In the not-too-distant past, I noted long before I saw it written or heard it said anywhere else that I didn’t think Bristol Palin’s marriage to the father of her son was going to happen. When that turned out to be correct, I made another note of it, congratulated myself at seeing through the kerfluffle of various amounts of posturing about and/or outright avoidance tactics towards the entire topic by the principals and the media involved, and moved on.
But it’s happened again. And I’m no longer feeling so self-congratulatory. I don’t want to be able to read these people’s minds! I don’t want them to be an open book to me! I don’t want to understand them this well!
Yes, William Saletan is at it again, but this time, he isn’t writing about ladyparts or about any of the other stuff he usually expounds upon (which I mentally dubbed “Frankenstein medicine” a while back, though he’s made a few notable segues into race issues). He…is…writing…about…gays.
Before I go on, let’s recap something from my Saletan bitch session from last week:
…the place where I usually see [Saletan's tactics of "oh of course I'm pro-choice! and now that I've said that, let me do my best to completely undermine the pro-choice stance"] used over and over is in the gay/lesbian debate world, under the rallying cry of “Of course we don’t hate homosexuals themselves! What we hate is homosexuality. Hate the sin, love the sinner!”
Let’s recontext what Saletan has to say, and see if it starts to sound awfully damn familiar to you too:
Every
abortionhomosexuality dilemma is different, because every situation is different. The person best situated to make the right decision is thepregnant womanperson having the homosexual feelings.A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this point.***So why do I keep bringing up
abortionhomosexuality as a moral problem? Because it is a moral problem. It’s the destruction ofa developing human beingthe traditional family unit. For that reason, the less we do it, the better. When I sayabortionhaving a homosexual relationship is bad, I’m not saying it’s necessarily worse thanbringing a child into the world in lousy circumstancesnever marrying someone of the opposite sex. I’m saying it’s worse thanavoiding unintended pregnancy in the first placehaving homosexual desires in the first place. That’s why I keep pushingcontraceptionconversion therapy. If youcause an unintended pregnancyenter into a homosexual relationship andan abortionget married to that person becauseyou didn’t want to wear a condomyou didn’t want to undergo conversion therapy, you should be ashamed.
***He hasn’t written one about homosexuality. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that there was one in the works.
…and, of course, today’s offering from Lord Saletan IS:
Shades of Gay
The heterogeneity of homosexuality.Researchers contacted more than 1,800 mental health professionals to find out whether they would ever try to change a client’s sexual orientation. Of the 1,328 practitioners who responded, one in six admitted to having helped at least one patient attempt to alter homosexual feelings. The total number of such cases reported by the respondents was 413. That’s nearly one case for every three therapists.
The study’s authors find this disturbing. Treatment to change homosexuality has proved ineffective and often unsafe, they argue. Therefore, therapists shouldn’t try it.
If only life were that simple.
It IS that simple, unless you’re a professional abortion concern troll turning your well-honed skills towards also becoming a homosexuality concern troll.
(OMG, he actually IS WRITING IN SUPPORT OF CONVERSION THERAPY, I thought I was just making a witty comparison..!!!)
In the big picture, the authors are right.
And Will Saletan agrees, women should have the right to choose!
But
I think we all saw that word coming…
…therapy isn’t about the big picture. It’s about lots of little pictures: the worlds unique to each of us. You and I may have the same sexual orientation, but our lives are very different. You know nothing of my family, my religion, or my community. You don’t even know how straight or gay I am. If I tell my therapist that I’d rather try to modify my feelings than give up my faith or my marriage, who are you to second-guess her or me?
In the British study, the therapists who admitted to collaborating in such cases weren’t anti-gay.
Well, of course they weren’t, and Saletan isn’t either, and he is ALSO pro-choice. One thing to love about the English language is the flexibility with which people are able to use it.
The rest of the article is typical Saletan concern trolling, liberally sprinkled with bizarre phrases that only make sense if you don’t think about them too closely, like
The therapists also distinguished between clear-cut and borderline homosexuality.
…”borderline homosexuality?” Like, your right hand yearns to touch Bob but your left hand would really rather stroke Susan?…wtf?
The idea of heterosexuality as a valid “lifestyle choice” turns the argument for sexual acceptance on its head. If a patient prefers to adjust his orientation to family or cultural circumstances, rather than the other way around, should the therapist challenge him?
…uh, the “patient” is always trying to adjust his orientation to family or cultural circumstances; it is NEVER the other way around–at least, this would be the absolute first time ever I have heard of the epidemic of people flocking to therapist’s offices to try to “convert” to homosexuality.
Sometimes, the substitution makes sense. When the patient is clearly gay
…”clearly gay?” Like, when he’s wearing lipstick and heels or she’s in steel-toed workboots and a buzzcut? Yargh…
…and when his discomfort with homosexuality isn’t fundamental to his personality, it’s logical to target the discomfort. But not every case is that simple. A friend once told me she was “primarily wired toward women.” She was my girlfriend for the next year and a half. Another friend told me he couldn’t countenance homosexuality because he was “obliged to believe it’s a mortal sin.” He came out of the closet a year later, but he never left Christianity or conservatism. Another friend lived as a gay man for years, then carried on a multiyear, monogamous relationship with a woman, then went back to the gay life.
“The evidence shows that you cannot change sexual orientation,” says King. But on the margins, I’ve seen it happen.
No, you haven’t. Rinse, repeat–NO, you haven’t, Dumb Ass! Good lord…case 1: your girlfriend told you she was bisexual. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but no, she wasn’t “borderline” or “marginally” straight and the magnificence of your manlyhood resolved her oh-so-confused feelings on the subject–she was bisexual, which is why she used the word PRIMARILY rather than EXCLUSIVELY. Case 2: Your friend was gay, from start to finish, which amazingly enough has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with having religious and political beliefs (I know, can you believe it?). Case 3: Is bisexuality something you just can’t comprehend? Either he’s taking it up the butt and therefore he is G-A-Y or he’s sticking it in the pussy and dammit for several years there he was STRAIGHT!! so he was clearly radically switching his orientation, back and forth, back and forth..! …er, or he’s just bisexual, like your girlfriend in case 1. (So anticlimactic, but the truth often is, I’ve found. Sigh.)
So, what’s going on with me..? Am I mutating into a conservative concern troll or Greta Van Susteren? How is it that my passing observations are coming so ickily true..?
I think I need a hug.
* hug *
Saletan seems to have read the article’s conclusions, perhaps in abstract, and completely missed what the authors were saying:
Saletan reads this and asks, “Well, what if I really, really, really want to? Should an ethical therapist really say no?”
Yes. That is exactly what an ethical therapist is to say.
“I can’t do that.”
There is no accepted, verifiable evidence supporting the efficacy of treatments to change sexual orientation. There is evidence that such treatments may in fact cause harm, at least in certain circumstances. Even lacking this, it is unethical for a therapist to pursue reparative therapy, since their job is to provide care, not the appearance of care.
This doesn’t preclude helping the patient navigate their own sexual desires versus their image of themselves or the image their community has of them. Perhaps this kind of therapy is what many therapists are actually talking about—I’ll have to read the full paper. But perhaps—and I think this is more likely—these therapists actually meant that they were pathologizing these patients sexual orientations. That 17% of therapists interviewed said they had done so is a pretty horrifying indicator of pervasive, internalized homophobia.
A word, I’ll note, that Saletan did not say even once.
I’m surprised he didn’t wade into gay IQ levels as they relate to rest of the population. I believe there have been several studies on GayQ…
Frighteningly enough, from reading the paper it appears that most people who received this treatment told the counselor that they were confused about their sexual orientation, not that they wanted to change it.
Thank you! Every time I see these “reparative” guys I’ve been initially appalled at the real damage that they do, but I’m also confused at the point. If they can “fix” a “gay” person to genuinely want the other then hooray, you’ve discovered the Kinsey scale of bisexuality and found a Kinsey 5 rather than 6.
It all comes down to a combination of ignorance and a firm desire not to learn anything about the people you’re talking about. Though I’m frankly amazed that anyone, even a conservative Catholic like Saletan hasn’t heard about bisexuality…though I guess with all of the talk about “fluid” sexuality that’s been coming out lately, maybe that’s a more common problem than I want to think about…
But then I loop back to being appalled that there are still non-fundies who even consider that “reparative” therapy isn’t a bunch of criminal BS. Saletan is deeply conservative and reactionary, not simply because he’s an idiotic concern troll, but because he is hostile to the idea of going to any source or numbers and looking at the medical facts. Both on abortion and reparative therapy, the doctors’ guidelines if not apparently the doctors themselves are clear about the medical reality both about the value of fetus versus mother and sexuality as a pathology and trying to “change” it.
You can change expression or honesty, but a Kinsey 5 will always be a Kinsey 5, a Kinsey 6 will always be a Kinsey 6 and his complete stupidity on this fact makes me question whether or not he’s really examined himself to know if he’s really a Kinsey 0.
I need a hug too. I came to know of Him today, and wasted three hours on His articles, which was like having my brain kicked for an eternity. Most of my intelligence evaporated, I drank much brandy and vodka, and came to this Site to seek sufferers of a similar trauma.
I shouldn’t have been troubled and driven to the edge of madness by a man from a foreign continent, with a baffling Politics (Is a Liberal Republican the inverse of a Conservative Monarchist?), but I was.
He worries me. Because I believe those possessed of His belief-set shall inherit the Earth. He exposed a fear which has been dawning on my mind for years. Ideas thrive because of their untruth, because they are insane, because they induce their bearers to regard those who don’t treat embryos as ‘us’ as wicked and evil, because they erect a wall of hatred between the mad and the not mad, and the mad triumph because their loyalties are totalised by their madness, Christians gladly suffering death-by-Lion, embryo-worship. I depart to daub this on a wall in human-muck. Pray for me.