Homosexuality misrepresented.

Homosexuality used to be classified as a psychiatric disorder but this was changed in 1973. The question is: why? In 2005 Dr. Jeffery B. Satinover, M.D., published an investigative, 25-page article, tracing the motives and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

Dr. Satinover is a psychiatrist and also a physicist. He is the Director of the Durckheim-Gladstone International Center for Quantitative Analysis (ICQA) in Washington, D.C. In cooperation with the Heritage Foundation and under the auspices of the ICQA, he is overseeing the development of a fully cross-linked international database of medical, social science and legal citations with associated meta-analyses and aggregated data tables. The purpose of the database is to assist concerned scholars, attorneys, social scientists, policy analysts and citizens worldwide in addressing the nearly-universal problem of embedding gross distortions (or even wholesale inventions) of social science conclusions in legal documents. These distortions are ideologically driven to make the public believe that these policies are founded in science. The 1973 ruling de-classifying homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder is one of these public policies.

Dr. Satinover has brilliantly used the expertise and scientific data base of the ICQA in order to expose the false claims, lack of scientific expertise, lack of clinical experience, fabrication of evidence, and obvious bias that characterize the behaviour of the homosexual activists who, in 1973, succeeded in pressuring the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from their official list of mental disorders.

He also shows how the mental health associations misrepresented key scientific evidence in recent court testimony. This authoritative and devastating article was published in the Conference Reports 2005, of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). (1)

History: how did this get started?

In 1957 psychologist Evelyn Hooker wrote a paper that claimed to show that homosexuality is normal. Twelve years later, in 1969, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Task Force on Homosexuality, of which Hooker was chairwoman, claimed that sexuality was a continuum from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality. (2) Hooker was handpicked by Judd Marmot, an influential psychiatrist from the University of California in Los Angeles.

The Task Force also claimed, without evidence, that homosexual suffering was caused by societal prejudice. Acceding to pressure, the APA in 1971, sponsored a panel, not on the subject of homosexuality, but a panel whose membership was composed of homosexuals. The fact that these panel members were homosexuals was the sole factor that was purported to enable them to speak as professionals.

The role of that panel of activists was to put pressure on the APA, by disrupting its activities if necessary, to secure an appearance before the APA's crucial Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics, responsible for publishing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The APA caved in and created another special task force made up almost entirely of the same people from the Kinsey Institute who had packed the previously mentioned NIMH task force in 1971. Judd Marmot was now the APA Vice-President, while the President-elect was a homosexual who would keep this fact secret. None of the members of the Nomenclature Committee was expert on homosexuality. A group of outside activists and gay psychiatrists and psychologists presented the Committee with arguments made by Evelyn Hooker and Alfred Kinsey that homosexuality was not associated with psychopathology and that all other studies on homosexuality were intrinsically flawed, because of sampling bias. Both arguments were outright falsehoods, especially outrageous because the Kinsey data were fraudulently skewed by blatant population sampling biases and the badgering, and even bribing, of its imprisoned and largely otherwise institutionalized subjects.

In reporting to the APA, the Nomenclature Committee failed to make any reference to studies critical of the Hooker and Kinsey evidence. Nonetheless, following the advice of these new homosexual advisors, two-thirds of the APA's Board of Trustees, barely a quorum, voted to remove homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, with only two abstentions.

As mentioned before, the Committee was presented with Hooker's study. This study failed the most basic tenets of the scientific method. The author deliberately had her associates recruit participants to obtain a pool of subjects who understood what the "experiment" was about and how it was to be used to achieve a political goal in transforming society. (3) She had no clinical experience in the field or in the scientific methods to be employed, had obvious bias, and provided no details about her procedures. The inadequacy of her research was acknowledged by the journal that published it.

Two years later, the other mental health guilds, the American Psychological Association, and the National Association of Social Workers, followed suit. Every psychiatrist, and there were tens of thousands, received a mailing urging them to support the change that purported to come from the APA, but was in fact financed by the National Gay Task Force. Four years later, a survey showed that 69% of psychiatrists disagreed with the APA Committee report.

The Judiciary

In the Romer brief (Roy Romer, Governor of Colorado v. Richard G. Evans, 1996), the authors claimed that there was no evidence that sexual orientation, a tendency to experience erotic or romantic responses to men, women, or both, resulting in a sense of one's self, can be changed. They also claimed that homosexuality is not a disorder. They failed, however, to refer to modern research of high quality that contradicts their claims. Although they praised the Laumann Report that contradicts their claims, they misrepresented its results.

In May, 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against an amendment of the Colorado State Constitution that would have allowed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Justice Scalia wrote, in dissent, that the amendment was a "a modest attempt ... to preserve traditional mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through the use of the laws."

In the Lawrence brief (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003), the mental health guild held that "Homosexuality is a normal form of human sexuality," that it is fixed early in life, and that it does not change: that it is a matter of "orientation" or 'identity." They ignored the fact that studies show a very strong intrinsic association between homosexuality and psychological distress far beyond that which could be attributed solely to the genuine and additional distress caused by stigma and prejudice.

No literature has succeeded in demonstrating that this excess psychological distress is in fact attributable to stigma and prejudice. The mental health guild did this despite the fact that the latest and best research done by Susan Cochran, one of the authors of the brief, directly and extensively asserted the opposite of what the guild claimed. All of Cochran et al.'s findings were published before the due-date for submission of briefs in the Lawrence case. In November 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas State law banning private consensual sex between adults of the same sex.

The Laumann study: the definitive study

This study, published in 1994, and repeatedly confirmed by many large scale epidemiological surveys involving hundreds of thousands of people, conducted in all English-speaking and many other industrialized nations, is universally recognized as definitive. (4,5) In summary, the major findings of the Laumann Report are that homosexuality is not a stable trait and that it tends spontaneously to convert into heterosexuality as an individual gets older; that sexual identity is not fixed at adolescence but continues to change over the course of life and that there is no evidence for homosexuality being innate.

Satinover states: "The reality is that, since 1994, there has existed solid epidemiological evidence, now extensively confirmed and reconfirmed, that the most common natural course for a young person who develops a 'homosexual identity' is for it to spontaneously disappear unless that person is discouraged or interfered with by extraneous factors [our emphasis].

"We may say now with increasing confidence that those 'extraneous factors' are primarily the 'social milieu' ... this 'social milieu' is the family setting and culture created by, inter alia, the decisions enforced by the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States acting in coordination with the misrepresentation of the scientific evidence provided to it by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Association of Social Workers."

REFERENCES:

(1.) Jeffery B. Satinover, M.S.M.D. National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, Conference Reports, 2005. "The Trojan couch: How the mental health guilds allow medical diagnostics scientific research and jurisprudence to be subverted in lockstep with the political aims of their gay sub-components."

(2.) Evelyn Hooker, "The adjustment of the male overt homosexual," Journal of Projective Techniques, 1957, 21, 18-31.

(3.) Bruce Shenitz, "The grand dame of gay liberation," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1990. pp. 20-34.

(4.) Edward O. Laumann et al. The Social organization of sexuality: sexual practices in the United States: University of Chicago (1994).

(5.) Edward O. Laumann et al. A political history of the national sex survey of adults. Fam. Plann. Perspect. 1994, Jan-Feb; 26 (1): 34-8.

SUMMARY BY CATHOLIC INSIGHT STAFF