Number 2 on the list
Joseph Nicolosi and the quack science group NARTH for endlessly spewing venomous lies about gay Americans to millions of people that trust and follow him.
Dr. Nicolosi is the president and principal research investigator for the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).
The lies....
"First and foremost, a homosexual person simply does not exist. Homosexuality should be considered as an adjective?a behavior?and not as a noun or label defining a person. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, one of the foremost experts on the causes of homosexuality as a sexual disorder and founder of NARTH, National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, states, "There is no such thing as a homosexual person. We are all heterosexuals. Homosexuality is a description of a condition. It is not a description of the intrinsic nature of the person" (NARTH's Statement of Policy)."
Given his statement, then, men and women who consider themselves homosexual are really intrinsically heterosexual but they have a sexual identity problem and, as a result, might engage in homosexual behavior
"Gay relationships do not have the mature elements of quiet consistency, trust, mutual dependency, and sexual fidelity characteristic of highly functioning heterosexual marriages." Joseph Nicolosi
"It was the rejection of homosexuality as a mental disorder that launched the "ex-gay" movement in the first place. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But a relatively small group of mental health professionals rejected that move, arguing that the APA caved in to aggressive political pressure from the gay rights movement, as opposed to science.
"That opinion is a political and not a scientific position," says Nicolosi from NARTH. "These major mental health associations have been hijacked by small political interest groups." All 8 million of them? Narth has no valid source to back up any of these statements.
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Narth on "REPARATIVE THERAPY"
NARTH (The only "scientific" group that completely disagrees with all other scientific groups about homosexuality. The group consists of a handful of fundamental religious members who base their opinions on scripture rather than reputable science. They comprise less than 5% of all scientists and professionals) VS. ALL OTHER REPUTABLE SCIENTISTS (in the world consisting of 95% of the professional scientific community about 8 million professionals who all agree that homosexuality is a normal variant of sexuality)
Narth's premise is that People "choose" to be gay.
Conversion therapy is hard to accept because political ideology interferes with honest scientific discourse, argues the therapy's chief proponents, Joseph Nicolosi, PhD.
Nicolosi is executive director of NARTH. The organization is made up of a few mental health professionals, educators, and public health officials. The mental health profession has abandoned the treatment of men and women who are attracted to the same sex and are made unhappy by that attraction, Nicolosi said.
When these people enter therapy, he said, they are told to blame their unhappiness on society's homophobia, not on their homosexuality. Although it's not supported by the data, Nicolosi asserts homosexuals have a higher rate of attempted suicide, have trouble maintaining long-term monogamous relationships, and have a greater-than-average rate of substance abuse. All these problems stem from an inability to resolve gender-identity conflicts, he said. (and not the enormous pressure and stigmatization put upon them by a society kept in the dark by groups like Narth?)
Nicolosi supports psychotherapy to help homosexual patients realize why they have these sexual feelings, to help them to understand their difficult relationships with their parents and to help them overcome their fear of heterosexual contact. He endorses a directive form of therapy geared toward encouraging nonsexual intimacy between men. He encourages them to get involved in a sports league or a men's group and to develop friendships with straight men. Nicolosi said he knows most therapists would suggest that the men he claims to have "cured" have simply buried their sexual desires, but he believes that complaint rings hollow. "If these people are happily married with a wife and kids and they don't feel any conflict with their homosexuality, you may call it repression," he said. "I want to call it a healthy adaptation to a heterosexual world."
"The only good homosexual is a heterosexual homosexual".
The opposing view (the truth)
Many psychologists criticize Nicolosi's attempts to treat homosexuals. "What a lot of the conversion-therapy therapists seem to get are people with co-morbid pathologies that preclude them from developing a positive identity and intimate relationships, no matter what their sexual orientation." Eli Coleman, PhD University of Minnesota "First, there is very poor evidence of [conversion] therapy being very successful," said Eli Coleman, PhD, director of the program in human sexuality at the University of Minnesota. "There is some evidence of short-term behavior change, especially among patients who were not exclusively homosexual when they entered therapy", he said. "At the very least, there should be very plain understanding about the potential efficacy--or lack of it--when treatment begins, Coleman said.
Dean Klinkenberg, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in clinical psychology at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health, agrees. "Nobody has ever had any real success in changing sexual identity," he said. "Is it ethical to offer therapy that has a long history of being ineffective?" http://www.pflagcolumbiasc.org/psychology.php#2
************************************************************************Two Opposing Views Regarding Reparative Therapy for Homosexuals.
Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., psychiatry, is president of the NARTH (National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality
James D. Weinrich, Ph.D., (progay) University of California, San Diego, Department of Psychiatry 0603-H, La Jolla, California.
On an Internet web site at http://math.ucsd.edu/~weinrich/NCLSWNRC.HTML Dr. Weinrich offers some comments on a book written by Dr. Nicolosi titled 'Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach.' Dr. Weinrich's concluding statement is, "The essence of our disagreement is this: Nicolosi believes that this choice will reduce homosexual feelings, and I beg to differ."
Dr. Weinrich's comments about Dr. Nicolosi's so-called reparative therapy are not nearly as harsh as comments by certain other opponents of reparative therapy. For instance, on an Internet web site at http://www.csicop.org/bib/654 Saffron Monsoon offers a brief review of a book by Wayne Besen titled 'Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth.' Monsoon says, "Besen provides a comprehensive examination of the present 'ex-gay' or 'former homosexual' movement promoted by quack therapists and the religious and political right wing. He traces the history of homosexuality as a mental illness, its removal from the DSM, the founding of groups such as Exodus International, NARTH, and homosexuals Anonymous, and so-called 'reparative therapy' intended to change a homosexual orientation to heterosexual.
www.waynebesen.com
According to Besen, the organized groups consist of disgraced psychiatrists (like Paul Cameron), psychologists, and untrained individuals who are using a questionable and/or harmful collection of new age, fundamentalist, spiritualist, and homophobic, stereotypic and archaic psychoanalytic 'therapies' to attempt to change gay people into straight people.
These therapies include aversion therapy (with either electric shocks or rubber bands), exorcism/deliverance ministry, spirit warfare, regression therapy, intrauterine experiences/fetal trauma resolution (similar to engrams), non-sexual touching (different from therapeutic touch), masculinizing men by playing football, feminizing women by applying makeup, isolation from friends and family, compulsive prayer/meditation/visualization, inner child work, inner healing, repressed memories, bioenergetics, and family constellations. These practices are a travesty of mental health care."
The Lie:
Saffron Monsoon goes on to say, "Besen points out that depending on whom they speak to, these quacks claim to keep no statistics on their success rates or have a 40-99% success rate on converting gays to straights!
The Truth:
In reality, Besen writes, they have no success because sexual orientation is innate and cannot be altered."
Some readers will wonder how Besen gathered his research data. He did so in the best way possible. He infiltrated reparative therapy organizations and did not reveal to those organizations his true opinions regarding gay issues. I am fairly certain that even some conservative Christians will question the methods utilized by many of the practitioners of reparative therapy. Besen is no small potato.
He has appeared on the Rosie O'Donnell television show, on Bill O'Reilly's popular television show called 'The O'Reilly Factor' and other media sources. Dr. Eric Vilain, a genetics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, recently said, "Sexual identity is rooted in every person's biology before birth and springs from a variation in our individual genome."
His website exposing all the X-Gay lies is www.truthwinsout.org
www.narth.com
http://www.family.org/resources/itempg.cfm?itemid=3442 book on Dobson's site
http://www.narth.com/docs/whyreveal.html anti-gay
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/narth/reparativetherapy-ch01.html chapter 1 non-gay gays...
http://www.family.org/resources/itempg.cfm?itemid=3898
ANTI-NARTH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_for_Research_and_Therapy_of_Homosexuality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nicolosi
http://www.nd.edu/~amanier/leftjab.html hack
http://atb.opho.org/atb/?p=77
http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/swt_0505p12.htm
http://math.ucsd.edu/~weinrich/NCLSWNRC.HTML
Contact Narth with your opinions:
Telephone number is 818/789-4440 and their mailing address is 16633 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 1340, Encino, California, 91436-1801.
