Author: Warren Throckmorton

I am way outside my area of expertise when I wax upon things political. However, my opinion is that the liberal opposition to Judge Roberts is mostly about rallying the troops and fundraising. On what basis would he not be confirmed? If Ruth Bader Ginsberg can be confirmed with her history with the ACLU then questions about former clients and charities and personal beliefs should be off the table.

Immediately, PFLAG and HRC are out in front along with NARAL in opposition to the nomination. Interesting connection, gay rights organizations and pro-abortion groups – it appears they believe Judge Roberts may not find an implied right to privacy in the constitution when he officially looks. Said better, he may not find that an individual right to privacy is an absolute truth to which all other rights and morals bow.

Having said that, let me predict the following: Roberts will be confirmed, he will not vote to overturn Roe, he will not vote to overturn Lawrence v. Texas, but he will strengthen parents rights, including over abortion and contraception for minors, he will allow states to place restrictions on abortion and he will vote with Scalia and Thomas on church – state relations.

This is a developing story and is already pretty big in Arkansas. As I said in the article, I cannot understand what educational value these books have. I remember in helping with child abuse investigations in Southern Ohio, perpretrators would give material such as is in these books in order to groom kids for a sexual advance. I don’t care what your political ideology is, I would hope we could get to some common ground on removing sexually explicit material from public schools.
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Arkansas Parents Uncover Volumes of Vile Literature in School Libraries
By Jim Brown July 22, 2005

(AgapePress) – An Arkansas mother who succeeded in getting three sexually explicit books removed from Fayetteville school libraries says she has found there are more than a hundred books of that nature in the school district. Now a mental health counselor is recommending a parental audit of all the books in the city’s school libraries.

According to a search conducted by Fayetteville mom Laurie Taylor, out of 502 books listed under “sex” in the city’s middle, junior high, and high school libraries, there are 66 books on sex instruction, and 32 of those are on child sex instruction. Another 75 of the books deal with homosexuality, 23 fall under the category of lesbian fiction, 16 are on rape, 9 on incest, and there are even some books on bestiality.

Taylor and other concerned mothers and fathers are calling area school officials on the carpet for allowing books filled with profanity and gratuitous sex to remain on the shelves in the city’s schools. The group has asked Superintendent Bobby New and school board members to restrict students’ access to the materials. Meanwhile, Taylor and other parents have begun reviewing the libraries’ collections and are providing a summary of some of the shocking and offensive content they have found on the “http://www.wpaag.org/” website.

“The majority of these … are fiction books,” the Arkansas mom notes, “so there’s no educational
value in them outside of the fact that they’re literary — and I hesitate when I say ‘works’ — but they’re literary works that have been put into our library system to, in my opinion, desensitize and indoctrinate our kids to thinking that sex with whoever, whenever, whatever you want to is okay.”

Taylor points out that, although the bulk of these books are actually in the middle school and above, in Fayetteville any child in the entire county — which covers several school districts — can access any book from the library. “And here’s the terrible thing,” she adds; after choosing a possibly inappropriate book from any of the libraries, boys and girls can “have it delivered to their home school without their parents’ consent or knowledge.”

So far, Taylor says, “irresponsible” Fayetteville school officials have refused to address the issue, at least until school resumes. The National Coalition Against Censorship and other left-wing groups have written a letter to Superintendent New and the school board, urging them to resist removing or imposing a parental consent requirement on the sexually explicit books.
Mental Health Expert Appalled by School Libraries’ Explicit LiteratureGrove City College professor and psychologist Dr. Warren Throckmorton says he, too, is appalled by the content of scores of books on human sexuality in Fayetteville’s school libraries. After reviewing just a portion of literature, the noted sexual orientation researcher and mental health counselor says he found the literary value of many offensive books to be of insufficient weight to overlook their sexually explicit content.

“We’re talking not just about descriptions of sexual thoughts or feelings,” Throckmorton says, “and certainly we’re not talking about any kind of sexual education material. What we’re talking about are things that are problems in schools, such as adult-child sexual relationships.”
The psychology expert notes one particularly egregious example in particular, a book called Doing It by Melvin Burgess. In it, he says, “there’s a description of a boy who has a sexual relationship with his teacher. He doesn’t tell the authorities.”

Another book to which Throckmorton took especial offense was Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez, which features a threesome of boys who believe they are homosexuals. “One of them has unprotected sex with an adult that he met through a Gay-Straight Alliance [club],” the mental health counselor says. And these kinds of books, he points out, “are touted as being recommended books by groups like the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, or GLSEN. And they’re in these libraries. I don’t understand what educational purpose [books like] this could possibly have to be in a school library.”

Dr. Throckmorton says it is important to remember, researchers warn that kids who are exposed to sexually explicit material — whether it be in books or on television — are more inclined to engage in sexual activity. He feels an audit should be made of the books currently included in the Fayetteville School Libraries, to be conducted by a broad committee of parents in the school system.

In my recent article regarding the founders of Exodus, I made the following quote referencing a study of counseling with gays and lesbians:

“For instance, in a recent study of 2000 episodes of counseling with 600 gays, only 13 episodes were identified as involving sexual reorientation therapy.”

The reference for the study is: Jones, M.A., Botsko, M., & Gorman, B.S. (2003). Predictors of psychotherapeutic benefit of lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients: The effects of sexual orientation matching and other factors. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 40, 289-301.

There were a number of factors examined but the authors asked 600 glb people who had been involved in any kind of counseling to report on their experiences with their counselors. The word episode refers to all the sessions with one counselor. So roughly we are talking about 600 people who consulted nearly 2000 counselors for an average of 3.3 episodes (counselors) each.

Of the nearly 2000 episodes of counseling reported on by these 600 clients, only 13 were with counselors who engaged in reorientation counseling. Remember this is more than 13 sessions but thirteen different counselors out of nearly 2000 reported on. So less than 1% of the episodes involved counseling situations that the gay and lesbian clients now see as being at odds with their current orientation. Remarkably, 48% of the clients were confused about their orientation at the time they went into counseling. These are the kind of clients that would seem to be vulnerable to therapists offering or attempting to impose reorientation interventions. However, less than 1% the counseling episodes included reorientation therapy. This does not sound like evidence of widespread harm done by counselors to vulnerable clients.

Also, on the point of widespread harm, the one other study (Shidlo and Schroeder) that surveyed clients who said they had been harmed by reorientation counseling took 5 years to find 176 people that experienced harm. This is a long period of time, despite the fact, that the effort was sponsored by gay and lesbian organizations and publicized widely in these circles. In contrast, Spitzer took less than 2 years to find 200 people who met his stringent criteria for change.

Those who have been harmed I do not doubt. What I think this evidence supports is that there are people doing things in the name of reorientation that are harmful and they need to be stopped. However, as evidence of widespread harm, I do not think the case is made.

In part two of their series on reparative therapy, Salon’s Mark Benjamin lies to Maryland therapist, Barry Levy to get his story.

The session with Mr. Levy sounds believable enough, although I would want to hear from Mr. Levy as well. Several aspects of the commentary on the story however are questionable. Benjamin writes:

The theory that homosexuality is a mental disorder that needs to be cured is the moral underpinning of the Christian right’s crusade against gay marriage, sodomy laws, gay adoption and sex ed curriculums in schools.

This is a theory that is based in the reaction of European psychiatry to the idea that homosexuality is a condition and not a behavior. Kertbeny and Ulrichs defined homosexuality as an inborn trait in the 1860s in a political effort to prevent the maintenance of sodomy laws in Prussia. European psychiatrists grasped this concept but looked for environmental causes. Freud came along and in the spirit of the day located the cause in the first six years of life. Freudian thinking about homosexuality dominated psychiatry for decades as it did on most other psychiatric issues. In the Salon article, Levy is not exactly off when he says psychoanalysts still consider homosexuality a treatable condition. Not officially, mind you, but there a number of them who were trained in this way and maintain that approach to practice. It should be noted that homosexuality is not the only issue they view this way. They are being consistent in their theoretical outlook when they consider homosexuality through Freudian lenses.

I wouldn’t call this theory the moral underpenning as Mr. Benjamin does. I don’t think the political opposition to gay marriage, for instance, is conditioned on the belief that homosexuality is a mental disorder.

Benjamin writes:

One study, often cited by conservative groups like Focus on the Family, shows incremental success from reparative therapy. But critics point out that the study was based solely on interviews with subjects arranged by ex-gay ministries; in fact, many of them worked at the ministries.

He is undoubtedly referring to Spitzer’s work. And the charge that the study was based solely on interviews “arranged” by ex-gay ministries is false. Spitzer says where his participants came from. About half were referred by a combination of NARTH and ex-gay ministries, but even then the interviews were not arranged. These groups put out the call for research participants and people answered.

It is worth pointing out that Mr. Levy cautioned Mr. Benjamin that change may take some time and that it didn’t work for everyone. While I personally go into much greater detail (and he may have as well, we don’t know), I think it speaks well of him that he was not coercive and did not over promise as reparative therapist are often accused of doing.

I think this article is detrimental in that it portrays reparative therapy as the only approach that holds that sexual orientation is flexible and that people can get real benefit from seeing a counselor for sexual orientation distress. I am not a reparative therapist but I do see clients that do not wish to integrate same sex attraction into a gay identity. And I do find that over time (not the same for all), some of the clients find that the same sex attractions go away and are replaced with opposite sex attractions. My approach is not to tell the client what might have caused their feelings but to allow the client to tell me via history taking. Not all same sex attraction is association with the reparative history as described by Mr. Levy in the Salon article. Many ex-gays have that background and the reason for this should continue to be researched but I have seen many who do not fit that Freudian based theory.

Here is a quote from the Salon article regarding the founders of Exodus International:

“Besen tracks down a dizzying array of former ex-gayleaders who later came out of the closet for good, including the two founders of Exodus.”

This is not true. Only one of the founders are gay today (Michael Bussee). His partner (Gary Cooper) was not a founder and died of AIDS several years ago. 80% of the founders are still ex-gay. I know; I have talked to all of them personally to research it. This should be corrected. Wayne Besen knows there were more than 2 founders of Exodus and he knows that Gary Cooper was not a founder but he still claims these things to anyone who will listen.

Here is a Salon article on reorientation therapy. The issue is getting a lot of press at the moment. Here is a place you can track the bloggers on the issue.

I am growing concerned serious therapists are going to be dismissed simply due to a belief in the flexibility of sexual feelings. There are so many serious questions about the nature of the science that are being ignored due to polarization on this issue. Gay activists in particular are loath to allow any serious questioning of the sexual orienation orthodoxy.

The New York Times weighs on the Love in Action controversy. Of course, they hunt up Jack Drescher for a quote but interview no one that would give a more balanced viewpoint.

I am beyond amazed. There is a story out of Tampa, FL that is sickening. A man boxed his three year old son to death to make sure he would not become a sissy. An aunt said he was afraid the boy would be gay. Florida “Protective Services” released the boy to the “parents” after obvious signs of abuse. The mother watched the boy being abused and did nothing. This is a tragic and incredibly nauseating story. I was involved in protecting kids like this in Portsmouth, Ohio when I was a consultant for the Protective Services there. So class, let’s take a quiz.

Who is responsible for the death of this boy?
a. the father
b. the mother
c. Florida Protective Services
d. the ex-gay movement and reorientation therapists

If you are a reasonable person, you chose the father but could consider the mother and the Florida authorities accomplices. If you are the gay press, you picked d) the ex-gay movement.

Here is the “reasoning” – ex-gays tend to hold traditional views about gender and this man obviously had warped views of masculinity. Voila! It the ex-gays fault!

Because ex-gays do not want to be gay, the man accused of killing the boy had negative attitudes toward potential gayness in his son (the boy was three)? Because some reorientation therapists have traditional views of gender roles, the accused killer had these same views to the extreme and he set out to follow the teachings of the therapists? Incredible!

Now I do not understand something. These same people with their traditional views also believe this wise saying from the same source as those traditional beliefs: “do not provoke your children to wrath.” Why didn’t that rub off on the killer?

Let’s be clear. Responsibility for this tragedy falls on both parents and the Florida Dept of “protective services.” It is beyond shameful that anyone would use this awful situation to try to score political points.

I mainly want to blog this link that gives the parent’s viewpoint regarding the Love in Action issue with Zach the blogger. I suspect this story will continue to unfold when Zach gets back on the computer. If he comes out and praises his experience at LIA, then what will the gay press do then? If he doesn’t give positive reviews of LIA then there will be an increased frenzy to make this young man’s experience a focal point for all criticism of ex-gay ministries. Stay tuned…