Aug 17, 2011 -- 10:07AM, Do_unto_others wrote:

Aug 16, 2011 -- 11:06PM, MMarcoe wrote:

There have been cases about people who lived as gay or straight for many years -- even decades -- and then somehow changed orientations. How did this happen? Had they been deceiving themselves all those years, or was there really a change?

Well, I "lived as straight" for the first 17 years of my life. Publicly, that is. No one would have known. But it was a lie. After leaving home to go to college, I finally found the courage to admit I was gay and stopped living the lie.

That wasn't the kind of experience this person was having. She started out as gay, so I can't see how she was living a lie. Her experience was the reverse of what you're saying.

I should have qualified the paragraph above to mean first gay, then straight.

I suspect most cases of your hypothetical situation would mirror my experience. There's a wonderful documentary called "Silent Pioneers" about people coming out at an older age because, like myself, they finally found the courage to stop living a lie. You would likely not have "known" about any of them, either. We who are hated so much tend to get real good at 'passing'.

 

Aug 15, 2011 -- 12:09PM, Do_unto_others wrote:

Aug 12, 2011 -- 5:22PM, Erey wrote:

... my point, don't fix what is not broken

But Erey, the 'religious' 'right' says you are wrong. They insist gay people are "broken". In fact, that is one of their favorite words to describe us.

You could look it up.

 

Who is talking about the "religious right"  what does that have to do with this conversation? 

Very little research has been done Spitzer did a study that showed that some people appear to be capable of change.  He did not like his findings, that was NOT what Spitzer wanted to find.  But it is what he found.  Who is going to additional research?  Probably not Spitzer because his findings put him in a political hotbed. 

Science is showing that people change many, many things about themselves once thought set in stone.  People used to think intelligence was a matter of what you were born with, now we know this is not true.  Strengths and weaknesses of cognition are capable of being altered.  Temperments are alterable. 

Again,  this is not to say people should change sexuality, I have stated ADFUCKINGNAUSEUM on this thread that I don't think people should feel compelled to do so just because they might be able to.  However, if sexuality is measured on a scale it is not unrealistic to think people slide around the scale.  Maybe not wild swings from one far end to the other but just a 2 or 3 points out of 10 is enough to make a significant change.

Aug 15, 2011 -- 7:49AM, REteach wrote:

Maybe the Psychology Department at UC Davis can explain it better.

 

I really like this analogy from the link:

To better appreciate the potential flaws in Dr. Spitzer's study, consider an analogous situation.

Suppose a pharmaceutical company claims that a new vitamin supplement can change left-handed people to right-handers. Mainstream medical organizations express their opposition to the vitamin, saying that it causes harm to many people who use it, and noting that there is no reason for left-handed people to try to change.

To test the drug company's claim, a researcher conducts brief telephone interviews with people who have used the product. He recruits most of his research participants from a list (provided by the drug company) of individuals who claim to have used the vitamin and have given public testimonials on behalf of the drug company. Many of those people say that they tried the vitamin because they felt miserable as left-handers in a right-handed world, and that they are now functioning as right-handers (although many report occasional thoughts about using their left hand).

The researcher's data consist entirely of the one-time telephone interviews. He does no follow-up interviews to assess the consistency of the users' stories. Nor does he conduct face-to-face assessments with standardized measures to assess whether the vitamin users have actually become right-handed. Meanwhile, another research team reports data from a different study, in which they found that the vitamin supplement did not change most left-handers to right-handers, and that many people who tried the vitamin suffered serious negative side effects.

In such a situation, we would want to ask several questions. How reliable are the reports of vitamin users who were recruited through the drug company? What about the many people who were harmed by the vitamin? Why is it important for left-handers to become right-handed in the first place?

We can raise similar questions about Dr. Spitzer's study.

• How reliable are the reports of people recruited through Exodus and NARTH?
• For those who did change, how do we know that they would not have changed their sexual orientation anyway, even without some form of therapy?
• What about the many people who have been harmed by conversion therapies?
• Why is it important for gay men and lesbians to become heterosexual in the first place? Doesn't the real problem lie in society's hostility toward people who are homosexual or bisexual?

Indeed, even if conversion therapies could be shown to change sexual orientation in a small number of cases, there are strong arguments that doing so is unethical. For example, Dr. Gerald Davison (1991), a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, argued that change-of-orientation programs are ethically improper, and that their availability only confirms professional and societal biases against homosexuality.

Erey, please read this post.

Aug 18, 2011 -- 12:26AM, Erey wrote:

Aug 15, 2011 -- 12:23PM, Do_unto_others wrote:

Aug 14, 2011 -- 2:35AM, Qwesam wrote:

Methinks the reason why this board is not busy because Anti-gay debaters lose the debate and  run away .......

No, they SAY they are going away, but then they stay (and stay) for days just to insult other posters.

Have I insulted you here?  Have I, can you show

Frankly, yes, you have insulted me - many times. In fact, I got tired of copying and pasting examples.