An Open Letter to the Deniers of Ex-Gay Reparative Therapy

John McCartney has been proclaiming the truth about homosexuality and abortion in the Chicago area for decades.

The following open letter was published late last month (in print only) by my friend and longtime pro-life and pro-family advocate, John McCartney. For decades, John has reached out locally in the Chicago area with the truth on two critically important cultural issues: the defense of unborn life and opposition to the homosexual (LGBTQ) agenda. With his steadfastness and reasonable, winsome approach he is a model for morality advocates everywhere. And he never quits–doing more as an octogenarian to defend truth in the public square in a single month than most people do in a lifetime.

For the uninitiated, “Reparative Therapy” is talk therapy designed to help people overcome and manage unwanted homosexual desires, aka “same-sex attractions” (SSA). Many people like David Pickup and Christopher Doyle, have been helped by such “ex-gay” therapy [see my LifeSiteNews piece on the late RT pioneer, Joe Nicolosi]. Nevertheless, LGBTQ ideologues are now heavily invested in demonizing and discrediting the practice, usually by “focusing on the failures,” i.e., people who claim to be harmed or abused by Reparative Therapy. (This in itself is strange, as John alludes to in his letter: in what other area of life–say, people overcoming drug addiction or obesity–do we focus only on the failures as opposed to the heart-warming successes of struggling people who got professional or ministerial help?)

In a seismic assault on liberty, RT for minors has been banned in nine states and the District of Columbia, according to this pro-LGBTQ website. (Interestingly, three governors who signed anti-RT bills into law were Republicans–Chris Christie (New Jersey), Susana Martinez (New Mexico) and Bruce Rauner (Illinois).) Yet it is important to remember that many people who have overcome the strong pull of homosexual impulses in their life, like Stephen Black, did not rely solely on RT-like counseling, and credit God with all or at least a big part of their transformation.

No matter to the neo-totalitarian Left, which is hellbent on destroying the practice and the freedom of people–even childhood victims of homosexual predators–to pursue healthy change away from homosexuality. Note that one method LGBTQ activists and their media echo chamber use to smear Reparative Therapy is to mislabel it as “conversion therapy.” That sounds more menacing and plays to the Left’s anti-Christian prejudices, making RT sound like some sinister cult. It also befits the LGBTQ activist narrative of portraying homosexuality as innate (inherent), thereby unchangeable, and “gays” as perpetual victims. Kudos to John McCartney for rebutting the LGBTQ lies and biased media groupthink. — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH; Twitter: @PeterLaBarbera – americansfortruth@gmail.com

P.S. Special Book Offer: Regarding McCartney’s proper assessment that homosexuality is NOT a normal variant of human sexual behavior, I recommend the thoroughly-documented, 600-page Mass Resistance book, “Health Hazards of Homosexuality,” which we are making available through AFTAH for $20 postpaid. Order online here with your gift of at least $20 [note your book order in the comments box], or send your check to: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522, noting the book order.]

Links and some explanatory notes have been added to this printed Open Letter:

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An Open Letter to the Deniers of Reparative Therapy

By John McCartney

For years, “gay” activists have waged a disinformation campaign against reparative therapy (RT), a service available to the those with unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA). It got national attention decades ago when, using it, [sexologists] Masters & Johnson relieved 60 percent of such persons from SSA. Such therapy consists of conversation between a therapist and a client seeking the source of this unwelcome felling. That there is a source is attested to by the fact that there is no replicated study supporting the born-that-way argument. Anti-RT activists advance assertions that warrant scrutiny, assertions in addition to born-that-way, such as:

• SSA is not a disorder, i.e., a divergence from nature. In support, they cite the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the [American Psychiatric Association’s] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders II at a meeting that made a travesty of psychiatric deliberation by politics and the ever-present threat of 1971-type disruptions [Editor’s note: see this “pro-LGBTQ psychiatric site, which notes: “There were a series of dramatic encounters between activists and psychiatrists at the annual meetings of the APA between 1970 and 1972.” Also see psychiatrist Dr Ronald Bayer’s book, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, which documents how “gay” militants bullied and harassed psychiatrists leading up to the APA vote depathologizing homosexuality.] In a subsequent referendum, psychiatrists without experience with homosexuality were polled; their votes outweighed the votes of psychiatrists who did have it. Psychiatrists with such clinical experience in counseling clients with SSA were marginalized in the proceedings.

The late Dr. Robert Spitzer, who equivocated on whether people could leave homosexuality (a supposed “orientation”) behind. See this compelling article on Spitzer, who once declared in a letter, based on his observations: “In homosexuality…something’s not working.”

• Dr. Robert Spitzer, who quarterbacked the 1973 removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder (with a narrow exception), retracted his 2003 endorsement of RT, which he made after listening to the self-reports of 200 men and women for whom RT worked. Spitzer, after ten years, was convinced by “gay” activists that he really didn’t know what he once knew, that his endorsement was putting homosexuals in jeopardy, and that self-reporting of change was unreliable, even though he had expertise evaluating it. The [then] 80-year-old psychiatrist yielded to the same intense lobbying that his fellow psychiatrists did in the 1973 “scientific” [APA] meeting–to truth’s detriment.

• The assertion that the showcased dozen or so victims of unqualified counselors constituted proof that RT doesn’t work and is often harmful is as unreasonable as asserting that Alcoholics Anonymous is a failure because it has only a 40 percent success rate.

Apparently, no successful “survivor” of Reparative Therapy was interviewed. One wonders how many of the 350,000 AIDS fatalities (up to 500,000 due to cause-of-death mislabeling) would be living if they had had an opportunity to weaken their same-sex attraction. HIV/AIDS has taken a terrible toll among men having sex with men (MSM). Of the 1.2 million Americans with the disease, 65 percent are MSM (homosexuals comprise just 1.7 percent of the U.S. population). Seventy percent of new infections occur among these men.Homosexual “marriage” has been no solution: 86 percent of new HIV transmissions in gay and bi [bisexual] men occur in relationships or in the context of two guys sleeping together regularly; for guys ages 16 to 24, 79 percent. The cost comes to $16.5 billion per year. Illinois alone has received $80.8 billion [in federal funds] to service HIV/AIDS victims (as of 2014). [See this Kaiser Family Foundation report, which states: “Federal funding for HIV has increased significantly over the course of the epidemic, rising from just a few hundred thousand in FY 1982 to more than $32 billion in FY 2017.”]

The above begs the question: why the desperate effort to discredit RT when SSA has led, and is leading, to such suffering and early death for MSM, plus the crushing medical costs (from self-inflicted behavior), when RT offers hope to those dissatisfied with their not-so-gay lifestyle? A plausible answer: the grandfather of the Gay Liberation Movement, the late Frank (“Gay Is Good”) Kameny, whose personal history belies his mantra, contended that the edifice of “gay” liberation would collapse if homosexuality could not gain acceptance as a normal variant of heterosexuality. If the 200 gays and lesbians interviewed by the aforementioned Dr. Spitzer, plus hundreds of others, have minimized or eliminated their same-sex attraction, then SSA cannot be regarded as a normal variant and therefore must be a disorder, a divergence from nature/normality. Disorders need rectifying, not membership in a protected class for which the 1973 APA decision laid the groundwork.

What accounts for the deniers’ success when there is so much evidence that homosexuality (condition and behavior) is not, as Kameny says, a normal variant of human sexual behavior? If Americans believe so, it is because the media has suppressed most negatives about homosexuality and suppressed all the positives about RT. If the success stories that Dr. Spitzer certified argue convincingly for the minimization/elimination of SSA–as they do–then there is no justification for making homosexuals a protected class. Rather, they should be regarded as many clinically experienced psychiatrists regard victims of depression, which affects saints and sinners. Developing the comparison: SSA points its victims toward HIV/AIDS; depression, toward suicide. The latter’s death toll is infinitesimal compared to the former.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Player Queen’s repeated assertions to her dying husband that she would never, never marry again led even the naïve Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, to suspect her emotional insistence. So should the relentless protestations (“fraudulent,” “harmful,” “charlatans”) of the RT deniers (like the LGBTQ activist group “Truth Wins Out“) be regarded. To paraphrase the skeptical Queen’s response to Hamlet’s question: These deniers protest too much, methinks.

John J. McCartney, Jr.

Cititens Concerned About Media
PO Box 8208
Chicago, IL 60608

Note: McCartney also can be reached via email through AFTAH by writing: americansfortruth@gmail.com.

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Special Book Offer: Regarding McCartney’s proper assessment that homosexuality is NOT a normal variant of human sexual behavior, I recommend the thoroughly-documented, 600-page Mass Resistance book, “Health Hazards of Homosexuality,” which we are making available through AFTAH for $20 or more postpaid. Order online here with your gift of at least $20 [note your book order in the comments box], or send your check to: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522, noting the book order.]