The Associated Press reported last night that a first-of-its-kind ban on the rather controversial method of psychotherapy intended to eliminate same-sex attraction, or reparative therapy, is making its way through the California statehouse.
Plenty of conservative religious groups are upset about this. Representatives for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a non-profit organization that offers reparative therapy and other regimens that purport to change sexual orientation, have called the bill “a piece of social engineering masquerading as a solution to a clinical problem.” David Pickup, a California-registered clinician, said that “Any therapist worth his salt knows that homosexual feelings commonly occur in victims as a result of abuses. I ought to know because I was one of those boys.”
There does sometimes seem to be a strong causal connection between child sex abuse and later same-sex attraction. And because of this, a method of therapy that aims at repairing the individual, whether resulting in heterosexual attraction or not, is needed. But unfortunately, pathologizing sexual orientation has been shown to cause extreme depression and increased chances of suicide. The American Counseling Association and American Psychiatric Association disavow the therapy.
Robert Spitzer’s widely-cited 2001 study lends support to the idea that highly motivated individuals can in fact change, or at least mitigate, their same-sex attraction. But famously, he expressed doubts about his own study. When asked about the (many) criticisms leveled against him, he said “In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct. The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.” He even spoke with the editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior about writing a retraction, which the editor declined.
Stanton L. Jones, professor of psychology at Wheaton College, has written at length in the pages of First Things about the difficulties of integrating psychological diagnoses with traditional religious beliefs about the human person. In particular, he brings home the reality that religious voices went sorely amiss in their simplified acceptance of the clinical view of homosexuality as a disease, and were rather unprepared when the APA removed it from the category:
We were complicit, even if ignorantly and passively so, in the cultural embrace of the disease conceptualization of homosexuality. We off-loaded responsibility for the articulation of a thoughtful, caring, theologically rich, and pastorally sensitive understanding of sexual brokenness grounded in our various religious traditions by conceptualizing homosexuality as a disease, and so we were unprepared for the vacuum created by that explanation’s timely demise.
You can read the entire article in our February issue here.
The bill won’t apply to clergy or other religious institutions—insofar as they don’t offer licensed psychological counseling—and will almost certainly be taken to the full Senate.
May 9th, 2012 | 11:31 am
The problem with statements like ‘pathologizing sexual orientation has been shown to cause extreme depression and increased chances of suicide’ is that the sexual orientation itself may actually be encouraging extreme depression and increase chances of suicide. If you are heading down an evolutionary dead end, perhaps you feel it to be so?
It is politically advantageous to place the blame elsewhere, but ultimately, the person who engages in suicide is the person who caused the suicide.
May 9th, 2012 | 12:14 pm
August, your point is well taken. That statement about “pathologizing sexual orientation” and linking it to depression and suicide is very likely misattribution error.
Given the link between being sexually abused and homosexuality, is it not also plausible that sexual abuse could be the cause of depression and suicide, and no amount of “acceptance” or affirmation is going to eliminate it?
May 9th, 2012 | 12:37 pm
[...] Reparative Therapy in California – Mark Misulia, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
May 9th, 2012 | 12:59 pm
I am sorry to say I do not think we are near a solution, because the entire psychological industry is IMO still immature to the point of guesswork – whether they are stigmatizing people who have done no wrong, or encouraging people to behave badly, they are still expressing not a genuine ability to heal, so much as they are expressing their own (often confused) values, using living people as pawns.
I don’t know what position society ought to take with regard to sexual deviance, but it seems clear to me that at the one extreme, as long as we have freedom of religion in America, we are going to have to tolerate pretty much every type of sexuality that conforms to “informed consent” guidelines; everyone is going to have to get used to the idea that others have the right to engage in sexual behaviors they themselves find upsetting, gross, immoral, or otherwise inappropriate. At the same time, we are also going to have to set some outer limits on what is acceptable, which means some people are going to have sexual feelings they did not ask for, but are nonetheless stigmatized and prohibited. What is the most humane thing to do?
I think it’s important that nobody be forced into being expected to have sexual desires according to some other person or group’s idea of what they “ought” to be feeling. That means we can’t force gay people into therapies designed to “cure” them, and also that we equally shouldn’t try to force those who don’t like having homosexual tendencies into anything either – they should be allowed to reject that aspect of themselves, and try to ‘cure’ it if they wish, without being harassed or guilt-tripped by gay activists. The idea that we “know” – as it if were settled – what homosexuality is, where it comes from, and what can or can’t be done about it is pure hogwash. The idea that individuals need to have the freedom to do what they want sexually – but not the freedom to feel what they feel, because there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to feel – is contradictory; I don’t see much difference between telling someone how they ought to feel sexually vs. telling them how they ought to feel about their sexuality. We need to separate the political agendas, strong feelings, & personal investments on both sides from the question of what is actually best for people – but I don’t have much hope.
May 9th, 2012 | 1:17 pm
Michel Foucault has, rather drolly described the change that took place during the 19th century:
““Sodomy, that of the old civil or canon laws, was a category of forbidden acts. Their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage: a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a character, a life-style and a morphology, with an over-inquisitive anatomy and, possibly, a mysterious physiology. Nothing that he was, escaped his sexuality… It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature…. The sodomite had been a lapse; the homosexual was now a species.” [My translation]
May 9th, 2012 | 2:07 pm
The law, as I understand it, requires informed consent (in writing) from those who want to undergo “reparative therapy,” and does not recognize the right of those under 18 to give informed consent, thus barring “reparative therapy” for those under 18. I put reparative therapy in quotation marks, because to the best of my knowledge, there is no recognized therapy to change sexual orientation (or gender identity, for that matter). This of course does not mean some therapists don’t attempt to change sexual orientation. The advertise here on First Things all the time.
As I recall, Masters & Johnson claimed they could “convert” a homosexual to a heterosexual, but they also claimed they could convert a heterosexual into a homosexual. I don’t doubt that there are behavioral techniques that could accomplish to some extent the changing of a functioning homosexuals to functioning heterosexuals or vice versa, but the techniques would no doubt be considered immoral by Christians.
If someone was homosexual as the result of sexual abuse as a child, it does not seem to me that therapy attempting to undo the damage, even if it resulted in an extinguishing of homosexual feelings, would be considered “reparative therapy.” It would be therapy for childhood sexual trauma. Who could oppose that? (Whether that is really the mechanism by which anyone becomes homosexual is one question. Whether it can be undone by therapy is another question. I doubt that anyone knows the answers, in spite of what may have happened in individual cases.)
I am extremely skeptical about “reparative therapy,” but perhaps equally skeptical about state government trying to ban it. What does the state government know about psychotherapy? How are they going to differentiate between “reparative therapy” and, say, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in which some believe that if there is a problem, and all the issues are talked through, the problem will be solved without attempting any kind of “conversion”?
I personally think “reparative therapy”—to whatever extent it sets as a goal changing a person’s sexual orientation—is not therapy but something more akin to brainwashing, but I think it is a mistake for the state to ban it unless they can identify very specific techniques (e.g., use of electric shocks to try to suppress sexual excitation when viewing pornography) that can be demonstrated to be harmful or inhumane.
Nobody knows what makes gay people gay, and one reason for that is that nobody knows what makes straight people straight.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:29 pm
David Nickol writes: “nobody knows what makes straight people straight”
Actually, science has a handle on that through the theory of Evolution. Opposite sex attraction leads to more members of that species, which helps considerably in survival. Indeed, that is seen as a rationale for the existence of sex in the first place.
I think what David meant to say was that we don’t know the details of how that attraction is created in the individual, whether straight or gay.
May 9th, 2012 | 5:15 pm
Mike Melendez,
Thanks for attempting the clarification, but actually, I don’t believe it is known for a fact whether sexual orientation is “instinctual” or learned (in humans). As Hanne Blank says, “We don’t know much about heterosexuality. No one knows whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals.”
Sexual reproduction does not always require sexual attraction. Wikipedia notes: “Many plants make use of external fertilization, especially ones without bright flowers or other means of attracting animals. In many aquatic animals such as coral or hydra, eggs and sperm are simultaneously shed into the water, and the sperm swim through the water to fertilize the egg in a process known as broadcast fertilization. In many fish species, including salmon, the female will deposit unfertilized eggs in the substrate and the male will swim by and fertilize them.”
If human sexual behavior were truly instinctual, there would be no need for sex manuals.
May 9th, 2012 | 6:17 pm
“The law, as I understand it, requires informed consent (in writing) from those who want to undergo “reparative therapy,” and does not recognize the right of those under 18 to give informed consent, thus barring “reparative therapy” for those under 18.”
Hmmm….that’s interesting. Apparently there’s something unique about reparative therapy such that it gets treated differently from every other medical or psychiatric procedure that requires informed consent — i.e., parental consent doesn’t count. That’s a pretty hard case to make, that reparative therapy is inherently so much more dangerous and/or unproven than any other legal medical or psychiatric procedure that it needs to occupy a unique place in law.
May 10th, 2012 | 5:10 am
Aristotle believed “love between males” (tōn aphrodisiōn tois arresin) could result from childhood abuse. “for these arise in some by nature (phusei) and in others, as in those who have been the victims of lust from childhood, from habit.” [Arist Eth Nic 1148b 27-30] He discusses it along with “the habit of plucking out the hair or of gnawing the nails, or even coals or earth, I suppose because he regarded them as, essentially, futile activites.
May 10th, 2012 | 6:47 am
I am extremely skeptical about “reparative therapy,” but perhaps equally skeptical about state government trying to ban it.
It isn’t often that I agree with you, but I agree with this statement.
However I do not agree that the government is not qualified because “What does the state government know about psychotherapy? ” If the matter were a clear-cut medical issue, then the government could get expert testimony, the way it does with other technical issues.
The real problem IMO is that nobody knows. Psychology is still too young a field to have answers to these questions, and the potential for damage is huge.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:28 am
David Nickol writes: “If human sexual behavior were truly instinctual, there would be no need for sex manuals.”
That’s the best joke you’ve told yet, David! How did we humans ever procreate before we invented writing? I think you may be confusing embellishment with the core. Certainly today’s decolletage is not instinctual.
As to the rest, it seems you agree with me in general. We don’t know much about the immediate causes of sexual attraction, if any, in any living entity. But we do know about the origins of sex itself and the reasons for straight sex in humans.
However, the idea that straight sexual attraction and procreation are not connected seems very far-fetched indeed. You might even say, unscientific.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:50 am
Hmmm….that’s interesting. Apparently there’s something unique about reparative therapy such that it gets treated differently from every other medical or psychiatric procedure that requires informed consent — i.e., parental consent doesn’t count. That’s a pretty hard case to make, that reparative therapy is inherently so much more dangerous and/or unproven than any other legal medical or psychiatric procedure that it needs to occupy a unique place in law.
I think the nature and politics of homosexuality being what it is today, it’s not unreasonable to be concerned about whether kids are really getting the advice based on what’s best for them – or whether the adults are injecting their own emotions, anxieties, and even ideological concerns into it, using the kids as projection spaces.
The only thing I’d say against this idea is that we aren’t recognizing that it’s equally harmful when either side of the political spectrum does it to any young man or woman.
The development of sexuality is far more complex, far more personal, and far less clear-cut than other aspects of puberty/adolescence. We can say there is a ‘right’ way to feel about developing an adult body: if a person is feeling abnormal amounts of shame or negativity toward a healthy body, something can be said to be ‘wrong’, and we can tell what a healthy body looks like vs. a body with a problem.
But we can’t apply that same level of certainty toward sexuality. To the extent that anyone has the “right” to tell another person how they “ought” to feel about sexuality, I would agree it is the parents who have that right – but I would also agree that there are limits to that, and the state has a valid interest in protecting children from excesses if those excesses are likely to cause harm. The question is to me not whether the state has a right to set boundaries on parents, but rather when and how it is appropriate to do so.
But the state also has a responsibility not to abuse that power – and I don’t think the people who have (or covet) that power really understand what an awesome responsibility it is, to be entrusted not to abuse that power.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:01 pm
That’s the best joke you’ve told yet, David! How did we humans ever procreate before we invented writing?
Mike Melendez,
I am glad you are amused, but I am afraid you are wrong. If human beings have instincts at all, they are very limited, and human beings do not “instinctually” have sexual intercourse. Put a male dog (or any male mammal) with a receptive female dog, and they will have sexual intercourse even if they have never had it or witnessed it before. Their behavior is instinctual. Put a sexually mature male with a sexually mature female in a sexually exciting situation, and if neither has no prior experience or knowledge about sexual intercourse, they will not instinctually have sex. They may fumble around and figure something out—which is not instinctual behavior—or they may not.
We are humans because we have culture and we act based on learned behavior, not instinctive behavior.
Do a bit of googling on the question of whether human beings have instincts if you don’t believe me.
May 16th, 2012 | 8:20 am
“Given the link between being sexually abused and homosexuality”
Might it be that some children are selected for sexual abuse _because_ of their sexual orientation, not the other way around?
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