The Counseling of Homosexuals Should Not Neglect Educating to the Facts

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By the Rev. Dr. Joe Renfro

In an article from the WorldNet Daily entitled, “Counselor ordered to argue for homosexuality,” it brings out that counselors must not seek to help homosexual clients change their homosexual orientation in counseling sessions, but they must offer only “gay affirmative” arguments.  This relates to counselors both in private and public schools, and it is a sad picture.

For example, The council committee in Cincinnati, Ohio voted 7-2 to impose a city ordinance that would make reparative therapy for minors struggling with same-sex attraction or gender confusion illegal, whether the teenager wants the therapy or not and whether the youth’s parents want the therapy for their child or not; and the proposed ordinance would levy a $200-a-day, $6,000-a-month fine on any counselor who tries to help a sexually confused teen. (“Cincinnati imposes massive fines on counselors who help youth with unwanted gay attractions” – by Father Mark Hodges, LifeSightNews, December 8, 2016)

One of the great villains designated by the America Psychiatric Association is the “conversion therapy,” also known as the “reparative therapy,” which has been was used by conservative Christian counselors to help clients deal with homosexual attractions.  The APA in 1998 rejected this practice and ultimately any form of counseling that sought to deliver individuals from homosexuality. The APA describes attempts to change sexual orientation by practitioners as unethical.

But, in 2001, Dr. Robert Spitzer published a report showing that a majority of gay men and lesbians who sought “re-orientation” therapy were able to achieve fulfilling heterosexual relationships in time. (Robert L. Spitzer, “Can some gay men and lesbians change their sexual orientation? 200 participants reporting a change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, Oct. 2003, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 403-417) 

The debate goes on, but may former homosexuals have been able to re-channel their actions and often in time even their desires from homosexual to heterosexual.  Nevertheless, in a 2009 report the APA ruled that “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts” or SOCE which was used to motivate change of the sexual orientation of homosexual and bisexual people to heterosexuality was ineffective and even harmful according to their appraisal.

Back in 1970 gay activists protested against classifying homosexuality as an illness at the APA convention in San Francisco.  In 1973 the APA’s nomenclature task force recommended that homosexuality be declared normal The removal of homosexuality as a mental illness was not by some scientific breakthrough, just by a vote that was very close as it is noteworthy that the vote of the membership was by no means unanimous with only about fifty-five percent of the members voting to remove the classification from mental illness. So all the people who had this terrible “illness” were “cured” overnight – by a vote.  And counselors now in 2017 are forbidden to treat homosexuality as anything but acceptable and desirable behavior.

Up until 1974 homosexuality was officially classified as a mental illness.  Freud had alluded to homosexuality numerous times in his writings, concluding that paranoia and homosexuality were inseparable.  Other psychiatrists wrote copiously on the subject, and homosexuality was psychiatrically “treated” on a wide basis.  There was little or no suggestion within the psychiatric community that homosexuality might be conceptualized as anything other than a mental illness that needed to be treated.  But things have changed!

An article by Exodus Global Alliance entitled, “Does Science Show Homosexuality is Healthy?” brings out some interesting facts!  These important facts it would seem should be basic in educational counseling, for the counselor is both an educator and a counselor, whether the counselor is a Christian or not.  The facts are the facts! Why could not a counselor share these?

In respect to emotional health the article shows from a major study by Bell and Weinberg that that seventy-eight percent of male homosexual “affairs” (relationships entered into with an intent of commitment) lasted less than three years. Only twelve percent lasted five years or longer. Certainly, this shows a pattern of broken relationships that must be painful for many.  seventy-three percent of the psychiatrists in the APA who responded to a survey by Harold I. Lief said that they thought that homosexual men are less happy than others. seventy percent percent said they believed that the homosexuals’ problems were due more to personal conflicts than to social stigmatization.

David McWhirter and Andrew Mattison conducted a non-random study of 156 stable committed male homosexual couples, and they found that none of the over 100 couples that had been together for more than five years had been sexually monogamous or exclusive. Studies have shown that children of homosexual households are two to four times as likely to become homosexual themselves as compared to the general population. Here is fragmentation and psychological pain!

In a national health care survey seventy-five percent of the nearly 2000 lesbian respondents reported they had pursued psychological counselling of some kind, many for treatment of long-term depression or sadness. Homosexual men are 6 times more likely to have attempted suicide than are heterosexual men. Studies indicate that between twenty-five and thirty-three percent of homosexual men and women are also alcoholics, and as alcoholism is an illness, should not homosexuality be also so classified, not as a moral healthy lifestyle.  Bell and Weinberg reported evidence of widespread sexual compulsion among homosexual men for multiple partners. eighty-three percent of the homosexual men surveyed estimated they had had sex with fifty or more partners in their lifetime, forty-three percent estimated they had sex with 500 or more partners; twenty-eight percent with 1,000 or more partners. These are the facts!

The same study revealed that homosexual men have to a great extent separated sexuality from relationship. The survey showed seventy-nine percent of the respondents saying that over half of their sexual partners were strangers. Seventy percent said that over half of their sexual partners were people with whom they had sex only once. It should be noted that this survey was drawn from the San Francisco area at the height of the celebration by that gay community of its freedom from the restraints of “puritanical, middle-class values” and before the AIDS epidemic struck.

In their study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals published in Journal of Sex Research, Paul Van de Ven et al. found “the modal range for number of sexual partners ever [of homosexuals] was 101–500.” In addition, 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent had between 501 and 1000 partners. A survey conducted by the homosexual magazine Genre found twenty-four percent of the respondents had had more than 100 sexual partners in their lifetime. The magazine noted that several suggested including a category of those who had more than 1,000 sexual partners.  

In respect to physical health, it was found that ninety percent of lesbians surveyed had been recipients of one of more acts of verbal aggression from their partners during the year prior to the study, and thirty-one percent reported experiencing physical abuse. Also the incidence of domestic violence among gay men is nearly double that in the heterosexual population.  Lesbians are three times more likely to abuse alcohol and to suffer from other compulsive behaviors. The life expectancy for gay and bisexual men is eight to twenty years less than for men in general. “A disproportionate percentage — twenty-nine percent — of the adult children of homosexual parents had been specifically subjected to sexual molestation by that homosexual parent, compared to only 0.6 percent of adult children of heterosexual parents having reported sexual relations with their parent. … Having a homosexual parent(s) appears to increase the risk of incest with a parent by a factor of about fifty. 

The conclusions made from the presentation of these facts are as the article concluded that:  “Thus from Scientific studies show here from the article there is a correlation between homosexuality and personal distress. There is clear evidence that many live unhealthy lifestyles. But not all homosexuals are distressed. Not all homosexuals experience personal distress nor can it be concluded that such distress is an inevitable part of the homosexual experience even if it is very common. Further there is effort to muddy the waters by hiding this kind of data. The mental health community, rather than reflecting the majority view, seems to have committed itself to revising the predominant public response, to normalizing behavior that is rejected by the public.” (“Does Science Show Homosexuality is Healthy?,” Exodus Global Alliances)

Add to these previous fasts, some observations by William Lane Craig that:   “In addition to these physical problems, sexually transmitted diseases are rampant among the homosexual population. Seventy-five percent of homosexual men carry one or more sexually transmitted diseases, wholly apart from AIDS. These include all sorts of non-viral infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, bacterial infections, and parasites. Also common among homosexuals are viral infections like herpes and hepatitis B (which afflicts sixty-five percent of homosexual men), both of which are incurable, as well as hepatitis A and anal warts, which afflict forty percent of homosexual men. And I haven’t even included AIDS. Perhaps the most shocking and frightening statistic is that, leaving aside those who die from AIDS, the life expectancy for a homosexual male is about forty-five years of age. That compares to a life expectancy of around seventy for men in general. If you include those who die of AIDS, which now infects thirty percent of homosexual men, the life expectancy drops to thirty-nine years of age.” (A Christian Perspective on Homosexuality, by William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith.)

Many advocating homosexuality as normal are bitterly against counseling that would suggest change from homosexual behavior accuse the illness as being basically the product of the lack of acceptance by the general public, especially those who hold a biblical view of it, whether it is classified as a sin, as the Bible does or a mental illness, as was once done in psychology.

Those advocating full acceptance of homosexuality is shown in an article by the Human Rights Campaign, entitled “The Lies and Dangers of Efforts to Change Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity,” that says that: “That there is ample evidence that societal prejudice causes significant medical, psychological and other harms to LGBTQ people,” but much of it is very subjective.  Yet, they conclude it is because of social rejection that LGBTQ people are eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, six times as likely to report light levels of depression, more than three times as likely to use illegal drugs, and three times as likely to be at high risk for HIV and STDS. 

The question comes to me, why on earth should the educational establishment forbid educational counselors along with other types of counselors from seeking to help an individuals who seek deliverance from a habit, addiction, or life-style that is in general very negative as it evident from the educational statistics I have observed in this article. Counseling should not negate education!

In an article from the Patriot Update, January 6, 2014 entitled, “Exposing the Global Efforts Behind the Homosexual Agenda,” David R. Monday makes some interesting observations, bringing out that it is part why the leftist thinking is seeking to destroy the Judeo-Christian moral and worldview that helped to found our nation, so as to transform it to a progressive, socialistic-(some would argue communistic) new world order.  Monday says that: “Once Americans are separated from the divine- then the idea of God given rights, the idea of “liberty being derived from God” is all but destroyed.”  This is a goal of the leftist thinking and why counselors are forbidden to encourage the deliverance from homosexuality by their therapy.

Bruno Bauer, a professor who strongly influenced the development of the thinking of Karl Marx, taught that:  “Only under the domination of Christianity, which made all national, moral, and theoretical relationships exterior to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the state, tear asunder all the species-bonds of man, put egotism and selfish need in the place of species-bonds and dissolve man into a world of atomistic individuals with hostile attitudes toward each other.”  (Karl Marx: Selected Writings, by David  McLellan,  p.59)

The villain to socialistic progress as Bauer saw it was Christianity. This thinking it can be argued influenced the development of the Marxian concept of the “species-being” which was became the Marxian theory of human nature. The individual mattered only as an instrument in the realization of the so-called “classless society.”  John Dewey’s philosophy which is the bedrock in progressive education in America is much in this same vein, as he greatly admired Marx.

David R. Monday also said, “The truth is, the radical homosexual lobby is just another leftist, communist front group dedicated to the destruction of traditional morality and America’s Christian heritage. Communists believe that the only way they can force human beings into subjugation is by destroying any connection to the divine. The first step in doing this is destroying morality. This is done by the promotion of homosexuality as being normal and healthy, exactly what is going on in our schools today. This is actually listed as one of the goals of the Communist Party (Number 26): Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural and healthy.”  Forbidding counselors from seeking to remediate people from homosexuality, even by just counseling them just by showing the facts educationally, for it does speak negatively of it, is an example! 

Why cannot counselors even counsel homosexuals by letting them know the facts?  By the educational facts, how can anyone say that homosexual behavior is healthy?  We need to wake up in America and see what the progressive thinking is doing to our land!

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