And this would be a bad thing because…?
As well they should be, owing to the great preponderance of evidence that “reparative” therapies are both ineffective and damaging. Cite (PDF).
[quote]
“The potential risks of ‘reparative therapy’ are great, including depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient.”
I believe that there are valid non-religious societal & cultural reasons for not creating SSM. But one of my reasons for opposing SSM is indeed religious & I am allowed to vote according to my religious beliefs. Gov’t however is Constitutionally prohibited from enforcing laws which have only a religious basis to them.
The active racial discrimination practiced by BJU being the forbidding of interracial dating among its students. If SSM is legitimized, the principle could easily be extended to religious schools that banned same-sex dating & marriage to its students
Former APA President and gay rights supporter Dr. Robert Perloff believes otherwise and that cleints have the right to choose such therapies.
http://www.narth.com/docs/perloff.html
The question is not how you’re allowed to vote – when you’re in the booth, you can vote on any basis you like, including your religion, a gut feeling, your interpretation of a dream, or a roll of the dice. The question is whether this issue may be legally put to a vote in the first place.
If my religion, for instance, holds that whites are superior and ordained by God to rule over other races, that does not in any way make laws enforcing that belief Constitutional. So no, you can’t legally vote your religion in this issue because the vote should not be held in the first place because laws against SSM deny a basic right to certain citizens without due process or legal justification. Yes, it’s being done, but as others have noted, we’ve seen similar situations in the past which have been at long last exposed to the light of reason and strict interpretation of the Constitution.
Discrimination against gays has long roots, as did discrimination against the rights of women and blacks. Those laws eventually fell to the power of the highest law of the land, and hopefully the same will happen soon for laws that discriminate against gays.
The Constitution’s language is broader than this. It states that no law may be passed “respecting the establishment of a religion”. If you have any solid arguments which justify denying basic human rights to homosexuals, please state them. But your bases so far have been religious – along with vague and unsubstantiated claims about the decline of civilization (which all eventually come back to your religious views anyway) – and would require that laws be established which give your religious views the force of law against others. These are laws respecting the establishment of a religion – they make your religion the law of the land for everyone.
Yes, it certainly would. But that’s not what you claimed above. You claimed that
There’s a difference between religious institutions teaching against gay sex and educational institutions discriminating against homosexuals. Churches are well within their rights to teach any doctrine they so choose. But they do not have the right to operate tax-exempt businesses that engage in racial or gender discrimination. They should also not have the right to operate tax-exempt businesses that engage in discrimination against gays.
Why should my taxes be even a fraction of a cent higher in order to effectively subsidise a university which would not allow my own nephew to study there? Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I don’t see any justification for increasing my share of taxes to support bigotry.
Frankly, I find it alarming that he would say such a thing. It sounds like he’s abandoned his credentials (particularly as a “gay rights supporter”). Suffice it to say, the psychological and psychiatric mainstream throughout the first world is in agreement that reparative therapies have no effect on sexual orientation because it cannot be intentionally modified.
Pull up a chair: I know two actual ex-gay persons. Both are women, both were about Kinsey-5 (casually attracted to men, predominant focus on women) before the event. Both attribute their change to divine intervention reshaping their orientation. (One is very anti-gay; the other, a conservative Christian who believes gay sex to be sinful, is highly compassionate towards gay people, and very down on “reparative therapy ex-gay ministries,” as am I.)
And I know of one such ministry for which I have any respect. Taking a traditionalist reading of Scripture, the founder, who was and is bisexual, though no longer practicing as regards gay sex, believes a gay orientation to be a “besetting sin” – which does not actually mean sin, but rather an ongoing source of temptation, that it is, short of miraculous intervention, incurable, and he focuses his ministry on enabling gay men to live moral Christian lives with that temptation.
While I disagree with some of his premises, I can respect facing facts as regards orientation and dealing with it according to his reading of what constitutes sin. (And as I pointed out in the Snark thread years ago, even if something is not sin in some absolute sense, acting in a manner you yourself consider to be sinful is definitely sinning – you know God doesn’t want you to do it (at least in your perception of reality), and yet do it anyway.)
What seems clear to me is: (1) [Presuming there to be a God who is concerned with the behavior of humans], He created us with varying orientations, or at least let us develop varying orientations with no “choice” in the matter. (2) Human therapies aimed at changing orientation don’t work. I’m very skeptical of even the 0.5% “success rate” of such groups. (3) God has a plan for every human being, regardless of his/her orientation – and which includes contentment with who one becomes in the process of coming to terms with oneself – what can be changed, what cannot, and how to live accordingly. (4) He definitely does intervene on rare occasions – because His plan for those particular people includes having them have experienced what it means to be gay, but the ultimate purpose of their particular lives is something other than what they can be as gay people. (5) It’s not something anyone can accomplish themselves, and no degree of will power or therapy will allow them to change. (Cf. the guy Andy Tobias mentioned as having gone through 700 hours of shock therapy, unsuccessfully.) (6) He has far less problems with gay people who are doing His work in the world (e.g., Priam, Sol, lissener) than He does with people who think that following Him entails them having the right to force other people into their idea of righteousness.
In sum: Be who you were made to be. Be happy with who you are. God made you to be you, not what somebody else thinks you ought to be.
Or: The ‘ex-gays’ were never homo-sexual to begin with.
Plausible. But if I’m to believe gobear or spectrum when they maintain that they did not choose to be gay and cannot decide not to be – and I do believe them – I will equally give credence to a woman who tells me that she was in fact mostly attracted to women, and no longer is – particularly when she evinces sympathy for those who are dealing with their own gay situation.
I suspect the “straight/gay” dichotomy has caught any number of Kinsey-1 bisexuals into thinking they’re gay, since they do have desires for other men/women, and “everybody knows” that only gay people do – and adapting to live a straight life is fairly easy for them, since their predominant attraction is straight. And I’m aware of what denial, self-repression, and self-convincing of what one is can do to people.
But I’m inclined to think that, yes, most “ex-gays” are frauds, self-deluded, or never-gay, but that there are a few exceptions, and that their testimony of God at work in their lives is valid (especially when they don’t credit Exodus Ministries or the equivalent, but a direct intervention).
Yeah, that’s kind of a tough one. Hearing about “ex-gays” sets off all my warning bells, about denial, self-repression, and delusion. I hear their stories and can think of a million times I told myself the exact same thing, and it always just spiraled in on itself and ended in my being miserable. And when they use it to drive closeted people even further into the closet, or use it as justification for setting back gay rights, that’s unconscionable and evil. Closeted people are constantly bombarded with messages that they’re wrong, and sinful, and broken; and all the “ex-gay” ministries just try to reinforce that message and convince the person that he could change and “fix” everything if he just did the right thing and weren’t so weak.
But in the end, it’s really all about what makes people happy and feeling “complete.”
I look back on some of the arguments I’ve gotten into on this message board and see residual bits of guilt from so many years of repression creeping in. I always took the approach of “I can see how you’d think it’s weird; let me explain it to you and justify it to you so you’ll understand.” Now that I’m actually in a relationship, though, and it’s not just academic, I don’t particularly feel like doing that anymore. When I hear someone saying that the goal of same-sex marriage advocates is to try and make homosexual relationships as legitimate as normal ones, my immediate response is, “Well fuck you!” I don’t have to justify or explain it to anyone; it just is legitimate, and any attempt I make to convince anyone of that would just be cheapening it. Back the fuck up and get your own damn life in order.
So if somebody else was genuinely unhappy being homosexual and has chosen to suppress it (or to not “indulge in sin,” as it’s so often put), and is genuinely happier being celibate, then, well, good for them. As long as they’re not using what makes them happy to judge anyone else or tell them that they should be following the same path, then there’s no problem. I’m still going to think that they’re headed for disappointment and just more struggling. But then I think, well, back the fuck up, SolGrundy, and get your own damn life in order.