There are two really interesting articles in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine dealing with the intersection of religion and sexuality, and both merit a careful look. In another piece, I’ll examine the one about gay activist turned “ex-gay” activist Michael Glatze, but that’s going to take some time, so I’m tackling this one first. It’s about the idea of therapists — not complete wingnuts, mind you – helping clients either stay in the closet or live lives which are completely counter to who they really are, based on the clients’ religious desires to remain “pure.” Or something. Let me say on the front end that this article makes me want to throw things, because it elucidates so clearly the harmful effects that fundamentalist religious indoctrination has on people. Having experienced such indoctrination myself, it makes me furious, but simultaneously grateful that I was able to, over a period of years, to abandon that indoctrination entirely.*
The article presents us with a conundrum: what to do when a client comes in and can’t balance their religious indoctrination/beliefs with their sexuality? Which wins out? How do good, well-meaning therapists treat these clients for whom tweaking the specific doctrines of their religious beliefs isn’t an option? As it turns out, some mental health specialists have some ideas, but I don’t think they’ve found the answers yet:
“I’m a very strong believer in people’s rights,” [therapist Denis Flanigan] said one gray morning at a Starbucks in Houston. But during his early training, he encountered a few clients who either would not come out of the closet or suffered mightily when they did. Christians of the kind who earnestly believed that the Bible deplored homosexuality were particularly troubled as they tried to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. The more Flanigan studied this conundrum, the more he came to see it as intractable. Some gay evangelicals truly believe that to follow their sexual orientation means abandonment by a church that provides them with emotional and social sustenance — not to mention eternal damnation. Keeping their sexual orientation a secret, however, means giving up any opportunity to have fulfilling relationships as gay men and women.
“When these clash, what do you do?” Flanigan recalled thinking, and when he began to research the topic about a decade ago, he found few answers beyond the obvious. Antigay religious groups would not condone homosexuality; they thought gays should just give up their orientation, and the most extreme among them offered frightening “conversion” practices. Nonreligious gays thought the conflicted should just walk away from churches that won’t accept homosexuals as they are. “Which trumps which?” Flanigan asked himself. “Religion or sexual orientation?”
So basically, the approach they’ve taken is to focus on the client’s needs and desires first and foremost. Is the religious angle so important to them that they want to find a way to be authentic within that framework? Are they looking to keep a job in that religious framework while remaining husbands and fathers in public?
“Psychological ethics say that we’re supposed to support religious beliefs and support sexual orientation,” Flanigan told me. “But there was nothing I knew of that says what to do when they conflict.” As far as he could tell, the only choice those people had was to give up one or the other.
Here is the tragedy in all of this. They’re working with these clients, trying to meet them where they are, but they’re addressing none of the root causes of people’s anguish, which is caused by religious indoctrination. It’s sad that there are so many people brought up in those sorts of environments, where the idea of “Christian love” has a lot more to do with judgment and guilt than it does with any human definition of “love.” It should be taken as a given that this article is dealing with grown-up, reality-based mental health professionals, so the crock of shit known as “ex-gay” or reparative therapy is not even on the table. No, that has been successfully laughed out of intelligent, educated company in this country, and for good reason.
So these mental health professionals are essentially helping people stay in the closet. That might be a band-aid, but it’s not a solution. The difference here is that we’re dealing with therapists who actually do mean well and have their clients’ best interests at heart, unlike the Joseph Nicolosis of the world, who go about their work with the empathy of common sociopaths. Another therapist, Douglas Haldeman, discusses the approach he came up with to deal with these sorts of cases:
Haldeman found in his research that the vast majority of people seeking to change their orientation held strong religious beliefs; often, these were married men with families who grew up in a church and who felt that they had far too much to lose by coming out.
[...]
In other words, Haldeman was certain that conversion therapy didn’t work, but he wasn’t sure that gay-affirmative therapy — helping gay clients to see that their discomfort with their orientation might come from internalizing a prejudice — would help them find peace of mind, either. In these circumstances, Haldeman tried a different approach.
[...]
The approach Haldeman used was, in the therapeutic parlance, client-centered; that is, the client’s desires took precedence over any values or opinions held by the therapist. So if John wanted to be a gay man who lived as a straight man, Haldeman would help him become that person.
I said before that this article makes me want to throw things. It still does. I was raised in a marginally conservative home, but ended up being exposed to seriously hateful religious indoctrination in high school in two churches I was involved with. Perhaps it was because I’ve always been strong-willed that I was able to at least put the self-hatred I had learned, along with the religious spew, in order to at least start on the journey out of the closet. It makes me seethe knowing that there are others who truly believe what they have been taught, that who they really are is unworthy of God.
Again, these therapists are certainly well-meaning, as they try to find answers for how to treat those who have been spiritually bullied and abused into believing that self-hating religious beliefs are truly what is best for them, or worse, that those beliefs are actually true in any sense. But the mental health community doesn’t have the real answers yet, possibly because we still haven’t wrapped our heads around the notion, in this nation at least, that spiritual abuse is itself a sickness inflicted on unwitting individuals. And as you read this piece, you’ll see that this sort of “client-centered” therapy leads to some serious double-lives, some grade-A hypocrisy, in the pursuit of giving these poor souls a little inner peace.
Warren Throckmorton is discussed in the piece as well. Most of you are familiar with him, but if not, in a nutshell: Warren is a Christian psychologist who used to preach the “ex-gay” nonsense, but became disillusioned when he realized that the luminaries of the fundamentalist/”ex-gay” industries are common liars, and started to question everything he thought he knew about human sexuality and its intersection with religious faith. In the section about Throckmorton and Mark Yarhouse, our own Wayne Besen is quoted:
Yarhouse and Throckmorton came up with what they called sexual-identity therapy (SIT). At first, Yarhouse told me, many left-leaning therapists saw SIT as a trick — conversion therapy by another name, and many remain skeptical: Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, an organization devoted to debunking the ex-gay ministry, told me that though he respects Throckmorton, he still believes that SIT is just another way of encouraging repression. “I think Throckmorton means well and really wants to help people reconcile their faith and sexuality,” Besen said. “However, the more appropriate way is for people to find a more moderate religion that doesn’t force them to live at cross purposes with their sexual health.”
Therein lies the rub. Some people of faith are raised to view it as a source of comfort, support, love and fellowship. The fundamentalist world is lacking in those departments, though, if you don’t easily conform to their definition of “normal.” The sad thing, though, is that while Wayne is completely right about the best way to handle these things — find a more moderate religion, do some research and go through the long, arduous process of abandoning religion altogether, etc. — some people are just far too tortured by their religious faith to do so. Abusers like to break their victims down until they feel that they are powerless and weak without the abuser around. You see this with abusive husbands, child rapists and anyone else who gets off on controlling people. These are also the hallmarks of fundamentalist religious indoctrination. Find comfort from the pain at the source of the pain, etc.
I wish I had the answers. Instead I just encourage the mental health community to keep working on their side of it, keep trying new things that, above all, respect people’s integrity and their true selves. The good news is that more and more people are abandoning religious fundamentalism every day, so future generations of Americans, perhaps, won’t need such therapy as much. Moreover, more and more people are getting the counter message of love and acceptance and equality — the It Gets Better project comes to mind — far earlier, even while they’re still being drowned in the baptismal font. The bad news is that as they lose power, religious abusers are digging in their heels and will certainly be around to hurt a few more generations of their own gay offspring.
I quoted liberally from the article, because it’s long and hits a lot of topics, but you all should take the time to read it if you haven’t already. We all have a lot of work left to do.
*I also abandoned religious faith in general, but that’s not the point, as there are several valid ways to unshackle oneself from religious indoctrination. My atheism has very little, if anything, to do with my sexuality, as I didn’t actually become an atheist until age 28, nine years after I came out of the closet.
Here, without further ado, are the other tabs open in my browser:
1. A new study, done by a panel of twenty-six researchers, has come out showing the connections between bullying [of all kinds: childhood, Religious Right, societal] and higher rates of depression and suicide in LGBT people. Add that one to the growing stack our ideological opponents pretend doesn’t exist.
2. Cliff Schecter has a great new piece where he compares the Religious Right’s current freak-outs over gays to the film Black Swan, suggesting that what wingnuts fear the most with the growing tide of gay acceptance is the black swans in their own mirrors. This is a good point, as one of the hallmarks of the Religious Right is their desperate need for authority figures and rulebooks to, seemingly, protect them from themselves.
3. GLAAD and the Rainbow Sash Movement, a group of LGBT Catholics, are at odds over whether anti-gay bigots should be given airtime on networks. I tend to fall in with the Catholics here [for once], with a few caveats, mostly for the media conducting interviews. I think the FRC and AFA should have all the airtime they want, because they damn themselves in the eyes of the general populations with their unfiltered words. However, I think the media needs to drop the act where they pretend there are simply “two opposing sides,” and step up their game in calling BS when people like Tony Perkins start farting provably untrue crap out of their wordholes.
4. Chely Wright is so awesome, but sometimes integrity comes with consequences. She’s lost a lot of record sales and received death threats since coming out. Poor thing. Chely: Make like the Dixie Chicks and cultivate real, grown-up music fans.
To their credit, when it was pointed out to the provinicial government in Alberta that homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder, the health minister immediately recognized it as a relic of less civilized, less educated days and ordered it removed. Predictably, though, the Pro-Family Wingnuts of Alberta are not happy:
“It’s just a political decision based on avoidance of political pressure and has nothing to do with common sense, nothing to do with the well-being and welfare of homosexuals at all,” said Gwen Landolt, national vice president of REAL Women Canada.
[...]
The fact that the province’s diagnostic codes still included homosexuality shocked many, as the deviance had been removed by most jurisdictions and the major health bodies many years before – the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, the Canadian Psychological Association in 1982, and the World Health Organization in 1990.
It looks like it was more of an oversight than anything else.
However, Dr. Julie Harren Hamilton, president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), told LifeSiteNews that many are “dissatisfied” with unwanted same-sex attractions and seek help from therapists to “avoid homosexual behaviors and increase their heterosexual potential.”
But with the removal of homosexuality by the APA in 1973, she said, “many therapists have come to incorrectly believe that growth and change for those experiencing these feelings is not possible. This is not true.”
Damn scientific/medical organizations and their facts that don’t jibe with fundamentalist Christian bigotry!
We’ll give the last word to the first wingnut quoted above:
Landolt stated: “Common sense says that homosexuality’s not natural.”
“It is a deviation from the normal and you cannot change that. You can put it down on paper, but everyone knows instinctively that it’s not acceptable.”
Reality disagrees with your “common sense” and your deeply imprinted, bigoted instincts, Gwendolyn.
James Dobson and his Focus on the Family empire rose to fame on a philosophy of authoritarian parenting that consisted of generous doses of spanking to ensure agreement, conformity, and obedience.
That philosophy was often criticized for its frequent outcome: Aggressive behavior, youth-on-youth violence, anxiety disorders, and externalization or projection of one’s problems. Christian Rightists countered that the benefits of harsh discipline outweighed these costs.
However, two new studies by Prof. Murray Straus at the University of New Hampshire find that children who are spanked suffer reduced intellectual capacity. The research was presented Friday at the 14th International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, in San Diego, Calif.
A study appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Homosexuality suggests that negative ex-gay and antigay attitudes — not homosexual behavior or same-sex orientation — worsen mental health and sexual health.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have published a study showing that the degree of internalized homonegativity (negative attitude towards homosexuality) among homosexual men is what predicts poor mental and sexual health — not the act of being homosexual.
Simon Rosser, Ph.D, is the study’s principal investigator and a researcher of the university’s School of Public Health.
“Given the debates in many religious denominations about homosexuality, and in society about homosexuals and civil rights, it’s also timely,” Rosser said. “In particular, the old advice to gay men to fight, deny, or minimize their homosexuality likely only increases depression, greater isolation, and poorer sexual health. In short, viewing homosexuality as a disorder is not only inaccurate, it may be harmful as well.”
This research, which is part of the HIV prevention program — funded by the Minnesota Department of Health — has also been shown to be effective in reducing unsafe sex.
The anti-life, religious-rightist LifeSiteNews last week distorted the results of a British study that came to the same conclusion. LSN falsely associated depression and self-destructive behavior with “a homosexual lifestyle” despite findings to the contrary, and cited the discredited work of antigay activists Paul and Kirk Cameron for additional support.
Meanwhile, a new paper in Science, Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits, finds that social conservatives may be more biologically predisposed to respond to fear and threats than the general population. Might these conservatives then assume, wrongly, that everyone else will (or should) react to fear and threats in a manner consistent with their own reaction?
ScienceBlogs provides detailed analysis of the paper. One take-home point:
For example, consider if the “conservative” psychology is typified by a heuristic & bias which orients toward conformity to current norms. In contrast, the “liberal” psychology has a more relaxed heuristic and is less biased toward current norms. That means naturally that liberal personality types would “random walk” out of the the central tendency of the population more often, so that you would see average differences between the two groups. But, that doesn’t define the distribution itself. What is conservative in 2008 might very well be rather liberal in 1950. For example, arguing against gay marriage but accepting the possibility of civil unions.
Visit Skipping to the Piccolo for pro-tolerant religious reaction to the Journal of Homosexuality study.
Bishop Gene Robinson could hardly have been clearer about his reason for dropping out of a forum on religion and sexuality that was to be held May 5 in conjunction with an American Psychological Association convention in Washington:
“Conservatives, particularly Focus on the Family, were going to use this event to draw credibility to the so-called reparative therapy movement. It became clear to me in the last couple of weeks that just my showing up and letting this event happen…lends credibility to that so-called therapy.” (The Washington Blade)
Robinson’s exit prompted the forum’s cancellation, but the political biases and oversights of forum organizers and panelists doomed the forum from the start.
In its latest video, Focus on the Family falsely describes the cancelled forum as a debate between “gay activists” and “pro-family leaders” regarding “homosexuality and therapy” — implying that the topic would be ex-gay therapy. Focus then falsely reports that “gay activists” prompted Robinson’s exit. Focus goes so far as to accuse forum critics of silencing Christian voices — as if Bishop Robinson, and the Christian ex-gay survivors who were excluded from the forum, were something other than Christian. Focus quotes Exodus executive vice president and resident cynic Randy Thomas:
“It’s pretty amazing that if if they (unnamed gay activists) want to be as diverse as they claim, they would accept people who have a different perspective on faith with regard to this issue.”
Throckmorton admits that opposition to the forum was motivated by involvement of Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But Throckmorton fails to explain how inclusion of a highly political activist such as Mohler was ever appropriate for a forum about religion, homosexuality, and mental health. Throckmorton continues to sidestep mischaracterizations of the forum by Focus on the Family, as well as the forum’s exclusion of former ex-gays and informed critics of ex-gay therapy that would have balanced out his own presence.
The Washington Times was among the news media that were quick to blame unspecified “gay activists” today for the failure of a symposium on religion and ex-gay conversion therapy that was to be held at the Washington Convention Center at the same time as an American Psychiatric Association convention.
But from the start, the planners of the symposium doomed the forum through political and clinical biases:
None of the panelists demonstrated professional knowledge of the myths perpetrated and the harm done by so-called conversion therapies
Former ex-gays — those injured by conversion therapies that are promoted by two of the would-be panelists — were excluded from the discussion
The symposium was promoted, and important facts distorted, by Focus on the Family
Symposium publicity exaggerated the forum’s level of official APA support
Political distortion and exploitation of the symposium by Focus on the Family emerged weeks ago. The symposium’s lead planner — Dr. David Scasta, former Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists president — seemed stubbornly ignorant of the damage being done to legitimate science and to the victims of the ex-gay industry, as well as the unearned credibility being conferred upon would-be panelists who have misused religion as a political weapon to promote bigotry and emotional harm among unpopular demographics.
Scasta was quoted by the Times (with erroneous credentials):
“It was a way to have a balanced discussion about religion and how it influences therapy,” said David Scasta, a former APA president and a gay psychiatrist in charge of assembling the panel. “We wanted to talk rationally, calmly and respectfully to each other, but the external forces made it into a divisive debate it never intended to be.”
In criticizing Bishop Gene Robinson for dropping out of the symposium and precipitating its failure, Scasta shows that he naively ignored the ultimate basis for Robinson’s decision:
“I got one e-mail from him [Bishop Gene Robinson] saying he thought I was being used by the other side, such as Focus on the Family,” Mr. Scasta said, calling the reaction from gay groups over-the-top and self-defeating.
“This was supposed to reduce polarization, which has hurt the gay community. They are blocked into this bitchy battle and they are not progressing. They are not willing to do missionary work and talk to the enemy. They have to be willing to listen and change themselves.”
Calm, rational, and respectful discussion is an essential element of sound discussion about psychiatry. But when that tone of discussion is achieved through half-truth, exclusion of essential facts, naivete, and political bias among the planners, such discussion is bound to harm professionalism in the mental-health fields.
Instead of resolving obvious and potentially fatal flaws in his plans, Scasta appears to have shut out early gay-media inquiries about the flaws in his program, ignored Robinson’s warning about antigay activists, scapegoated Robinson, and finally wasted time whining about gay activists. (Read More)
