Well, thank the New York Times for distracting us from Sandy and the election with this: ‘Ex-Gay’ Men Fight Back Against View That Homosexuality Can’t Be Changed. I can't leave this alone, election or no election, except maybe to say that if the religion you grow up in demonizes psychiatry and psychotherapy, what can you expect?
Still, I'm going to make an attempt to understand why the national desk thought this was important enough to print the weekend before people vote on marriage equality in three states and against a constitutional amendment in a fourth. Yes, I'm angry!
Erik Eckholm is a senior writer for the Times. Based on his output, he's concentrating on the intersections between social/religious issues and law in the current American situation. He covered the Amish beard-cutting incident, and he was my source for a diary, Marriage equality, religious freedom and kidnapping, about a case concerning the participants in a lesbian civil union in Vermont which dissolved when one of the women was "born again." The issue of reparative therapy (the "ex-gay" procedure), which was recently forbidden for minors in California by the legislature, falls within his bailiwick.
Friday, the Times published an article by Echkolm in which he decided to reveal the fact that ex-gays think they're being disrespected.
Mr. Smith is one of thousands of men across the country, often known as “ex-gay,” who believe they have changed their most basic sexual desires through some combination of therapy and prayer — something most scientists say has never been proved possible and is likely an illusion.
Who's the villain this time? To your right:
Why? Because of this. What's the matter with that?
Here in California, their sense of siege grew more intense in September when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law banning use of widely discredited sexual “conversion therapies” for minors — an assault on their own validity, some ex-gay men feel.
PLEASE, save me from myself! Yes, some people are SO upset that no young men will have the experiences they had that they're suing the state to get rid of the bill. On what grounds? Says Aaron Bitzer, 35:
“If I’d known about these therapies as a teen I could have avoided a lot of depression, self-hatred and suicidal thoughts,” he said at his apartment in Los Angeles. He was tormented as a Christian teenager by his homosexual attractions, but now, after men’s retreats and an online course of reparative therapy, he says he feels glimmers of attraction for women and is thinking about dating. “I found that I couldn’t just say ‘I’m gay’ and live that way,” said Mr. Bitzer, who plans to seek a doctorate in psychology and become a therapist himself.
A therapist himself. Well, I suppose that might be possible, since we have such things as evangelical Christian colleges in these United States. I suppose if someone interested in becoming a doctor wanted a program that included bloodletting and laudanum it would be possible to find one of those too.
But I digress. Eckholm, who wrote the article when Brown signed the bill too (the headline writers referred to it as "Cure"), describes the situation of his subjects the way we used to describe the closet. He also observes that scientific opinion on this is changing, although that's not how he puts it:
Reparative therapy suffered two other major setbacks this year. In April, a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, publicly repudiated as invalid his own 2001 study suggesting that some people could change their sexual orientation; the study had been widely cited by defenders of the therapy.
Then this summer, the ex-gay world was convulsed when Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus International, the largest Christian ministry for people fighting same-sex attraction, said he did not believe anyone could be rid of homosexual desires.
SETBACKS? Poor struggling reparative therapists. People don't believe their work has any merit. They MUST be able to combat this, no? In the first article, Eckholm found dissenters to the bill:
But some therapists and conservative religious leaders who promote methods that they say can reduce homosexual desire have condemned the new law as a violation of free choice. They say that it will harm young people who want to fight homosexual attractions on religious or other grounds and warn that it will lead more people to seek help from untrained amateurs.
Yes, apparently there's training for this kind of
quackery therapy.
Does Echkolm leave it here? Of course not. He finds a dissenter here too, the self-styled leader of the therapists: Joseph Nicolosi, head of the largest reparative clinic (so he says) in the country (the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Encino, Calif.), and a former president (he was voted out of that position) of NARTH, The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. Truth Wins Out describes NARTH:
NARTH proclaims to be a secular organization but often supports reparative therapy and participates in ex-gay events conducted by an array of religious organizations including Focus on the Family’ Love Won Out symposium. In many instances, NARTH’s rhetoric is indistinguishable from sectarian organizations.
Nicolosi says he doesn't believe anyone is really gay. Add that one to evolution, and climate change, and the various theories on rape we've heard recently, and you have a world view that's, well, limited.
Eckholm presents two more pieces of testimony from ex-gay men. One says he's celibate now and his Catholic faith has deepened. The other says he's in the early stages of his fight against his gayness, and he hopes he can scrape together enough money to see a reparative therapist. Dr. Nicolosi has to make a living, after all.
Oh, right. This is a he says-he says article. Eckholm acknowledges that
Critics like Wayne Besen, the executive director of Truth Wins Out, which fights antigay bias, liken such therapy to faith healing, with apparent effects that later fade away. They also point out that the failures of such therapy are seldom reported.
He also quotes S. Mark Breedlove, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Michigan State, who wonders if these therapies can form instinctive sexual behavior and notes that this has never been verified by scientific studies.
I can't fathom this. Why are we defending this practice and these people? Are we just exposing the many forms that "praying away the gay" takes in modern American society? The problem is that this practice and these people will probably be encouraged in a Republican administration. In the old days of gay liberation, this would call for a "zap" at the New York Times office, but this is 2012. Which makes it even odder.
I hate to use this imagery, but what I get from this article is a group of men with their eyes closed clapping their hands vigorously, not to make sure that Tinkerbell lives, but to make sure she dies or at least goes away and stops bothering them.
Not sorry for any of them, and appalled by the national desk for deciding to print it now. In fact, I find this whole thing offensive. Feh!