It seems that years and years ago, society condemned the practice of homosexuality as destructive behavior–destructive to the individual, and destructive to society. Then psychologists and sociologists came along and said that gays can’t help being gays, and therefore one can’t condemn some practice when it’s practioners are helpless to alter their behavior. Indeed, anyone who tries to offer “treatment” for homosexuality is a destructive quack, and threatens to damage the psyche of anyone submitting to such treatment.
Is my rough understanding correct so far?
However, and again according to my rough understanding of the issue, it’s generally understood that alcoholics can’t help being alcoholics, but nobody appears to draw the conclusion that alcoholism is an alternative “lifestyle” that should be accepted by society. Instead, it seems that treatment programs like Alcoholics Anonymous acknowledge that there is no “cure” for alcoholism, but alcoholics should nonetheless be encouraged to get on the wagon of abstinence for the good of themselves, their families, and society in general. It seems like alcoholics receive sympathy for the challenge that they face, but the outward expression of their condition–getting drunk–is still discouraged or condemned.
So for the sake of argument, I ask: would it be so different for society to adopt a similar attitude toward homosexuality and practicioners of homosexuality? That is, is it so wrong for society–for whatever reasons–to condemn homosexuality as a practice if at the same time it’s trying to encourage understanding of the challenge that individuals face in getting away from homosexuality–and actively trying to help them in facing this challenge?
I’m an alcoholic and poly-addict, raised by a gay parent, so I’ll try my hand at this one.
Alcoholism is not a choice, it’s an illness that causes you to drink uncontrolably. Drinking large amounts of alcohol not only damages you physically, but causes depression and causes you to have problems with dealing with simple every day things. You can’t drive your kids to school if you’re about to pass out from drinking at eight in the morning, you can’t hold down a job if you always keep a bottle and some pills in your drawer. You make the wrong choices almost every time when under the influence.
It ruins your life, man.
Being gay means having romantic feelings for people of the same sex, instead of the opposite sex. It means loving someone of the same sex and wanting to find someone of the same sex to share your life with. Nothing else, and the only destructive element is being exposed to bigotry. It’s not a “challenge”, as you say, unless some asshole challenges you about it.
It IS a life, man.
The root of the bigotry problem lies in the mind of the bigots, while the problem with alcohol is it’s chemical makeup and effect on the body.
How in the name of God does that compare?
Nice response, morrison’s lament. And **Zarathustra’s ** analogy is a great case in point demonstrating the worthlessness of analogies in meaningful debate. Thru use of analogy, one can link any type of behavior or individual to a commonly accepted “evil” principle.
Well, the comparison I was trying to draw here was between two types of behavior that are both blamed on uncontrollable factors for the individual–genetics or early environment, as far as I understand. My point was that even though alcoholism is a terrible disease, and the people subject to it are in no way to blame for their condition, nonetheless there appear to be plenty of people who have dealt with it and are able to live without getting drunk and experiencing all the other attendant ills you’ve listed.
So here we have homosexuality, which is also supposedly caused by some uncontrollable factors in the individual. But people react with shock, dismay, and scorn when it’s suggested that it’s possible to get away from the homosexual lifestyle through treatment programs, for those who are willing to undergo them. No, a person practicing homosexuality has to give up on the idea that he can ever change his ways–even if he wants to–because he was “born” that way. Scorn is heaped upon any doctor or researcher suggesting that people who do want to stop practicing homosexuality ought to have treatment programs available to them.
Of course alcoholism and homosexuality are two very different conditions. My point, however, is that they seem to be ascribed to more or less the same causes, but in one case the condition is treatable and in the other case the condition is not.
Now, whether homosexuality one should be treated is a separate debate. My argument is that it might be a cop-out to cut off such a debate because of the false claim that it can’t be treated.
I hope that also makes it clear how andros has missed my point entirely. Although I’m curious, even if I were interested in pursuing the question you pose, why am I forbidden to mention AIDS? (What color is the sky? And no, the answer isn’t “blue”.)
You said yourself in the OP that no one really believes alcoholism is treatable, now you say people think it is. It’s not possible to treat it, it’s only possible to stop drinking which is the catalyst for the worst symptoms.
One is still an alcoholic and it has emotional symptoms even though you are sober. It doesn’t take much for a lot of people to fall of the wagon either, you just have to start again.
It’s a painstakingly difficult process and in a way it’s simply brainwashing in order to condition oneself not to drink. No one in their right mind would ever want to go through a process like this to change his sexual behavior, because after all neither homosexuality nor alcoholism is treatable, you can just stop the behavior it causes. Anyone who would want to commit their lives to changing their sexual behavior while still having feelings for his own sex obviously needs treatment for some deep lying emotional problems rather than an intensive 12 step program to stop his gay sex.
So what I’m basically trying to tell you is that you can stop the behavior, sure, but the behavior of obsessive drinking is destructive and having sex with your own sex is not. Furthermore, and this is my main point, you seem to forget that relationships and lifepartners are about feelings for most people, not sex. Why would you want to stop yourself from being happy with a partner of your choice when you’d just be holding back your feelings? Sure it’s possible to just sit at home and not date or go out with the opposite sex and not enjoy it. The problem is that it’s not really a treatment, and neither is the 12 step program, but at least that is about damage minimization.
Hope this answers your question: it’s possible to stop both beaviours but it’s only worth it in one case.
No, what is rejected is the idea that someone can be “cured” of homosexuality. That’s what these programs say — that those entering it are magically changed into heterosexuals, presumably by the heterosexuality fairy. Suddenly, Poof! All their desires for same-sex intercourse are removed, and attraction to members of the opposite sex is suddenly created, from nowhere.
Alcoholism programs, on the other hand, are exactly the opposite. If you are an alcoholic going into them, they say, you will still be an alcoholic throughout the program. What the programs do is give their members self-defense mechanisms to deal with their urges, to help them have satisfying, healthy lives free from alcohol.
Cyan. And I think andros was spot-on. Far too often, the presence of AIDS is used as proof of the unhealthiness of homosexuality, when, in truth, more heterosexuals have died of AIDS than homosexuals.
Why don’t we take your analogy to its logical extreme?
Seriel killers and habitual sex offenders can’t help being what they are, but nobody appears to draw the conclusion that this is an alternative “lifestyle” and should be accepted by society. Instead, it seems that they recieve no sympathy for the challange that they face and the outward expression of thier condition - killing and molesting-is still discouraged or condemned.
The answer is:
Claiming a behavior is uncontrolable or a lifestyle choice does not justify it. And if that behavior is dangerous to other people, it needs to be prevented or at least controlled.
The fact that it is an uncontrolable addition just makes the behavior more tragic since an alchohoic may be a good person when their sober. They just can’t stay sober.
I can’t really imagine what it’s like to have no control over my behavior. From what I understand, addictions are not a matter of “will power” and the adict can simply force themselves to stop.
“Then psychologists and sociologists came along and said that gays can’t help being gays, and therefore one can’t condemn some practice when it’s practioners are helpless to alter their behavior. Indeed, anyone who tries to offer “treatment” for homosexuality is a destructive quack, and threatens to damage the psyche of anyone submitting to such treatment.”
No, psychologists and sociologists came along and said that homosexuality should be removed from the list of psychological disorders because it does not qualify as a psychological disorder. Gay men and women are perfectly able to have happy and healthy relationships.
Nature/nurture questions had nothing to do with the decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM.
This rather breaks down the alcoholism analogy, which wasn’t particularly strong in the first place. Binges are intrinsically harmful. Gayness is not.
This is interesting-- the posters who have responded so far have taken a different tack than I expected. Please do correct me if I am wrong, but are alcoholics born needing alcohol? I know that children of alcoholics are sometimes pre-disposed to developing a later addiction.
Where the alcoholic/homosexual analogy breaks down for me is that sexuality, homo- or hetero-, is integral to a person’s identity. Gay posters on this board have shared many times, more calmly than I would be able to, that there was never a choice for them. They knew far before they reached sexual maturity (or even puberty) that they were gay. An alcoholic, OTOH (and again, correct me if I am wrong), is not born knowing s/he is an alcoholic. They become addicted over time, with repeated exposure to alcohol.
Far more importantly, there is no indication whatsoever that homosexuality harms anyone or anything. At its most extreme, homosexual behavior may harm the tender sensibilities of bigots and homophobes. I see no reason to pander to their outlook by treating homosexuality as an illness.
In short, is it so wrong for society to condemn homosexuality and encourage gays and lesbians to seek “treatment”? Hell yes, and here’s why:
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There is nothing harmful in homosexuality, outside of the mental harm gays come to at the hands of bigots and arses.
For society to regress to the point of labeling someone’s wholly benign behavior (and more importantly, identity) as an illness needing treatment would be inhumane and unfounded on anything resembling proof. It’s knee-jerk morality being proscribed by what I can only assume are fundie troglodytes.
And furthmore, is it OK for society to condemn alcoholism, and encourage alcoholics to seek treatment? Yes, and here’s why:
Alcoholism is harmful to the alcoholics physical and usually mental health. It affects the person’s behavior which impedes upon their functionality in work and home life.
By both condemning the practice and encouraging treatment, treatment itself becomes more widely available to those addicts who want help for their HARMFUL addiction. Though the need for alcohol may be beyond their control, it is not a benign aspect of their human identity, but an illness developed over time.
Actually, your description of the history of pathology of homosexuality is wrong. In the past, psychologists thought that homosexuality was pathological and disordered…that being homosexual was in itself harmful. What happened to change that wasn’t that psychologists found that homosexuality was innate…it was that they found that it wasn’t harmful.
The other problem with your analogy is that alcoholics engage in an an acceptable activity, but they do it in an unacceptable fashion. For the analogy to hold, society would have to decide that sexual activity between members of the same sex is acceptable for most people, but not for homosexuals, because they are unable to responsibly engage in the permitted behavior.
OK, I may have been wrong about that, although at worst I think I was subscribing to a popular misconception. But all the same, doesn’t it still boil down to a question of what kind of behavior society chooses to endorse (recoginzing it as a “benign aspect of their human identity”)? There may be some perfectly happy and well-adjusted recreational drug users out there, for example, and from a psychological standpoint there may be nothing wrong with them. Society still condemns this type of behavior, however. For me, this seems to suggest that (1) society has no obligation to endorse a category of behavior just because an individual is perfectly happy with it himself, and (2) in the case of an addictive personality, the fact that the person involved can’t help himself is a moot point–the behavior is still discouraged.
But within the general context of sexual behavior, hasn’t this almost always been true of homosexuality as well? Sexuality has always had acceptable and unacceptable outlets–at any given time, a man may have been forbidden to covet his neighbor’s wife, and I suspect that the man shouldn’t covet his (male) neighbor either was kind of understood to go along with that rule.
I personally don’t have much problem with homosexuality, but if I did, this would be it: as a married man, I might encounter temptation almost every day, and I can argue that it’s just natural for me to lust after the hot babe in the next cubicle–after all, I was born that way. But I don’t give in to temptation, because I have free will and am not a slave to my hormones. I might instead choose to be faithful to my wife.
Being truly unable to control one’s (possibly self-destructive) actions because of some deep-seated compulsion–isn’t that one way of looking at mental illness? And if I’m am in control of my actions, than I can’t argue that my behavior isn’t a matter of choice.
Religious beliefs are clearly a choice - you are not born with them, but rather you are taught them and society influences you to believe in them. Some people have broken free of the dogma instilled in them and have consciously chosen to live a life of free-thinking and openmindedness. Why can’t psychologists help those poor, deluded religious people to break free of their choice?
Not really. Alcoholism is a destructive behavior. Homosexuality is not. Alcoholism kills. Homosexuality does not. Alcoholism costs taxpayers money. Homosexuality does not.
Seems to me you’re not even comparing apples to oranges–you’re comparing apples to Wankel rotary engines.
Let’s see . . . firstly, if you refuse to deign to address the question I asked of you, there’s no reason I should answer yours. See, I can be just a childish as you. Aren’t we cool now?
Nope, I’m better than that. Reading over my previous post, I don’t see any prohibition of mentioning AIDS. It’s simply that AIDS is a disease that is related to unsafe sexual practice . . . not to homosexuality. Which means it’s unrelated to the relative harmfulness of alcoholism and homosexuality.
In other words, your analogy is flawed so deeply it is essentially meaningless.
I might note that you, however, have a socially acceptable outlet for your sexual needs which a homosexual has never had until the modern era. As a homosexual, I can tell you that your obvious rebuttal “You could get married to a woman and have sex with her, too” is no rebuttal. Sex with a woman would be about the same as masturbation for me on a good day. On an average day, I’d probably rather jack off. (To the women here, don’t take this as a denigration of women…it’s more to do with my desires than a woman’s desirability.)
I love the people who take the moral tack that “all those things I’d never want to do are baaaaaad. But don’t you dare make these things I do like to do be bad!”
Why don’t we just make heterosexual sex immoral and illegal? I could tell you that you have to get married to a man and have sex with him exclusively. The folks from the Fertility Commission will be around for your donation so a couple of nice lesbians can have children. Thanks for living in this homosexual world, citizen! Gee, you probably wouldn’t like that, huh?
jayjay (I’m gonna end up in the Pit over these idiots…)
First, alcoholism is a disease. For your own benefit of your argument, visit http://www.emedicine.com and do a search. What you seem to be describing is reforming the “behavior”, and psychological aspects of the individual with the disease, which is a part of the treatment.
Here’s where you lose me. First, define homosexuality for me. Are you defining homosexuality as a disease? Are you defining it as a challenge? Are you suggesting that homosexuals act “less gay”?
I don’t understand your question at this point. Help me out.
That’s funny, but I think you’re still missing my point. I could have gone to a greater extreme and compared homosexuality with serial killers (like msmith537 did) or to a lesser extreme and compared it to someone addicted to one of the milder recreational drugs. I’m talking about whether the “I can’t help myself” defense works in arguing against society’s traditional prohibition of certain behaviors. Whether homosexuality, or any of the other behaviors I’ve just mentioned, is actually destructive or to what degree–that’s beside the point.
Well, in my view at least, you were trying to hijack the thread with a tangential issue, and I refused to play along. Don’t think that’s childish–and I still don’t care to address the issue in this thread.
I looked at that link, but I didn’t see anything to address the question that’s uppermost in my mind: why is alcoholism considered a disease? My layman’s knowledge of the issue still stands as thus: alcoholism is considered a disease because (1) it is socially unacceptable, (2) many alcoholics are unhappy with being alcoholic, and (3) alcoholics don’t seem to be able to stop doing what they’re doing, though the exact mechanism of their compulsion is still poorly understood. (I don’t say (4) alcoholism destroys the victim’s health, because AFAIK cigarette smoking isn’t considered a disease, but has the same effect.)
Regarding homosexual behavior, condition (1) used to apply but doesn’t as much any more. Condition (3) appears to apply still, though, and it appears that in many cases conditon (2) does as well. So why is a study like Dr. Robert Spitzer’s, which puddlglum is discussing in a parallel thread, held in such instant disrepute? Why is it so offensive to suggest that homosexuality might be a treatable condition for those who do want to get away from it?
You’re pretty insightful there, in that you recognize that I’m rather unclear on the issue myself. Just what is this business of a “gay identity”, and basing one’s entire sense of self on what one prefers to do in bed? (I’ve never thought of myself as a Doggy-Position-American.) I tend to suspect that the modern “gay” construct is something that might be wholly unrecognizable to Oscar Wilde, James Buchanan, Michaelangelo, or Plato. With the possible exception of ol’ Oscar, I don’t know if any of them would even know what “acting gay” means, or how to act more or less so.
So I’m not sure either how to separate the behavior from the identity, and that might really get to the root of the debate here: is “being gay” really such an intrinsic part of one’s self that any attempt to stop “being gay” is ipso facto a destructive exercise?
In other words, why is it that alcoholism (or recreational drug usage, or whatever) considered a condition or disease that individuals ought to be encouraged to and assisted in getting away from, but it’s heresy–heresy, I say–to suggest that some kind of treatment ought to be offered to those individuals who might (delude themselves into thinking that they) want to stop doing what they’re doing? Is it really such a part of themselves that they have no other choice, and if so, what makes this different from the other behaviors listed above?
One’s sexuality is an intrinsic to one’s person as any other aspect of one’s sexuality, be it hetero or homo. When you stop being straight, I’ll stop being gay, deal? :rolleyes:
I see. So you’re uninterested in discussing why society has traditionally prohibited certain behaviors, and why those behaviors are different from one another.
:shrug: OK. I think that’s a startlingly poor choice on your part, but it won’t keep me up nights. Seeya.