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:

_____________________________________________

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.

Homosexual perversion centers flourish despite HIV crisis–even in Atlanta, where CDC is based

In this recent Roku interview on America’s Survival, my friend and AS founder Cliff Kincaid and I discussed how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) politically correct approach toward homosexuality and HIV does not breed confidence in the federal agency’s ability to keep Americans from contracting the Ebola virus. We also discuss the Republican Party’s growing support for proud homosexuality, as House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) held a fund-raiser for openly homosexual San Dieogo congressional candidate Carl DeMaio just when DeMaio had been charged with sexually harassing another homosexual male campaign worker [see AIM story HERE]. It is simply incredible that homosexual bathhouses flourish in big cities across America (including Atlanta, where the CDC is based: see about the 8:00 mark in the video)–even as HIV rates surge among homosexual male youth. — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH

“For young gay men…[the] urge for sex is strong, compulsive and obsessive. It dominates conscious thought with lustful fantasies which society does not grant expression without censure and judgement. For many gay men, a salient goal of life is to fulfill their sex fantasies and achieve some sort of intimacy with other men. …We seek intrigue and danger in our sexual netherworld. The threat of HIV infection may even nurture these yearnings. The greater the danger, the greater the thrill. Our masculine ideal is of strong, fearless men willing to inflict pain, aloof to suffering, and undaunted by sin. Virility is immortal, masculinity ever powerful and everlasting…Though the reality is often ugly, scarred, sordid and stupid, we willingly cower in the presence of that ersatz ideal, submit to its potency, genuflecting and suckling at the font of another man’s virility while scorning our own. Sometimes the power is fully consummated. I daresay there isn’t a gay man of 50 who doesn’t know of at least one friend murdered at the hands of a ‘trick’ [sexual hook-up]…Yet, as we survive each anonymous act, we only move farther away from the goal. We find no intimacy, fulfill no male ideal, and only confirm our deep-seated self-loathing….” –Garey Lambert, homosexual writer, “AIDS activist,” and editor of [homosexual newspaper] Baltimore Alternative, 1993

Ad for homosexual FLEX bathhouse in Atlanta–where men go for anonymous deviant sexual encounters with other men. (We’ve blocked the address and web site.) It is telling that such de facto perversion centers thrive in Atlanta, home to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control–which, though tasked with fighting the spread of HIV, refuses to push for closure of sex businesses that encourage “gay” hyper-promiscuity. The late homosexual writer Garey Lambert described how and why “gay” men are compulsively drawn to reckless, anonymous sexual encounters, which can be dangerous and even lethal. He wrote, “I daresay there isn’t a gay man of 50 who doesn’t know of at least one friend murdered at the hands of a [sexual] ‘trick.'”

[Warning: graphic language]

_________________________

There is a way which seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death.

—Proverbs 14:12 (NASB)

Dear Readers,

This is the side of homosexualism that the secular-minded chattering classes–in their zeal to normalize sodomy as an innocuous identity and mere “orientation”–choose to avoid. Below is a verbatim reprinting of a column written two decades ago in the now-defunct homosexual newspaper, The Baltimore Alternative. I recently rediscovered this in the Americans For Truth archives. It is dated “1993” but the copy of the article does not give the month and date (we will attempt to find that). The writer is the late Garey Lambert, an “AIDS activist” and former editor at the Alternative, who died of AIDS at age 49 in 1996. This piece is a fascinating look into the the “consuming depravity” of homosexualism, to quote Pastor Ralph Ovadal–and of the overpowering lustful quests that motivate “men who have sex with men,” and which in all too many cases drive them to an early grave.

Reading the essay, I am reminded of how, even as much as AFTAH tries to convey the debauched, confused and destructive reality of homosexuality, we have only skimmed the surface. What is at work here is a type of indulged sexual addiction I have difficulty understanding. Let the astonishing words below sink in; obviously, “gay” men are endangered more by their own obsessive sexual pursuits with strangers than by any kind of anti-homosexual “hate” violence:

“I daresay there isn’t a gay man of 50 who doesn’t know of at least one friend murdered at the hands of a ‘trick’ [sexual hook-up] .“

Writings like this expose the “enslavement” (Lambert’s word) of male homosexual lust–and the same-sex desperation that seems to result from libidinous young men pursuing the wrong answer to their own masculinity crisis. LGBT ideologues will attempt to explain away Lambert’s observations–or claim they are made obsolete by the “domestication” of homosexuality (e.g., same-sex “marriage”). But he describes a root problem–emotional and spiritual–that cannot be cured by politics, or “pride.” (Note Lambert’s obligatory attempt to blame “society” and “parents” for the plight of homosexuals and the proper judgment of homosexuality as abnormal and wrong.)

Angry homosexual activists wish death upon pro-family advocates

UPDATE, Sept. 19, 2013: The hateful comments — copied below — to the “New Civil Rights Movement” post about Bryan Fischer’s AFR Talk interview with Peter LaBarbera have been removed.]

I appeared on Bryan Fischer’s AFR Talk Show “Focal Point” yesterday (September 17. 2013) to discuss the astonishing CDC data unearthed by AFTAH showing that among boys and young men ages 13-24, 94-95 percent of the HIV cases are linked to homosexual sex. (I apologize for the poor sound quality of my voice in this broadcast.) Our interview and focus on the CDC data have not been popular with homosexual activists: David Badash of the The New Civil Rights Movement (NCRM) accuses Bryan and me of engaging in “dangerous advocacy.” And the hateful homosexuals at “Truth Wins Out” attack us with the requisite name-calling HERE. [Watch video on YouTube HERE.] — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH

PS. To document the type of over-the-top, wish-your-opponents-dead hatred that is all too common among radical homosexual activists, we reproduce uncensored four vicious “comments” from the NCRM piece following the video and after the jump: