Oh, my! The saga continues! This is as more confusing as than the the Intelligent Design versus Evolution kerfuffle!
The weight of professional opinion seemed to me to have become that same-sex orientation was unchangeable.
So I had pretty much come to the conclusion that Christian people with exclusive same-sex attraction simply needed to gird themselves for life-long sexual abstinence, without even the hope of an abstinent bachelor or spinster (I know the former is neutral, the latter deprecatory in connotation – sorry) someday finding Mister or Miss Right. (I generally say “chastity” instead of “abstinence” when dealing with, say, teen sexuality of clients at Matrix Lifeline, because of chastity’s relatively positive connotation. But chastity outside Christian marriage means abstinence and repentance for lapses.)
I would not have urged a gay or lesbian Christian, in other words, to try to become heterosexual.
I might have encouraged them to consider a monastic vocation to get away from our hypersexualized culture and, for an Orthodox monastic, to engage in this ultimate battle against all the passions. But monastic vocation should not be undertaken toward the specific end of sexual reorientation, as if to say “I’ll be a monastic until I’m straight, and then I’ll laicize and marry.”
But here is a flawed column citing provocative information to the effect that I may have been wrong.
[T]he American College of Pediatricians … recently began a campaign to educate schools on sexual orientation and youth. “Facts About Youth” cites research that shows that over 85% of students with homosexual attractions will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity as adults.
Okay, the American College of Pediatricians can be, as is being, faulted as a Christian front group impersonating the American Academy of Pediatrics. Point taken. But the American Psychiatric Association did not dispassionately de-list homosexuality as a disorder because of the great weight of scientific evidence. They did it for the same reason that the American Bar Association endorsed abortion – just before I resigned: a powerful lobby with an agenda mau-maued the APA (and the ABA). It’s hard to find neutrality on some subjects.
But what of these studies they cite?
If they exist, and are methodologically sound, they at least suggest that sexuality in youth is highly confused – perhaps even malleable. Mightn’t it be premature to tell conflicted adolescents that “you’re gay (or bi-); get used to it and celebrate it”? As long ago as Kinsey, there were claims that an astonishing proportion of people had experienced some same-sex encounter in their lives. And there are, after all, even adults who get sexually aroused by things like feet or underwear. Adolescent arousal by a member of the same sex may not mean much about one’s ultimate sexual destiny. (Would you think you were destined to get off with shoes forever if they turned you on?)
[There is a] growing body of research demonstrating that changing one’s sexual orientation is indeed possible.
Among those being ignored is Columbia University’s Dr. Robert Spitzer, whose 2003 landmark study was published in the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. To his surprise, Spitzer – who ironically spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 – found that the majority of his 200 subjects experienced significant change in their same-sex feelings through therapy and support groups: “Like most psychiatrists, I thought that homosexual behavior could only be resisted, and that no one could really change their sexual orientation. I now believe that to be false. Some people can and do change.”
If that’s not convincing enough, in 2009 the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality published a comprehensive overview of research, citing over 500 scientific studies spanning nearly 100 years of research that demonstrates change is possible. However, these facts aren’t being communicated to young people. What is being educated to our youth is based on political correctness, not sexual freedom.
Dr. Robert Spitzer has no known ax to grind, but is a fairly dramatic “conversion story.” NARTH may have an ax to grind; that’s not clear to me.
By all means stop the persecution of young people who have doubt about their sexuality or who have come out as gay or lesbian (or are harassed for other reasons, like Phoebe Prince), but let’s have a little retiscence about showing 13 year old boys how most safely to sodomize or be sodomized, and suchlike.
And I’m not ruling out the possibility that some adults can change from gay to straight. It won’t upset my worldview if it proves false, but I may have closed my book prematurely.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 