APA Say No Cure for Gay

The AP is reporting the American Psychological Association (APA) declared that mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments.

In a resolution adopted on a 125-to-4 vote by the APA’s governing council, and in a comprehensive report based on two years of research, the 150,000-member association put itself firmly on record in opposition of so-called “reparative therapy” which seeks to change sexual orientation.  Instead, the APA urged therapists to consider multiple options that could range from celibacy to switching churches to help clients whose sexual orientation and religious faith conflict.

The report breaks new ground in its detailed assessment of how therapists should deal with gay clients struggling to remain loyal to a religious faith that disapproves of homosexuality.  No solid, independent evidence exists that change from these “pray away the gay” therapies is likely, and some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.

Amen.  For those of us with personal experience in these reprogramming summer camps, I applaud the APA for their progressive approach in offering professional alternatives to this erroneously perceived and emotionally charged issue.

I have jokingly referenced my first experience with Race for the Cure as not the 5K for Breast Cancer research, but the mad dash and squealing tires toward my summer-of-misspent-youth home in the mountains called, “The Retreat”. All this because I was caught in bed with a saxophone player in the marching band.  Now, being a Southerner of a certain station, fraternizing with a mere member of the marching band would have gotten me certain condemnation, but considering this sax came with a female blonde attached, well, that was a sin of a different color.

I spent the dog days of my almost 17^th year obtaining my first advance degree, in lying.  There was no other alternative.  To graduate, these so called counselors had to believe I was cured.  And I was…hardened like jerky and tempered by the ignorance of these laymen of the Lord.

As I look back on my history, I wonder how differently life could have been for teenagers of my era had we been provided a choice of alternative therapies sanctioned by medical professionals instead of Southern Baptists ministers and their minions vowed to rid the earth of the “homasexshul” scourge.

Choice.  It seems so simple. I don’t mean choice as it pertains to whether you are or you aren’t, I believe that is genetically encoded from birth.  But just as medical professionals eventually branded the practice of forced change for left-handed children as unnatural and even dangerous for the individual, the same can now be said for inherent sexuality.  The choice is up to the individual what to do with it.

Faith is a very significant thread in the embroidery of human life.  This new approach allows those clients, whose sexual orientation and religious faith conflict, the opportunity to embrace those all encompassing aspects of religion such as love, hope, and forgiveness in order to transcend negative beliefs about homosexuality.  If celibacy is the alternative to rejecting personal religious principles in regard to faith, then so be it.  Medical professionals should have no problem in offering the recourse in order to achieve individual resolution.

Judith Glassgold, a Highland Park, N.J. psychologist who chaired the APA task force, said, “The religious psychotherapists have to open up their eyes to the potential positive aspects of being gay or lesbian. Secular therapists have to recognize that some people will choose their faith over their sexuality.”

Sounds like common sense, no wonder it took so long to make it official.