Okay, so it only took an entire decade, but finally the one person whose work gave even the patina of scientific reality to so-called “reparative therapy” or, in the vernacular, “pray away the gay” has totally repudiated his study and now publically apologized to the LGBT community for his misguided and mistaken study.
Over at Truth Wins Out, they have the full text of Dr. Robert Spitzer’s letter. Here is a taste:
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
It would be great if I thought at all that having the single study that showed any efficaciousness ‘pray away the gay’ would end this issue with the bigoted Christianists that have embraced it. Sadly we all know that this is not going to be the case. They were never arguing this issue from the point of view of facts and so new facts or repudiation of facts is not going to sway them in the least.
While it is a good thing that Dr. Spitzer is fully repudiating his study, the fact remains that his apology is too little, too late for many people who duped or forced in trying to change their sexuality through bogus therapy. The damage that was done is incalculable for many of these folks.
Still, as much as I would like to excoriate the good doctor, the fact is that this man is also the person who, in the 1970’s, led the charge to remove homosexuality from the DSM as a mental disorder. Without his previous work the life of our LGTB brothers and sisters, Moms and Dads, cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts would be much harder than they are.
Going forward it is important that we all arm ourselves with the real facts about this study. If for no other reason than to kick the legs out from under any bigoted jackass that wants to continue to cite it as “proof” that people can change their sexuality.
The reality of this study is that it relied on subjects reporting changes in their own sexuality. You would think that a professor of psychology would know that people lie about sex, even to themselves and thus not make definitive statements about the issue based solely on assertions of people who had claimed to change their sexual orientation.
However that is exactly what he did. Dr. Spitzer now says he should have known better than to assume that people who were so in denial would actually tell the truth about an issue like this. The reality is that for those who are so self-loathing that they would deny one of the basic facts about themselves much keep that barrier of unreality up at all times, even with themselves, because once a single string is pulled the whole weave of lies and self-deception unravels.
Social sciences are difficult to pin down the way we would something (hopefully) as concrete as a Higgs Boson. The very way that data is acquired and then filtered through our own current social constraints skew the results. This is why diseases like autism spectrum were originally thought to be the fault of ‘cold mothers’ rather than a neurological difference.
Mistakes like Dr. Spitzer’s are the cost of being unable to pin down for an external observer all the messy and contradictory feelings, beliefs, lies, fears and hopes of the make up the human mind.
Here is hoping that the next such mistake is not one that plays into the bigoted world view of haters, and does not do the kind of damage that ‘reparative therapy’ has done and sadly will probably continue to do for some time to come.
The floor is yours.