from the associated press: source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090805/ap_on_re_us/us_psychologists_gays I think the bolded part is probably the most important part of the report... not that it will keep wingnuts from forcing their kids into ex-gay brainwashing programs.
125-to-4 vote? Those 4 people are fucking retarded *cough* Yes, but other than that, this is great news. Too bad anytime you bring this up to a super-bigot they will dismiss it as "Left wing liberal brainwashing garbage"
Good! I wrote a big paper on the history of ex gay therapy if anyone is interested. Homosexuals Anonymous was founded by a pedo, and techniques used by him were watching gay porn, spanking, and mutual masturbation.
Certainly good to get this information confirmed by a credible, official source. Now, may God have mercy on those who think they've been "cured". At best they've accepted to be celibate, which is more like going from homosexual to asexual (or at least pretending too).
Thank god we shipped practicly all the religious fundamentalists out of the country after the Civil War Sorry to the people in the US that are actually, you know, sane, though
mental health professionals shouldn't tell gay clients anything except "being gay is normal, natural, and perfectly acceptable". telling them anything else isn't going to help their mental health, quite the opposite! it'll make them guilty for being who they are, and it will exacerbate depression. i didn't even realise that reparative therapy was still being suggested by professionals!! i thought that would have been discarded years and years ago. if you're gay, you're gay, and there's nothing you can do about it except to accept it.
Ah but... as the APA statement itself indicates, it isn't nearly that cut-and-dried. The problem is that most people who come into therapy aren't sure they're gay. They may only identify as questioning, or confused, or they may even label themselves bisexual as a bridge to accepting themselves. So while I agree that if a client is absolutely convinced he's gay, that the therapist should support and affirm that, I also think it is the role of a responsible therapist to help his or her client explore his or her feelings in more depth. There are a small percentage of people who, for example, are sexually abused early in childhood and develop an aversion to people who are the same sex as the abuser. This happens more commonly with females being abused by male perpetrators, but it can happen the reverse way as well (female perpetrator, male survivor.) So these people may identify as gay when in fact they really aren't, and good therapy will help separate the negative feelings toward opposite-sex people. Now... this group represents a very, very tiny percentage of people who seek (or are forced into) reparative therapy, but the dumbasses at Exodus and the other reparative therapy places don't differentiate between someone who is biologically heterosexual and behaving homosexually due to trauma and someone who is biologically homosexual and behaving normally. So they find the 10 people out of 500,000 that were never gay in the first place, help them understand their feelings and adust to their true nature, and call those people out as "cures for homosexuality." It's pathetic, and it's more pathetic that people believe it. Hopefully the APA report will help to put the kibosh on that.