By popular demand 🙂
Seems fitting since I am spending too much time watching the Father’s Day Clone Wars marathon.
May the force be with you.
A college psychology professor's observations about public policy, mental health, sexual identity, and religious issues
By popular demand 🙂
Seems fitting since I am spending too much time watching the Father’s Day Clone Wars marathon.
May the force be with you.
The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality recently released a journal.
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
June 10, 2009
Contact: David Pruden
Phone: (888) 364-4744
E-mail: [email protected]
New Scientific Research Refutes Unsubstantiated Claims Regarding Homosexuality
Encino, CA- A new report in this month’s edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Sexuality finds that sexual orientation is not immutable and that psychological care for individuals with unwanted homosexual attractions is beneficial and poses no significant risk of harm. The study, What Research Shows: NARTH’s Response to the American Psychological Associations Claims on Homosexuality, examines over 100 years of professional and scientific literature as well as over 600 reports from clinicians, researchers, and former clients principally published in professional and peer-reviewed journals.
This research, assembled over a period of eighteen months by three of the leading academics and therapists in the field and under the direction of the NARTH Scientific Advisory Committee directly refutes unsubstantiated claims made by some factions of the American Psychological Association and several other professional mental health organizations. The study, conducted by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a network of professionals dedicated to upholding the rights of men and women dealing with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care, confirms the results of a 2007 longitudinal study conducted by researchers Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse that found that religiously mediated sexual orientation change is possible for some individuals and does not cause psychological harm on average.
“This research is a significant milestone when it comes to the scientific debate over the issue of homosexuality,” said NARTH president Dr. Julie Hamilton. “It also confirms what we have seen evidenced in hundreds of individuals who have benefited from the help of NARTH therapists. We believe that every person should have the right to independently determine their own course in life and for many that involves seeking counseling options that affirm their personal beliefs.”
In addition to What Research Shows, a collection of peer-reviewed scholarly and professional papers entitled Understanding, Preventing, and Treating Sexual Identity Confusion in Children and Adolescents, will be published in Volume II of the Journal of Human Sexuality.
Requests for copies or for a more detailed summary of the inaugural issue of the journal should be addressed to: Journal of Human Sexuality • 307 West 200 South, Suite 3001 • Salt Lake City, UT 84101. The journal can also be ordered by phone at 1-888-364-4744 or online at www.narth.com. A PDF summary of the journal may be downloaded at www.narth.com.
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NARTH is a professional, scientific organization that offers hope to those who struggle with unwanted homosexuality. As an organization, it disseminates educational information, conducts and collects scientific research, promotes effective therapeutic treatment, and provides referrals to those who seek assistance. NARTH upholds the rights of individuals with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care and the right of professionals to offer that care.
I have a copy of the report heading my way and will review it later this summer. For now, it is worth pointing out that there is no new research in the response to the APA, rather it is a review of literature. If the paper “confirms the results” of Jones and Yarhouse, does that mean that NARTH will scale back the claims about change to the 15% found by those authors? That result would require a change in rhetoric from NARTH leaders when on the stump.
In any event, this paper and the journal as an effort is likely a response to the APA Task Force which will probably report in August at the APA annual meeting.
The Pink Swastika authors, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, would have us believe that homosexuality was the driving force behind the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. Near the beginning of chapter three of The Pink Swastika, “The Homosexual Roots of Fascism,” Lively and Abrams state this thesis:
In seeking the roots of fascism we once again find a high correlation between homosexuality and a mode of thinking which we identify with Nazism.
The chapter then traces the roots of German fascism from Plato, through Frederick the Great, and Friedrich Nietzsche – all gay by the author’s reckoning. My point is not to contest this even though one could. For instance, historians and philosophers are divided about Nietzsche’s sexuality. Reading his works, I get the feeling Nietzsche was more of a schizoid personality, meaning that he required nor wanted human tenderness. Thus, for him, asexual might be a more apt description of his behavior. However, my point here is to propose a problem for the thesis that homosexuality and fascism have a necessary causal link of some kind.
In chapter three, Lively and Abrams guess at the sexuality of many Nazi and related people but with the following figure – Thomas Mann – they are probably accurate in their assessment. About Mann, they write:
Thomas Mann’s identification with Nietzsche may also have had some thing to do with the latter’s homosexuality. Among other works, Mann is famous for a 1912 novella called Der Tod in Venedig (“Death in Venice”), in which “an aging writer risks life and reputation in his attempts to gaze on the Apollonian beauty of the 14-year-old Tadzio” (Reiter in Grolier). Homosexualist historian A.L. Rowse called this novella “the most publicized homosexual story of the century” (Rowse:212). A recently published biography, Thomas Mann: A Life, by Donald Prater, establishes the novelist’s homosexuality. A review of this book in The San Francisco Examiner (December 23, 1995) states that the book is based in part on Mann’s private diaries, which reveal a “secret homoerotic life.”
Mann was married and had six children for whom he was “a remote and some times terrifying figure.” The article reveals that two of these children, Klaus and Michael, committed suicide. Two of his children became homosexuals (Rowse:212). Mann confesses in his diary that the character Tadzio, the 14-year-old boy in “A Death in Venice,” was actually modeled after a boy on whom Mann “developed a crush while holidaying in Venice.”
Now just as the uninformed reader might think that Lively and Abrams are about to suggest Mann’s positive relationship with Hitler and fascism, the authors write:
We must be clear, however, that Mann’s contribution to Nazism, his role in popularizing Nietzsche, was unintended. Mann was personally anti-Nazi, and was persona non grata with Hitler’s government.
Lively and Abrams vastly understate the case. Mann was openly anti-Nazi and while influenced as a writer by Nietzsche, did not come to the same political or personal conclusions. On the contrary, Mann actively opposed Hitler. He used his considerable popularity with the German people in a series of radio broadcasts designed to cause common Germans to question and oppose the regime. Here is an excerpt of one of Mann’s speeches to the German people, broadcast in July, 1942:
I know well that I don’t have to warn you against exuberance now that Hitler is once again winning and has conquered Rostov, the city on the Don, which he had conquered once before. It is well known that such things do not plunge you into exuberance, that the blare of radio trumpets which accompanies the announcement is odious to you, that you are by no means overjoyed. It is not necessary to dampen your enthusiasm; rather, you have to be consoled. Not we, out here, are in need of consolation when the war looks as it does at present. If you only knew how sure we are of our cause, which to begin with, and as premise for all that is to come, is the cause of destroying Hitler! His destruction is sealed, believe me and don’t be afraid! It is a world necessity, wholly inevitable, and will be accomplished one way or another; and because it is decided, the victories of that wretch are merely bloody nonsense. You are bewildered and depressed. You are thinking: “Will he triumph after all? And shall we never get rid of him? And will the world be German, in that desperate fashion in which we are now German?” Be of good cheer! Hitler’s victory is an empty word: there is no such thing – it is not within the realm of the acceptable, permissible, thinkable. It will be prevented; rather, he himself will always prevent it, the sorry scoundrel, because of himself, simply because of his nature, because of his impossible and hopelessly deranged disposition, which does not permit him to think, want, or do anything which is not false, mendacious, condemned beforehand. One speaks of the betrayed devil. But nobody betrays the devil; he is betrayed, because of himself and to begin with. Not with Faust’s soul, the soul of humanity, will this stupid Satan go down to hell, but alone.
From Thomas Mann, Listen Germany! Twenty-five Radio Messages to the German People Over BBC by Thomas Mann. New York, 1943, pp. 102-07.
Please read the entire address on the German Documents website.
First, it is worth noting how Lively and Abrams’ devotion to their thesis leads them to treat Thomas Mann. Apparently the primary reason he is mentioned at all is to make a stronger case that Nietzsche was homosexual. Mann was a great writer, one of the best fiction writers in modern history. He was a resolute opponent of Hitler and the Nazis. He left his homeland in service of his convictions and used his fame and gifts to try to bring down Hitler. In The Pink Swastika, his personal life is disparaged and he is discounted as an apologist for Nietzsche and thus an unwitting contributor to Nazism.
Lively and Abrams thesis collapses into absurdity when one considers the vigor of Mann’s opposition to Hitler’s fascism. People of all orientations and worldviews supported and opposed Hitler. The Nazis used anyone, gay or straight, religious or not, to get to power. And once they attained power, they systematically crushed opposition both gay and straight, religious and not.
To close this post, read the closing argument offered by Mann to the German people in his July, 1942 broadcast. Note his utter contempt for the intellectual foundations of Nazism. And then recall that the speaker was attracted to the same sex.
The end is near, Germans, believe me, and be of good cheer! Just at this moment I tell it to you when once again it looks like success and victory and conquest for you. The end is near – not yours, not Germany’s. The so-called destruction of Germany is as empty a word, as non-existent a thing, as the victory of Hitler. But the end is approaching; in fact, it will come soon – the end of the repulsive system, the robber, murder, and liar state of National Socialism. An end will be put to its trashy and disgraceful philosophy and all the acts of trash and disgrace which have sprung from it. Accounts will be settled, disastrously settled, with its bigwigs, its leaders and helpers, servants and beneficiaries, its generals, diplomats, and Gestapo hyenas. Accounts will also be settled with its intellectual trail-blazers and shield-bearers, the journalists and pseudo-philosophers who licked its boots, the geopoliticians, war geographers, teachers of “Wehrwissenschaft” and race professors. Germany will be cleansed of all that ever had anything to do with the filth of Hitlerism and all that made it possible. And a freedom will be established in Germany and in the world which believes in itself, respects itself, knows how to defend itself, and which takes not only the deed but, before that, the thoughts into the control of those ideas which connect man with God.
Those inclined to accept the thesis in The Pink Swastika might complain that one bisexual opponent to Hitler is not disruptive to Lively’s proposed link between fascism and homosexuality. However, I submit that Mann’s experience is one relevant response to the idea that there is something about same-sex attraction which necessarily leads to fascist beliefs and tactics.
In addition, in future posts, I will demonstrate that at least some of the formative figures Lively and Abrams assume are homosexual (e.g., Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Rudolf Hoess), were not homosexual or cannot be labeled so with any certainty.
Other posts in this series:
May 28 – Scott Lively wants off SPLC hate group list
May 31 – Eliminating homosexuality: Modern Uganda and Nazi Germany
June 3 – Before The Pink Swastika
June 4 – Kevin Abrams: The side of The Pink Swastika
June 8 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 1
June 9 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 2
June 11 – American Nazi movement and homosexuality: How pink is their swastika?
June 15 – Nazi movement rallies against gays in Springfield, MO
June 17 – Does homosexuality lead to fascism?
In graduate school, I read and thoroughly enjoyed Jerome Kagan’s The Nature of the Child. I have excerpted the beginning of chapter 7 below as a means of continuing the conversation about the relevance of childhood events for sexuality. This chapter is titled, “The Role of the Family” and the excerpt comes from pages 240-242.
I have said little about the influence of experience on the child, especially the consequences of parental behavior. The most important reason for this omission is that the effects of most experiences are not fixed but depend upon the child’s interpretation. And the interpretation will vary with the child’s cognitive maturity, expectations, beliefs, and momentary feeling state. Seven-year-old boys who are part of a small isolated culture in the highlands of New
Guinea perform fellatio regularly on older adolescent males for about a half-dozen years; but this behavior is interpreted as part of a secret, sacred ritual that is necessary if the boy is to assume the adult male role and successfully impregnate a wife (Herdt, 1981). If an American boy performed fellatio on several older boys for a half-dozen years, he would regard himself as homosexual and posÂsess a fragile, rather than a substantial, sense of his maleness.
Children growing up in Brahmin families in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in India hear their mothers exclaim each month, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, I’m polluted.” These children do not feel rejected or unloved, because they know this command is a regular event that occurs during the mother’s menstrual period (Shweder, in press). And a small proportion of American children, whose affluent parents shower them with affection and gifts out of a desire to create in them feelings of confidence and self-worth, become apathetic, depressed adolescents because they do not believe they deserve such continuous privilege.
As these examples make clear, the child’s personal interpretation of experience, not the event recorded by camera or observer, is the essential basis for the formation of and change in beliefs, wishes, and actions. However, the psychologist can only guess at these interpretations, and the preoccupations and values of the culture in which the scholar works influence these guesses in a major way. For example, Erasmus (1530), who believed the child’s appearance reflected his character, told parents to train the child to hold his body in a controlled composure – no furrowing of brows, sagging of cheek, or biting of the lip, and especially no laughter without a very good cause.
Educated citizens in early sixteenth-century London, who were disturbed by the high rate of crime, begging, and vagrancy among children of the poor, blamed the loss of a parent, living with lazy parents, being one of many children, or a mental or physical handicap. These diagnoses ignored the possible influence of genetics, parental love, or social conditions existing outside the home. Two centuries later, a comparable group of English citizens concerned with identical social problems, but still without any sound facts, emphasized the influence of the love relation between mother and child (Pinchbeck and Hewitt, 1969 and 1973).
Many contemporary essays on the influence of family experience also originate in hunches, few of which are firmly supported by evidence. This is not surprising; the first empirical study to appear in a major American journal that attempted to relate family factors to a characteristic in the child was published less than sixty years ago in The Pedagogical Seminary (Sutherland, 1930). The fact that a hunch about the role of family originates in a society’s folk premises about human nature does not mean that it is incorrect. Eighteenth-century French physicians believed that a nursing mother should bathe the baby regularly and not drink too much wine – suggestions that have been validated by modern medicine. But those same doctors also believed – mistakenly, I suppose – that cold baths will ensure a tough character in the older child. The absence of conclusive evidence means that each theorist must be continually sensitive to the danger of trusting his or her hunches too completely, for at different times during the last few centuries of European and American history, the child has been seen as inherently evil, or as a blank tablet with no special predispositions, or, currently, as a reservoir of genetically determined psychological qualities. Modern Western society follows Rousseau in assuming that the infant is prepared to attach herself to her caregiver and to prefer love to hate, mastery to cooperation, autonomy to interdependence, personal freedom to bonds of obligation, and trust to suspicion. It is assumed that if the child develops the qualities implied by the undesirable members of those pairs, the practices of the family during the early years – especially parental neglect, indifference, restriction, and absence of joyful and playful interaction – are major culprits.
I cannot escape these beliefs which are so thoroughly threaded through the culture in which I was raised and trained. But having made that declaration, I believe it is useful to rely on selected elements in popular theory, on the few trustworthy facts, and on intuition in considering the family experiences that create different types of children, even if my suggestions are more valid for American youngsters than for those growing up in other cultures.
Kagan refers to Gilbert Herdt’s book, Guardians of the Flutes, published in 1981 which describes the masculinity rituals of the Sambian tribe (not the actual tribal name) in Papua New Guinea. Essentially the tribe “believes” boys become men by ingesting the semen (“male milk”) of older boys. And of course, by the teen years, it “works” and the boys attain manhood. At that point, the vast majority of males choose a female partner.
Kagan’s reference to this practice reminds us that these experiences are embedded in a culture. In our own, such experiences would not be normalized and contextualized as a contributing to masculinity but rather detracting from it.
I cannot improve on Kagan’s description of his thesis. He is a gifted writer. However, I will elaborate for sake of discussion. He proposes that perception drives the psychological impact of a given experience. How differing perceptions effect the development of sexuality seems to me to be highly individualistic. Thus, for some, sexual maltreatment might push an essentially heterosexual person toward same-sex preoccupations. For others, abuse might strengthen the budding heterosexual impulses toward heterosexual preoccupations. For others, the abusive events may have no effect on attractions but rather influence attachment security. My point here is not to describe all possible trajectories, but rather to illustrate the potential of many variations.
A related point made by Kagan is that our culture looks at parenting as causative of adult personality. I believe many people do not question this assumption. In the last several years, I have looked for data to support or contradict it. I find little support that individual personality traits or conditions are strongly related to particular family dynamics. However, some broad trends can be observed. Fatherlessness is associated with a variety of problems in children and society. However, not having a father around may be interpreted in different ways by different children. For some, having the wrong kind of father around might lead to anti-social behavior. Thus, simply isolating childhood variables and relating them to adult outcomes is insufficient. These points are often lost on reparative therapists and other advocates who want to reduce homosexuality to a set of family dynamics or childhood experiences. On the other hand, biological determinists err on the side of discounting these social experiences as potentially influential for some people.
A satisfying position to me is to consider homosexual behavior to be determined by different factors in different ways for different people. For some, there is a very early awareness of romantic and sexual attraction for the same-sex independent of any trauma or parenting actions. For others, trauma and poor parenting occur but the same-sex attractions appeared prior to these unhappy events. For yet others people, the unhappy experiences may serve to create a disconnect between impulse to same-sex behavior and internal desire and attraction which may be toward the opposite sex. While these complexities create PR problems for culture warriors on both sides, I believe we must recognize the existence of multiple pathways to adult sexuality if we are to be true to the data and experience.
Yesterday, as planned, the National Socialist Movement (American Nazis) conducted a protest of gay pride in Springfield, MO.
According to video of the event, the National Socialist shouted “death to gays” at their rally.
A festival meant to celebrate the gay and lesbian communities in the Ozarks was met with mixed opinions Sunday afternoon.
The local chapter of the National Socialist Movement made their opnions (sic) heard at Pridefest.
Leaders with the Socialist movement say gays and lesbians are not welcome in Springfield.
The Minutemen United stood just to the side of the celebration.
They say they were praying for God to lift up the homosexual community.
The Minutemen United appear to be a Christian group who were there rallying against gay pride. It is not clear, but it does not appear that the MU were there to protest against the NSM.
The behavior of the NSM raises a significant challenge to the thesis of Kevin Abrams and Scott Lively about National Socialism and homosexuality. Abrams and Lively are founding members of the International Committee for Holocaust Truth. The first report from that small group proposed this thesis:
Hitler’s plans for a “1000 Year Reich,” is a “Homofascist” Conspiracy which still thrives today disguised as “gay” rights.
There is a problem with this thinking. The neo-Nazis in America yesterday shouted hatred at the same gay rights movement that Lively and Abrams consider the “homofascist conspiracy.” The NSM would like to implement “Hitler’s plans,” but this would mean “gays and lesbians are not welcome.” How can gays extend “Hitler’s plans” when they are not allowed in the Nazi movement? I really doubt the NSM would agree that the gay rights movement is true extention of “Hitler’s plans.”
(Here is a slideshow of the Pridefest and protests)
Update: The Minutemen United is a loosely organized bunch of men who are affiliated with Dave Daubenmire’s Pass the Salt ministry. On the front page of that organization’s website, there is a link to a podcast from Springfield, MO. There intent there was to do street preaching and evangelism at a gay bar and the Pridefest. According to this Springfield News-Leader report, some of the Christian groups, perhaps the MU included, also preached to the Nazis.
Prior posts in this series:
May 28 – Scott Lively wants off SPLC hate group list
May 31 – Eliminating homosexuality: Modern Uganda and Nazi Germany
June 3 – Before The Pink Swastika
June 4 – Kevin Abrams: The side of The Pink Swastika
June 8 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 1
June 9 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 2
June 11 – American Nazi movement and homosexuality: How pink is their swastika?
June 15 – Nazi movement rallies against gays in Springfield, MO
June 17 – Does homosexuality lead to fascism?
June 23 – The Pink Swastika and Friedrich Nietzsche