Conversion therapy

Salon is currently running a series on one of the more disturbing enterprises of the Christian Right, the push to "convert" gays and lesbians into being straight. Salon calls it "a four-part investigation into the Christian netherworld of 'reparative therapy,' a disputed practice to convert gays and lesbians into heterosexuals."

The first three parts are:

Turning off gays by Mark Benjamin 07/18/05
My gay therapy session by Mark Benjamin 07/19/05
Getting straight with God by Mark Benjamin 07/20/05

Among several things disturbing about it, these articles give a glimpse at the seamy and bizarre way that some Chrisitians are willing to use dishonest appeals, unethical practices and quack medical theories to promote their particular version of Christianity.

I'm willing to believe that at least some of them sincerely think they're trying to help people. But consider the implications of this, from the first article:

It is not just gay rights activists who say that efforts to change gays and lesbians are voodoo therapy. The nation's two mainstream psychiatric and psychological associations, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, deny reparative therapy's very premise. Along with the National Association of Social Workers, these groups say homosexuality simply is not a mental disorder. Being gay by itself is not a problem, they point out; rather, the negative mental health consequences of discrimination have been well established and cited as a factor in higher suicide rates among gays. Therapy to change homosexuality may simply telegraph to patients they are sick when they are not, that they can fundamentally change their sexual orientation when they cannot. If so, failed efforts to change could prove disastrous, particularly for deeply religious gays.

Quack therapies can and do cause real harm to patients. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a type of therapy became popular based on "recovered memories" of early childhood sexual abuse. It generated the concept of "multiple-personality disorder." It has now become largely discredited, because it was based on unfounded theories and unethical manipulation of the patients. Some of the wild stories of Satanic cults and orgies and sacrificing babies and such came from this particular fad.

And it was a type of therapy largely pushed by fundamentalist Christians.

Fundamentalist Protestants aren't the only ones pushing bizarre and dangerous psychotherapies. Although the specifics would be a bit dated now, the book Crazy Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? (1996) by Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich discusses a number of New Agey therapies, and includes some useful advice for recognizing when pyschotherapy is taking a wrong turn.

One of the alarm signals is when a therapist directly tries to change the patient's religious beliefs. That is unethical behavior, and should raise the most serious concerns right away. And, yes, clinics symptoms with religious manifestations can be addressed without the therapist proselytizing the patient to change their basic religious beliefs - or lack thereof.

The whole field of "reparative therapy" is echoing with alarms signals. Psychological claims without good evidentiary bases, a heavily religious emphasis, operating in a regulatory gray area - something risky is going on there. And Christians who claim to be doing the work of God but engage in unethical and deceptive practices really should take a serious look at what they are doing.

The American Psychiatric Association has asked ethical psychiatrists to refrain from reparative therapy. "We are finding that the numbers of people claiming to be harmed by reparative therapy are increasing," says Dr. Jack Drescher, chair of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Issues. "I don't know about the suicides because it is hard to determine why somebody killed themselves afterward. But the harm is increasing." The legislative body of Drescher's APA approved a statement this past spring that endorsed gay marriage to help reverse gay stigma. They also cite evidence that stable, monogamous relationships are beneficial for mental health, whether gay or straight. (my emphasis)

This is an interesting comment to me:

... Drescher says the mental health profession does agree with the reparative therapy crowd about one thing: No one knows for sure what guides sexual orientation, gay or straight, but mounting evidence suggests a biological component. "We do know there is a very good likelihood that [homosexuality] is biologically related. We do have some studies that indicate a biological component," he says. That homosexuality may be innate, Drescher says, bolsters the argument for gay rights. "And that's what the religious right is fighting against," he says.

I've thought that gay rights advocates may be making a mistake by putting too much emphasis on the notion that homosexuality is primarily biological. For one thing, finding a precise biological basis for even a specific physical condition is very difficult. And finding a biological/genetic basis for any complex behavior is still well beyond current scientific capabilities. Periodically, there will be a front-page headline about an exciting new discovery of a genetic predisposition to violent crime or something like that. The article a couple of months later reporting that other experiments have not been able to validate the claim tend to get buried in the back pages.

Because even though there's some biological basis for everything human beings do, virtually nothing about human sexuality is "natural". I mean, I enjoyed seeing Brooke Shields in the original Blue Lagoon movie discover the birds and the bees by trial and error with her male companion. But in fact, every kind of sexual behavior beyond the most basic physical arousal is shaped by some kind of cultural assumptions and training. And even physical arousal depends heavily on learned assumptions about what is attractive.

Sigmund Freud, in his provocative way, described any kind of sexual behavior other than intercourse as "aim-inhibited." In his view, the behaviors known as "perversions" - like fetishism, for example - are aim-inhibited sex. But then, so are "normal" sexual behaviors like kissing or holding hands. No, this did not mean he advocated the abandonment of all rules for sexual behavior. But he did insist that medicine and science should recognize that sexuality is more complex than good and bad, sick and healthy.

That's why in some ways it's surprising to hear fundis arguing that being gay is a "chosen lifestyle" and many gay-rights advocates insisting on a biological explanation. Apart from what is effective as a political slogan, it seems to me that if a straight person has to learn basically everything about sexual behavior, then it's hard to argue logically or sensibly that straight or "normal" sexual behavior is "natural," i.e., biological. And if even a kiss is a "perversion", an aim-inhibited sexual act that doesn't in itself serve reproduction, how can you really say that gay sexuality is wrong because it doesn't serve biological reproduction?

That may sound like a contrarian argument. But a lot of what the Christian Right holds up as the "traditional family" is an ideological abstraction that often has little to do with the changing nature of family and sexual life even among straight people. Understanding sexuality as being in great part a social product seems to me to be a powerful argument for a pragmatic and compassionate approach to such issues in public policy.

Just to be clear: advocates of "reparative therapy" are happy to use scientific arguments opportunistically, e.g., the fact that there is no consensus on the biological roots of sexual preference. But one of the things that Benjamin's series illustrates is how quick some of the Christian Right activists are to override medical and scientific findings with their "faith-based" approaches and unethical practices. Even if there were a consensus among biologists about an identifiable physical determinant of sexual preferences, the hardcore Christian Right would reject it.

And straight people shouldn't kid ourselves about the anti-gay agenda of the Christian Right. They want to dictate our sexual behavior, too. And for many of them, fear of gay sexuality is part of a larger fear and hostility to sexuality in general.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, gay rights