Today a number of major health organizations agree: adult sexual orientation is fixed and attempts to change that orientation are harmful.
According to Robert Spitzer, however, these health organizations are wrong. Spitzer is a recently retired professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. He was also the primary advocate for removing homosexuality from the APA's list of sexual disorders in 1973. Since that time he has conducted research on the possibility of changing sexual orientation, and has arrived at the following conclusion: "some people can change from gay to straight."
Here are the numbers:
"Spitzer concluded that 66 percent of the men he studied and 44 percent of the women had arrived at what he called good heterosexual functioning. That term was defined as being in a sustained, loving heterosexual relationship within the past year, getting enough satisfaction from the emotional relationship with their partner to rate at least seven on a 10-point scale, having satisfying heterosexual sex at least monthly and never or rarely thinking of somebody of the same sex during heterosexual sex. In addition, 89 percent of men and 95 percent of women said they were bothered only slightly, or not at all, by unwanted homosexual feelings" (Malcolm Ritter of the Washington Post).
The APA, however, quickly dismissed Spitzer's findings. They continue to maintain that sexual orientation changes are impossible.
Notice how modest Spitzer's claim is: some people can change. The contradiction of his claim is much stronger: no one can change. Why would we take this second claim as our default position? Is our evidence on the issue really strong enough to support the conclusion that no one can change their sexual orientation? Just take a look at Spitzer's work; you will find that the answer is "no."
More than anything else, this example demonstrates the close-mindedness of the approved "experts" who peddle the conventional wisdom on the matter. There simply can be no dissent from their infallible conclusion that change is impossible, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It's ironic that they approach this question with the same kind of blind dogmatic certainty that they routinely ascribe to religious conservatives.
ReplyDeleteFor those indefatigably pushing the homosexual lifestyle, ideology (the endgame of blurring gender differences, and so on.) will always trump science.