I was reading this post from Rainbow Bloggers entitled "The Ex-Gays" and wanted to share my two cents' worth. That I did but felt the urge to say just a little bit more and so here's my own post regarding the topic.
Gays are gays because they choose to be so, not because homosexuality is a side effect of some inadvertent experiences. It's my belief that while homosexuality may be classified as a psychological condition, it's a condition that the person has chosen to go into, a path one has chosen to take. We're not gays because we're lacking some essential fluid in our brains or because part of our hypothalamus is misshapen or whatsoever. I don't think it's anything like that. Although whether sexual orientation is genetically or sociologically acquired has yet any final answers and the debate over nature versus nurture is still ongoing, my personal though is that it is the person's own decision whether to be gay or not.
It's not surprising for homosexuality to be regarded negatively in some sections of society. It doesn't surprise me that some people still think of gays as immoral, unnatural, unacceptable or whatever negative adjective one can think of. What surprises me is that there are so-called "cures" to homosexuality.
I'm not sure if many people have heard of "Conversion Therapy", but this process has been officially defined by the American Psychiatric Association as "psychiatric treatment...which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation."
During the early 1950's, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Many researches believed it to be a psychopathology, a behaviour that indicates mental illness, and thus regarded homosexuals to be abnormal or "almost invariably neurotic or psychotic." Attempts were made to "cure" this so-called disease with techniques like behavior modification wherein behaviors and reactions to stimuli are altered through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior, aversion therapy in which the patient is exposed to stimulus while being subjected to some form of discomfort, primal therapy, EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and several other techniques. Some of these techniques have been reported successful only to be proven otherwise later on. By 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder due to intense lobbying by gay groups and new scientific information, but conversion therapy remained to be used.
The term "reparative therapy" was introduced in 1980's and is sometimes used loosely as a synonym for conversion therapy in general. Reparative Therapy, however, poses as offering a possibility of change for homosexuals who are dissatisfied with their sexual orientation. This technique does not propose to eliminating homosexual desires but rather minimize them. Although most professionals of the field had discredited this therapeutic model, there are some who still make an effort in the endeavor.
Yet, whether attempting to minimize homosexual tendencies or eliminating it entirely, there are still no established data to prove that homosexuality is a psychopathology, a mental disorder, or anything caused by biological or genetic conditions. Sigmund Freud, so-called "father of psychoanalysis," wrote in a letter written to a mother who had asked to treat his son: "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development." Being so, there is no reason to believe that a cure for homosexuality is necessary.
Although I agree with conversions therapists when they argue that people should be able to determine their own therapeutic goals, I should emphasize that it should be the person's own will to undergo a change in sexual orientation and not because their parents, friends or their social environment told them so. I mean, they should be happy in not being gay anymore.
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