variation, the other a natural variation that leads to sin.
Psychology and Christianity are diametrically opposed. There can be no fellowship between light and darkness.
There are many reasons people develop/experience same-sex attraction - probably as many causes as there are people who experience this unfortunate condition. The standard weak father/overbearing mother scenario doesn't always hold water, but for many it does explain things. My point is, that many who experience SSM do so because of some past experience or behavior reinforcement early in life. It's these that I believe can and should seek to change. I'm not that familiar with NARTH, but I have profound skepticism for the "scientificness" of the APA. They are political like no other activist group.
EVERY person who experiences attraction to the same sex CAN resist acting on his urges. If he claims a relationship with Christ, he has an urgent duty to do so, for the sake of his own soul.
The thing is, he started out with quite different views to the APA's. But the more he read of the data, and the more data he collected, the more he was forced due to intellectual honesty and integrity to modify his position.
I wish the APA was not so politicised. But in this case, they really do have the evidence on their side.
Don't rely on the Press Release. The 130 page report (PDF) sets out why they came to the conclusions they did.
I disagree with what you're saying.
Yes, Narth is conservative, but I wouldn't compare them to Code Pink.
It's worth reiterating what various groups have said. The American Psychological Association has written that “various theories have proposed differing sources for sexual orientation...However, many scientists share the view that sexual orientation is shaped for most people at an early age through complex interactions of biological, psychological and social factors.” That's the best summary of the scientific literature.
The American Psychiatric Association wrote in 2000 that no study that pointed to a biological orientation of homosexuality had ever been replicated.
The University of Chicago had a study that came out in 1994, “The Social Organization of Sexuality,” in which they concluded that sexual behavior was largely driven by environment: early childhood experience, family situation, religious beliefs, culture. They also found that people who grew up in small towns were less likely to become homosexual than people who grew up in big cities, and that the incidence of homosexual behavior drops with age.
This is not to deny that biological factors contribute to homosexuality — most scientists do believe that — but to compare sexuality to left-handedness is not accurate. (I also don't know what the evolutionary justification for innate homosexuality would be.)
Anyone who has dealt with psychologists knows most of them are mentally ill.
Anyone who has dealt with psychologists knows most of them are mentally ill.
At the least they have horrendous issues.
Sorry, that is a crass distortion of the great works of Plato...I shouldn't have written it.
But....what I was referring to was the prevalent ideology and the practice of pederasty in Athens and Sparta at the time. In Plato's Symposium there is dialogue that explicitly defends the practice by Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes. Then, again, that wasn't the point of the Symposium to embrace their beliefs and simply, we do not really even know Plato's views and the dialogues are meant only to gain greater understanding.
I have read that the pagan Greeks tolerated homosexuality, but did not extol the vice as a positive good as “political correctness” requires today.
It is true that Plato's Laws stated that this situation was "against nature" but the practice was very widespread -- esp. within the military. The practice was considered ideal and at a higher level than heterosexual sex in many instances. Equality of the sexes did not exist when homosexuality was widespread. Women and their relationships had low standing.
Homosexuality was widespread because young boys were seduced into the lifestyle at crucial periods in their development which turned their sexual urges toward men. Society approved of it. It is a learned behavior and not genetic as the gay mafia tries to claim. That is why they have gotten their "educational sex materials" into the schools starting at Kindergarten. Their sexual act goes against nature and to groom young boys they have to get them when they are young.
Where are you quoting from? How do the summaries of modern, politically correct historians compare to what Greeks themselves said about homo-pederasty? What Greek extols "boy love" over wife love?
Helen of Troy had "the face that launched a thousand ships" in a war between jealous princes according to Homer's epic poem. I doubt if there is anything about homo "love" that compares to romantic love between men and women in Greek literature.
The last quotes I forgot to post but will have to find on the internet--will get back to you when I have the time.
Great beauty and Youth were the objects of love (and sex) in Greece...it didn't matter what gender...that was immaterial. The beauty and youth of young men were written about far more than the beauty of women....which was also valued, of course. But those penetrated were never considered equals.
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