Expect the Christianist nut jobs to go absolutely crazy over this issue. If the APA formally condemns all reparative therapy as dangerous and basically malpractice per se, it will do several things: (1) it will make it more difficult politically for Daddy Dobson and company to try to claim being gay is a choice and that gays can change, (2) it will make it more difficult for licensed psychologists to participate in ex-gay programs without putting their licenses at risk, and (3) it will help set up ex-gay programs like Exodus for potential lawsuits by individuals who were harmed by the bogus programs and/or families of those who commit suicide as a result of the ex-gay programs.
Wayne Besen and I have talked frequently of a successful malpractice/tort type lawsuit against these charlatan ex-gay programs as being the best way to shut down the Christianists from using these programs to further their anti-gay political agenda and as a source of making money. Here's highlights of the My Way News story:
NEW YORK (AP) - The American Psychological Association is embarking on the first review of its 10-year-old policy on counseling gays and lesbians, a step that gay-rights activists hope will end with a denunciation of any attempt by therapists to change sexual orientation.
Such efforts - often called reparative therapy or conversion therapy - are considered futile and harmful by many gay-rights activists. Conservative groups defend the right to offer such treatment, and say people with their viewpoint have been excluded from the review panel. A six-member task force set up by the APA has its first meeting beginning next Tuesday.
The current APA policy, adopted in 1997, opposes any counseling that treats homosexuality as a mental illness, but does not explicitly denounce reparative therapy. The APA has decided to review the policy at a time when gay-rights groups are increasingly critical of such treatment and groups that support it.
Already, scores of conservative religious leaders and counselors, representing such groups as the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family, have written a joint letter to the APA, expressing concern that the task force's proposals would not properly accommodate gays and lesbians whose religious beliefs condemn gay sex.
The complete story on the APA review and the whining by the Christianists can be found here: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070710/D8Q9VMSG1.html More information on the APA's current positions on sexual orientation can be found on the APA web site here: http://www.apa.org/topics/orientation.html
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The statute of limitations must have expired, since it was psychologists and psychiatrists who originated reparative therapy. But it has now been 34 years since homosexuality "as a pathology the cult could cure with reparative therapy," was voted in high peer-review council "a standard variant of the sexual condition." But even five years later, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson was decrying the cult's pathologizing and treating a "normal biological fact" after their Hawaii divinations. Odd things happen when one demands proof of such claims. Of course, the cult has never had proof of any of their claims, and as devotee Philip Reiff (Susan Sontag's "ex") writes, the Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith since Freud. Yes, the cult of death and superstition. But since it is a "secular religion," I guess they can divine new orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and point fingers elsehwere when they were the origin.
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