New study not reliable

I won't spend much time demolishing Columbia University psychiatrist Robert Spitzer's study purporting to show that sexual orientation can be changed; or the study by Columbia psychologists\nMichael Schroeder and Ariel Shidlo, announced at the same time, which supposedly showed that "reparative" therapy doesn't work. (Or as one local gay man calls it, confusing one hot issue with another, "reparation" therapy). Neither study has passed peer review; both massage the impressionistic and unverifiable self-reports of interview subjects.\nPsychiatric treatments purporting to "cure" homosexuality have a long and dishonorable history; that such treatments do not work isn't news either. (Freud himself said so in a famous 1936 letter). Even heterosexual supremacists' justification of the treatments hasn't changed in thirty years: a writer for the Wall Street Journal opined that while the "vast majority of homosexuals are happy with their sexuality ... those who seek to change (should) be allowed to do so without being vilified." I haven't noticed that "those who seek to change" were being vilified. It's the quacks who fraudulently claim to be able to change them who are vilified, and should be.\nOr those who pimp for the quacks: Remember the self-proclaimed ex-gay, Newsweek cover boy John Paulk, who was found last fall in a Washington, D.C., gay bar. He claimed he was just there to use the restroom, and maybe he was -- where else would he have taken a pickup?\nI'd rather pick a bone or two with Schroeder and Shidlo, the authors of the other study. Shidlo told an interviewer from Newsweek, "When you hear that something's a choice, that means someone can choose it or 'unchoose' it ..." Nonsense. Choices are not necessarily reversible: just think of jumping off the top of the Empire State Building. Only the most trivial choices can be reversed, and maybe not even they. Pick up a penny; you can set it back down, but you cannot undo the fact that you picked it up. You can regret having lost your virginity, but you can't get your virginity back. (Not surprisingly, the Christian right also markets the bogus notion of "secondary virginity").\nIf the "reparative therapists" are correct, then homosexuality is not a choice: applying medical language to mental conditions absolves "victims" of mental "illness" from moral responsibility for their condition. If Jerry Falwell, who recently debated lesbian conservative Elizabeth Birch on CNN, really believes that homosexuality is "chosen behavior," then he should denounce the change therapists for treating it as if it were an illness.\n"Choice" is not a scientific concept. There is no way to tell scientifically whether something is a choice or not. Much of psychology (a discipline at about the same stage of development as surgery was when barbers did it) seeks to ignore choice, when it doesn't reject the notion altogether: all our behavior is determined by conditioning, or early family relationships, or our genes.\nThe really strange thing is the way gay and pro-gay critics of "reparative" therapy accept its premises, which are certainly open to argument. The notion that successful "reparative" therapy proves\nhomosexuality a "choice"; that "choices" are trivial and reversible; that no one would ever choose to be different from the majority; that to be different in any significant way is to be sick, maladjusted and in need of treatment from competent and licensed professionals.\nThose of us who remember the 1950s know that such totalitarian doctrines were the bread and butter of the mental health professions then. It wasn't limited to homosexuality: the mental health of single people was suspect, as was that of married people who chose not to have children, or people who joined minority religious movements, or who simply refused to join the grey-flannel rat race.\nThe post-Stonewall gay movement of the 1970s opposed and fought this tyranny, denying that psychiatrists and other professionals were competent to tell anyone what was sick and what was healthy. Since then, many GLBT people have become therapists themselves, often with the same grandiose delusions about their authority, and the same abuse of power. This, I think, is what "mainstream" gays call becoming respectable. Quite the opposite.\nEven if "reparative therapy" worked, no one would be obliged to submit to it. The crucial weakness of most pro-gay critics is that they don't seem to realize this; that it's a weakness is shown by their willingness to accept Schroeder and Shidlo's study, which is as worthless as Spitzler's. I choose to affirm my loves, not to try to excuse them as something I'm stuck with.