Replies to '06/06 "I'm Gay, OK?"'

I meant no offense to you as a Jew and a self proclaimed ex-gay. I believe if my post was defamatory the moderators would never have posted it. However, everything I posted is true and supported by facts and it was not meant to harm but to inform people of what the medical, scientific and professional community have to say. Nothing I posted was untrue.  

Conversion camps for gay people WAS an initiative by Nazi Germany. Homosexuals were placed there wearing pink triangles just as Jews were placed there wearing yellow stars. You were both persecuted by hateful people. This is a FACT and part of the awful history of the holocaust. I mentioned it not to demean you but to show the some of the HISTORY of "coversion therapy". If you read the post with an open mind you will also see that it was meant to demonstrate that if being gay is a simple lifestyle choice like chosing to play tennis then all those extreme measures to "change" gay people would (1) be unecessary and (2) result in far greater success rates. Which they do not.  

I agree with you that people can choose how they want to live their life. I know most self proclaimed ex-gays speak of the their homosexuality in negative terms. Guilt, social pressure, relgious pressure, lonliness, prejudice etc. which leads to self-destructive behavior, which leads to MORE pain are usually part of the accounts they relate. If you believe you chose to be gay and you can change, that is your right.  

Other gay people learn to accept their sexuality by and surround themselves with people who will love and support them just as they are. That is also their right.   

The fact is gay people are free to live as they are or attempt to change into something else or at least try to live as something else. Gay people are just fine as they are. There is nothing wrong with them, they are just as intelligent, law abiding, well adjusted, loving, responsible etc. as any other person. They can have fulfilling family and community lives, careers, spiritual satisfaction etc. just as much as any other person.  

Everyone should have the opportunity to be FREE and enjoy FAMILY LIFE and FELLOWSHIP within their chosen faith or community and happy and productive and even have a wonderul relationship with God, whther they are gay or straight or a gay person trying to be straight. NEVER once did I advocate discrimination or hatred of ex-gays, so there is no need to get overly defensive or overly sensetive. I only quoted from recognized sources and investigations into the ex-gay movement and what America's Medical bodies think of these organisations including NARTH, which you referenced. NARTH is not recognized by the respected medical community. Sorry if that hurts your feelings but it is true. NARTH broke off from the officially recgonised American Psychological Association in the 1970s.  

You mentioned Dr. Sptizer, and I am sorry to report that his study has since been rejected by the American Psychological Association and the majority of the recognized medical community. Why?  

1. Dr. Spitzer sampled from ex-gay ministries and took testimonials at face value, with no checks on the reliability or validity of their self-reports. In his relatively brief interviews with them, Dr. Spitzer may not have been able to detect factual errors or misstatements – intentional or inadvertent – by the activists.

     

2. Dr. Spitzer's study also appears to suffer from some of the same methodological flaws as the published studies discussed above. For example, only a minority of the participants (about 40%) were exclusively attracted to partners of the same sex before they attempted to change. In other words a lot of the people were BISEXUAL, not exclusively homosexual.
3. Dr. Spitzer did not claim that his findings could be generalized to the gay and lesbian population at large. Indeed, he was quoted in the New York Times as saying that, despite the findings from his study, the number of homosexuals who could successfully become heterosexual was likely to be "pretty low." He also conceded that participants in his study were "unusually religious" and were not necessarily representative of most gay men and lesbians in the United States .

     

Seems you need to follow up on recent developments. The thing is, although all of this has happened a WHILE ago, ex-gay activists are STILL using his flawed research even though it is PROVEN to be inaccruate and non-emperical, BY HIS OWN ADMISSON.  

As for your URL to refute the existence of homosexuality in animals, I know this is a very sore point for ex-gays because homosexual behavior has been observed in over 200 species of animals. Most recently, Researchers at Oregon State University think that new studies showing that about 8 percent of rams are "male-oriented". OAS_AD('300x250_1'); The findings, by researchers at Oregon State, Oregon Health & Science University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Sheep Experiment Station, suggest that homosexuality may be biologically driven. The study began in 1995, when researchers at the federal Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho , noticed that some rams refused to mate with female sheep. Of these animals, some showed no interest in males or females, and a fraction preferred to mount other rams. In rams who like other rams, the anterior preoptic area of the hypothalamus was about half the size of this part of the brain in heterosexual rams.  

I am certain things like this go ignored by many. Anyhow, I wish you best of luck with being ex-gay. It's your life, live it as you think best for you :)  

P.S. You assume I am a gay activist just because I speak positively of gay people and present the facts by the American Psychological Association. You should know this is simply what the majority of fair minded, straight people believe. We don't have to be gay to speak up for gay issues.