Baptists Promote Ex-Gay Therapy - II

Comment posted regarding Tennessean article Baptists reach out to gays, to make them 'ex-gays

clarksbar said,

"There was absolutely NO logical reason to remove homosexuality, as a formal disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) during that fateful conference in 1973. None whatsoever! It was removed for political reasons and the materials offered, as proof, were based on fiction."

Here are two more logical reasons:

Third, it was clear after WWII that gays didn't "break down" during combat stress due to their "mental illness" as many had supposed. Instead, they served honorably and with distinction as did other Americans. The same was true in Korea, and the war I served in, Vietnam. A fellow US Air Force Academy graduate and pilot is gay. Do you think they would have given him a $3,500,000 airplane to fly if he were suffering from some mental illness or other? Members of the APA recognized the same thing. Homosexuality had no debilitating effects during military service, a truly stressful environment, so maintaining that it was an illness made no sense to them.

Forth, the wealth of data available for research from the Army Alpha testing program, and the surprisingly successful gay military service, lead to a surge in research on homosexuality beginning in the 1950's. A primary object of research was to "prove" Freud's conjectures that upbringing factors (distant father, domineering mother, you name it) were the root cause of homosexuality. Later studies became larger and more sophisticated, but try as they might, they couldn't find any relation between childhood experiences and adult sexual orientation. Trauma can lead to many mental disorders. With none discovered in this case, it left homosexuality on the shaky ground of being a disease without a cause.

Removing homosexuality from the DSM was based on logical reasoning backed by sound scientific research.