Abbey-Roads2

Wearing down Catholic resistance to the “G” agenda.

I have given up blogging about “G” issues for Lent, so this post is not really about that.  It is about psychology - kind of, sort of.

Vox Nova has a post, The APA and “H” that includes an excerpt of a review by Sally Satel wherein there is an “interesting tidbit about the APA’s decision to eliminate homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders.”  I believe the reversal of diagnosis occurred sometime in the early 1970’s.  Millions of “G” people were no longer nuts.  Perverts no more!  Since then, many people in medicine and psychiatry felt the psychiatric industry had been coerced into taking homosexuality off the list of mental disorders by “G”  activists.  Hence the author of the entry posed the following question:

The APA changes its position on homosexuality after protest and harassment and people lose faith in the authority of its pronouncements? Go figure. It’s worth noting, though, that the conduct members of the APA were subjected to by those gay activists is just an extreme example of the social pressures scientists, academics, and other professionals are subjected to generally to conform their conclusions to the opinions of their social group. A researcher whose work tends towards some politically unpalatable conclusions is not likely to have people picketing his house, but he is likely to face a subtle ostracism from his friends and colleagues. - APA and “H”

I linked to the post and you can read it for yourself - the comments especially are rather interesting.  In fact, my main interest in the Vox Nova  piece centered upon the many comments it received.  I was impressed with how (some)  of the comments by defender of the Faith-style  Catholics,  paralleled similar positions taken by (some)  ”G” activists on their blogs when defending the “H” lifestyle.  The following two comments may help demonstrate my point.

“The misconceptions of many people”

 Gerald Augustinus Says:
February 18, 2008 at 1:00 am

Psychologists follow the same “manual” as psychiatrists. My wife’s a doctor of clinical psychology (which is why she can bear with me, coincidentally) and doesn’t think it’s an illness either, nor does she think that the orientation can be “cured”. She’s counseled HIV patients in the past, many of whom Catholic, unfortunately many a gay person took some serious damage from the way they were treated by (some) Catholics and resent the Church now. It seems nigh impossible to pull off the “hate the sin, love the sinner” act. In particular when people use the term “Sodomite”. (On this note - just how on earth was Lot any better than the men clamoring for the angels ? Hospitality > having virgin daughters gang-raped. Sweet…)

Common ground.

 Gerald Augustinus Says:
February 18, 2008 at 3:01 am

It is hard to tell the symptom from the cause in this matter. Certainly, it doesn’t help with psychosexual development to be widely stigmatized, in particular in the past. Regardless of what one thinks of Church rule on this subject, it must be horribly difficult to identify one’s desire for companionship, love, and, yes, sex with being ‘objectively disordered’. Suppression and sublimation certainly results in a secretive culture. The more open someone is, the less likely they are to engage in the more appalling elements of male gay culture. It’s the ‘closeted’ ones that tend to get caught in restrooms, park, and so forth. The sex abuse scandal in the Church largely happened because of sexually immature homosexuals who entered the priesthood as a ‘beard’ or in the hope to overcome their inclination. Such immaturity then resulted in abusing their emotional ‘equals’, teenage boys.

One could go on forever about the misconceptions of many people - like to claim that homosexuals ‘define’ themselves by their sexuality. For one, that which separates one from the majority sticks out like a sore thumb and by virtue of that becomes defining from both sides. In addition, to reduce homosexuality to a collection of sex acts is just as absurd as if one did that for heterosexuals.

Of course, due to the ‘deviant’ nature (de-viare, off the path) of homosexuality, there are problems caused by the fact that man and woman are made for each other (and even that isn’t all fun and games), and man and man, woman and woman, are not. Hyper-sexuality in the former, and hypo-sexuality in the latter, are quite common.

Lastly, while a gay person, in particular a man, is more likely to be more promiscuous, lead a more dangerous lifestyle (meth, in particular) etc, it ain’t necessarily so - there are many homosexuals who are quite ‘boring’ and ‘normal’.

I have a friend in Courage, I am not sure that ‘re-programming’ is part of that ?

P.S. “Sodomite” is as inappropriate a term as “onany”. The question in the story was the respect for guests, a big thing in the culture. That the women wouldn’t come clamor is self-explanatory. Neither seems ‘Lot’ to have deemed his fellow ‘Sodomites’ to be homosexual, but rather bi-, since he offered them his virgin daughters instead…(who later would go on to jump their drunken fathers and both managed to get pregnant, conveniently giving birth to ‘Ammon’ and ‘Moab’, thus paving the way for future genocide of the respective -ites.

The Catholic Church must conform! 

Contrast those comments with Michael Bayly’s  post (indeed, his website) regarding the APA’s decision, which also figures in well with his campaign for the Roman Catholic Church to discard Her own teaching on the subject:

Dr. Gonsiorek then proceeded to provide some insightful background information on the origins of NARTH – origins inseparable from the wider cultural debate on homosexuality and, specifically, the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its official manual that lists mental and emotional disorders (followed two years later by the passage of a similar resolution of the American Psychological Association).

This change in the diagnosis of homosexuality was the result of the wealth of research data gathered since the early 1950s that showed no difference between homosexual and heterosexual populations in terms of “adjustment.”

In time, the psychoanalytical establishment also changed in its understanding of homosexuality; it now has the same sets of policies and principles about sexual orientation as the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Yet there were “old guard” psychoanalysts who were disgruntled about being displaced and seeing their organization change its views on homosexuality. This disaffected group of psychoanalysts formed an alliance with conservatively- and religiously-oriented psychotherapists. It was from this alliance that NARTH was established. - Debunking NARTH

How queer is that?  Seems like that agenda thing may be working out after all.

Links:

http://www.powells.com/review/2008_02_14.html