How am I responsible?
This happened before I ever met him.
If your speaking supportively of reparative therapy based on your lying friend causes one more person to go through the hell of reparative therapy – to let themselves be brainwashed by a bunch of Jesus freaks with a seething hatred of homosexuals – to force themselves back into the living death of the closet – then yes, you are responsible.
Reparative therapy is pure, complete evil, as is anyone who supports it.
vanilla, it’s entirely possible that he’s not lying per se, but perhaps he’s in denial and is lying to himself. Or else, like I said, he swings both ways.
spectrum, I wouldn’t go that far. I think people like this deacon are in need of help, and I feel for him-as well as his family. Imagine you are married to someone who is lying about his or her sexual orientation and years later you find out? That’s got to hurt.
spectrum- I don’t speak supportively of therapy.
I don’t know if he had “therapy.”
From what I know (and I have’t seen him in years) Jesus just healed him all by Himself.
And his wife does know he claims he used to be gay.
She believes he is not anymore.
Not enough research has been done, but all studies that I know of have have supported the theory that it is partially or totally innate (by innate I mean pre-natal – genetic, hormonal, etc).
Hypothalamus Studies
In 1991, California neurologist Simon LeVay performed autopsies on several women, ostensibly heterosexual men, and self-identified homosexual men. He was looking at the hypothalamus – the part of the brain believed to control things like sexual desire and other basic animal functions. There’s a part of this organ which is smaller for women than for men. LeVay found that the gay men had a hypothalamus comparable to that of women.
LeVay was criticized because of the small sample he used for his study, and because all of the gay men had died of AIDS. However, the same study was done in the Netherlands in 1989, and was replicated in 2001, and again in 2004, in the US.
While it is possible for sexually dimorphic brain structures to be altered by behaviour, experiments on rats in 1965 (which showed that altering the prenatal hormone levels in rats could alter their brains and their sexual behaviour), and another study on exclusively homosexual rams that backs this up. And no one’s going to suggest that the rams and the rats were “influenced” to become gay.
Twins Study
Several studies seem to suggest that homosexuality is at least half inborn (one study way back in 1952 suggested 100%). Basically, the way a twin study is done is this: find a group of homosexual men or women with an identical twin, another group with a fraternal twin, and another group with an adoptive twin. Compare their sexuality to the amount of genes they share, and look for a difference.
In the lowest concordance (a study of women done in 1993, identical twins had a 48% concordance, whereas fraternal twins had a concordance of 22%), the number of genes shared corresponded closely to the chance that they shared a sexual orientation. Twin studies are significant, because other factors – parenting, age group, etc – are as close as two human beings can be.
My cite for this is the same page linked above. These are only two examples. There are dozens of others on that page.
(You know, one the great things about being gay is that’s it’s forced me to learn a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise have learned. I can now hold a coherent conversation of behavioural genetics, biblical Hebrew, and Canadian constitutional law, mostly because I keep getting into debates like this one)
Guin, that’s precisely why reparative therapy, and its backers, are so evil: they harm people. They do permanent, scarring, psychological harm. And the lies don’t stick. If a person is truly gay, they can’t deny their reality forever. They will either become violently depressed, violently alcoholic, suicidal or – the best possible solution – honest about themselves again. Which then rips apart their innocent families. It’s a cycle of cruelty and hate, all brought to you by Team Jesus.
The APA has been very clear about the dangers of this. But fundamentalist Christians don’t care about the harm they do. They just care about pushing fags back into their caskets – I mean closets – and making sure they only fall to their knees to Jesus.
As you said, you don’t know his mind. You believe he’s an honest person. The problem is, he may not know his own mind. You say he was totally homosexual. Okay, but what does that mean? Kinsey 6? Kinsey 3 but in denial? Was he aware of the very real orientation of bisexual when he made such claims? Did you know him when he was “totally gay”? Were you able to observe him on a regular basis as he went through his conversion? Just taking him at his word (as reported above), there are so many details that could be swept under the rug if they are inconvenient.
It reminds me of the people who claim miracles in situations where other people can explain the events without appealing to the supernatural. But we must still accept their word that a miracle occurred since we weren’t there or didn’t experience the same thing.
Without knowing him personally, and since neither of us know his mind, I would speculate (not declare) that he might have been somewhat bisexual, may not have realized it, but with enough self-loathing and psychic mutilation, might have managed to supress his same-sex leanings enough for his opposite-sex leanings to fall in love with and subsequently marry a woman. He may still have homosexual urges now and again, but his faith in Jesus allows him to squelch them since he also has heterosexual urges (and now an outlet).
Taking the risk of being repetative, I offer this scenario as a possibility that maybe he, in his religiously-induced state, may not have seen.
I did not know him before he was married and claiming straightness.
That was about a decade at least before I met him.
Therefore, the details of how he felt about whom and how he came to the conclusions he did are now obscured by the distance of time. We all condence and finctionalize our past experiences to one degree or another, most often to make them easier to remember and communicate. It is possible that he’s remembered the parts that fit his story bettern than those that don’t.
JOhn.
I didn’t miss your point, although you maybe missed the blogger’s. He’s not simply trying to go celibate. He wants his god to erase his desires.
I’m a big-time fan of free will, too. But I realize it applies to behaviours, and doesn’t always apply to fundamental states of the human soul. Could he abstain from sex? Certainly. Could he remove the desire? No.
Let’s take another example. Let’s take hunger. Hunger may relate to a bodily state (as can sexual desire), but hunger itself exists entirely in the mind. A person can suppress hunger, can ignore it with varying degrees of success, but cannot make it cease to exist. And hunger – though ultimately a psychological state – is certainly hardwired into us. We don’t pick it up from our parents.
I don’t see how it’s ironic. I have personal experience of the state of mind that’s afflicted our blogger, and yes, I do feel that gives me more of a right to speak on this subject than someone who has not. I have known people who’ve tried this road and come away wounded, but I have never met a person who walked it and came back unscathed.
Would you prefer me to say that, “Even though the sun has always risen, every morning of every day of my life, that’s no proof it will rise tomorrow?” If all my experience, and all objective evidence (for objective evidence, read the posts and links above) says it will, I will trust that, and not yourself.
This process is harmful. It is as harmful as anoerexia or heroin use, and to encourage it is to encourage self-destructive behaviour. We can’t live his life for him – he’ll discover it on his own, as so many others have done before – but would you get out of your damn cheerleader’s outfit and pompoms for a minute? Jeez.
Umm, Brandus, may I please use this as a sig? It’s utterly brilliant!
I also disagree with the statement “If it can be changed, anyone can change it if they try hard enough” - there’s a big logical difference, in my opinion, between that which is possible to do and that which an individual can accomplish by his own effort of will. I don’t think homosexuality is something you can wish yourself out of, but I still think it might be possible for it to be changed (although the process might irreparably damage the subject in some, most or all maybe even all cases).
That’s what I have been trying to say all along; not ‘you can change it’ (and certainly not ‘you should try to change it’, but ‘maybe it can be changed’.
Didn’t they used to use shock therapy for this?
Or aversion therapy?
I would also like to point out one odd thing about the skepticism around homosexuality.
Who here agrees with this statement?
“Sexual desire is innate. We are hardwired to want to have sex.”
Most people take this as a given. The basic assumption – one so widespread it’s almost universal – is that human beings come programmed with a set of sexual desires, that trigger with puberty. The assumption that sexual desire is a part of our instictual animal nature is one that cuts deep into our language. When we want to express disgust with someone’s lack of sexual self-control, we say they “rut like pigs,” “fuck like bunnies,” or are “like cats in heat.” And while we’re on the subject of animals, nobody ever suggests that an animal’s sexual desires are the result of conditioning.
Nobody ever questions that sexual object choice is genetic when that sexual object is the opposite sex. Nobody (that I’ve ever met, anyway) would ever be shocked at the suggestion that a young man starts to notice girls because his hormones are racing when he hits a certain age. It is accepted wisdom that sexuality is a very physical thing.
In short, we are all genetic determinists when it comes to sexuality. Most of us, anyway. So why is it such an absurd suggestion that same-sex sexual object choice is inborn? Why isn’t heterosexuality – or sexuality, period – subject to the same scrutiny?
Now, conventional wisdom isn’t scientific proof, of course. But this is not really a debate about science. The scientists, both psychologists and biologists, have weighed in with a “probably” (the firmest answer you can really get out of a scientist).
The real question is not, “Is homosexuality inborn?” The real question is, “Why are homosexuals forced to prove our emotions are real and permanent, when the same point is accepted as self-evident if expressed by a heterosexual?”
Hey, that makes two of us. I started watching Star Trek when I was 12 (second season). Wil Wheaton was 16. I had a real crush on him, though I was already knee-deep in trying to change myself, so I didn’t admit it until years later.
And DocCathode, Riker and Worf looked way too old for me. It was probably the beards. Crusher was more my age group.
Geordi was okay, though. 
Yes. And they didn’t work, which means generations of homosexual men were electrocuted, committed, and locked away for absolutely no good reason.
The spiritual descendants of those atrocities are the “reparative” “therapies”.
Would that be electro-shock therapy as in the same type that was used to treat depression, or would it be the kind used to torture suspects in some Guatemalan military compound?
Something can be real and permanent, as far as nature is concerned, and still be subject to real fundamental change as a result of artificial processes.
I actually think it might be possible for someone to apply a set of processes that might result in me (I am currently heterosexual) considering myself a homosexual person in nothing like a superficial way. I think there is a very high (and I have to admit possibly 100%) risk that the processes might also drive me batshit insane.
IIRC, It was not electroconvulsive therapy (which I think has been effectively used against some brain disorders), but part of a regime of aversion therapy; painful electric shocks being administered at the same time as images of naked men - that sort of thing.
I won’t rule out the possibility that science might one day be able to manipulate brain structures, genes, and hormones to the point where they twist our minds and souls into a different shape.
I only hope we’ve evolved as a society enough not to miuse science in such a way. We don’t yet understand that diversity is sacred and necessary. Such a technology, dumped on us now, would be a catastrophe.
I do not believe that that technology exists now. There’s a good reason why groups like Exodus International don’t publish their success rates, and why the ex-gay movement keeps losing its spokespeople to the growing number of ex-ex-gays.