"Bob" wrote in message
eb.com...
On 7/22/2015 12:34 AM, Muggles wrote:
One argument in favor of being gay is people are born gay. I've always
countered that argument with a logical response. Do you think people are
born gay?
We are what we are. We can't change our sexual preference any more than
we can change our eye color. Maybe someday we'll be able to alter our
firmware and tweak our attributes.
There are colored contact lenses that can turn brown-eyes blue but I get
your point. What really frosts my cake is that many religious types
actually believe if you work VERY hard at it, you can "ungay" youself.
Sadly, though a lot of people spent a lot of money trying to convert their
son or daughter (or themselves), the outcomes are universally poor and most
"ungayed" people lapse sooner than later:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...sters-johnson/
A British survey published last month found that one in 25 therapists
would assist gay and bisexual patients attempting to convert to
heterosexuality. That's despite the fact that many medical groups, including
the American Medical Association, have for years condemned such practices,
saying they don't work and can actually cause harm.
The irony is that so many of the religious types that despise gays haven't
realized that God *made* them that way. So when the "faithful" codemn gays,
they are also condemning the God that made them so.
http://www.livescience.com/25082-gay...apy-facts.html
says: (edited for Fair Use exemption)
Here are five things you need to know about the therapy and the current
lawsuits.
1. What's happening in the courts?
Two new legal challenges are targeting conversion therapy. The first is a
civil suit in New Jersey in which four former clients of a counseling group
called Jonah are suing for deceptive practices. The patients argue they paid
thousands of dollars for therapies that did not rid them of same-sex
attractions, and that they then had to pay for mainstream therapy to repair
the damage done by the conversion therapy.
2. What happens in conversion therapy?
Because conversion therapy is not a mainstream psychological treatment,
there are no professional standards or guidelines for how it is conducted.
Early treatments in the 1960s and 70s included aversion therapy, such as
shocking patients or giving them nausea-inducing drugs while showing them
same-sex erotica, according to a 2004 article in the British Medical
Journal.
More recently, people who have been through conversion therapy report talk
therapy that emphasizes pseudoscientific theories, such as the idea that an
overbearing mother and a distant father make a child gay. In an April 2012
essay in The American Prospect, writer Gabriel Arana describes his "ex-gay"
therapy experience. His therapist blamed his parents for Arana's
homosexuality, and urged him to distance himself from his female best
friends.
3. Why psychologists say conversion therapy doesn't work
Homosexuality is not considered a mental disorder, so the American
Psychological Association (APA) does not recommend "curing" same-sex
attraction in any case. Instead, societal ignorance, prejudice and pressure
to conform to heterosexual desires are the real dangers to gay people's
mental health, according to a 1997 statement on "conversion" or "reparative"
therapy by the APA.
A 2009 APA task force found that conversion therapies, despite being touted
by religious organizations, have little evidence to back them up. A review
of studies from 1960 to 2007 found only 83 on the topic, the vast majority
of which did not have the experimental muscle to show whether the therapies
achieved their stated goals. (Many of the people studied in the early years
were court-mandated to take the therapies, adding a coercive element to
those outcomes.)
The best-quality studies were more recent and qualitative, the APA task
force found, meaning they focused not on the statistical effectiveness of
treatment, but of the subjective experience.
"These studies show that enduring change to an individual's sexual
orientation is uncommon," the task force wrote in their 2009 report. The
participants continued to report same-sex attractions after the conversion
therapy, and were not significantly more attracted to the opposite gender.
These studies did find that conversion therapy could be harmful, however.
Negative effects included "loss of sexual feeling, depression, suicidality
and anxiety."
4. How did conversion therapy get started?
The desire to turn gay people straight goes way back. In 1920, Sigmund Freud
wrote of a lesbian patient whose father wanted to see her converted to
heterosexuality. Freud echoed modern psychologists by responding that
changing sexual orientation was difficult and unlikely. He offered to see
the woman anyway, but later broke off the therapy due to her hostility. In
1935, Freud went even further, writing to a woman who wanted her homosexual
son converted that homosexuality "is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no
degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."
One of the most prominent advocates of conversion therapy in the 1940s and
50s was Edmund Bergler, who saw homosexuality as a perversion and believed
he could "cure" gay people with a punishment-based, confrontational therapy
style.
Once the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality
as a mental disorder in 1973, conversion therapies lost support. But
religious-right organizations such as Exodus International and Focus on the
Family's Love Won Out took up the charge, promoting their own "ex-gay"
therapies. A small group of psychologists, splitting with their peers,
continue to promote the therapies, founding the conversion therapy
organization NARTH, or the National Association for Research & Therapy of
Homosexuality. The group has religious links; for example, one of its
founders and former president, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, is a one-time
spokesman for Focus on the Family.
5. Okay, but what about that one study that found conversion therapies work?
Groups that promote conversion therapy often point to a single study to
support their work. In 2003, famed psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who
spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric
Association's mental disorder list in 1973, reported in the journal Archives
of Sexual Behavior that interviews with conversion therapy patients
suggested that some people could change their sexual orientation.
The paper was incendiary and highly criticized, given that it relied on
interviews with patients instead of measurable benchmarks of same-sex
desires. Conservative groups were delighted to have support from Spitzer,
who wasn't tainted with religious bias or anti-gay ideology; gay
organizations felt betrayed.
In the end, however, Spitzer came to agree with his critics. There was no
way to confirm that what his interviewees said was true, he wrote in 2012 to
the editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The study, he said,
was fatally flawed.
"I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven
claims of the efficacy of reparative thrapy," Spitzer wrote.
So what choice do our religious friends offer someone like this? Certainly
not love and understanding. More like condemnation and ostracism. Doesn't
sound the way Jesus preached to his flock.
--
Bobby G.