"AskPastorWalter"

IN ENGLISH.. "The APA claimed that they made the change because new research showed that most homosexual people were content with their sexual orientation and that, as a group, they appeared to be as well-adjusted as heterosexual people. I suggest, however, that these research findings were simply the APA's face-saver. For centuries, perhaps millennia, homosexual people had clung to their sexual orientation despite the most severe persecution and vilification, including imprisonment and death. Wouldn't this suggest that they were happy with their orientation? Do we need research to confirm this? And, if we do, shouldn't we also need research to confirm that heterosexual people are happy with their orientation? And if poor adjustment is critical to a diagnosis of mental illness, where was the evidence of this that justified making homosexuality a mental illness in the first place? Also, quite noteworthy was the fact that the vote of the membership was by no ...

"Peer Pressure Leads to Shifting Sands In 1970, gay activists protested against the APA convention in San Francisco. These scenes were repeated in 1971, and as people came out of the "closet" and felt empowered politically and socially, the APA directorate became increasingly uncomfortable with their stance. In 1973 the APA's nomenclature task force recommended that homosexuality be declared normal. The trustees were not prepared to go that far, but they did vote to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses by a vote of thirteen to zero, with two abstentions. This decision was confirmed by a vote of the APA membership, and homosexuality was no longer listed in the seventh edition of DSM-II, which was issued in 1974. What's noteworthy about this is that the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses was not triggered by some scientific breakthrough. There was no new fact or set of facts that stimulated this major change. Rather, ...