RIP (hopefully) "reparative therapy"

[njlauren]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/h...or-study-on-gay-cure.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I don't know how I feel about Spitzer, I appreciate the fact that he took the lead in the early 70's in getting being gay out of the DSM (that the religious right is still trying to get re-added *sigh*), but from what I have read about his claim that reparative therapy could work for motivated people, I wonder how much weight I would give his apology (and quite frankly the journal that published his paper should be closed down given that they violated major rules like not submitting his work for peer review and comment. )

It sounds to me like he did this simply to show he was still the maverick, the one willing to challenge orthodoxy and did so without even thinking about what he was doing. I am not a researcher but even I know that self reported results in a sociological or psychological study is useless without verification, and taking a sample group from people specifically guided to the study is also a no no (would be like in pharm studies choosing people who have shown a huge placebo affect with medicines and claiming that the stuff being tested worked, without double blind controls and such). It was like he was going to show he was still the young turk and didn't care how it worked. I am glad he at least wasn't a stubborn ass enough to keep quiet rather then admit he fucked up, but it astounds me that someone with his training could even promote something like his statement on Reparative therapy as science. I am sure the religious right will claim he was pressured to retract this, that his study was valid and so forth, but hopefully this will stop the next GOP president from allocating federal money into research on 'curing' homosexuality, the way Bush II did, based in part on Spitzer's work (I believe it was through the NIH, not entirely sure).

Put it this way, when scientific studies have been done on so called "reparative' therapy, what they show is that within 5 years of the end of treatment, roughly 5% are still leading a 'straight' existence, the rest seem to revert back. If it wasn't for the power of the religious right, no licensed therapist or psych professional would be allowed to perform this and keep their license, a 5% success rate after 5 years is basically a total failure as treatment.

 

[EMPRESSLAINIE]

An online friend of mine, age 19, spent 36 hours writing and posting her life story, then blew her brains out with a pistol.

Her father never accepted her as a woman (TS) and even at the funeral called her his "son." Then he had the gall to start a foundation in HER name to "CURE" homosexuality with HIS therapy. He should have been held accountable for murder in my opinion.

 

[EMPRESSLAINIE]

I think scientists as a whole are about as close minded as fundamentalist Islamists or Christians.

Emanuel Velikovsky is an excellent example. And Wegener with continental drift; after the satellites proved it they had no choice but to accept it, what? 40 years later?

There is evidence all over the world of ancient prior civilizations, and in Texas human footprints in stone beside dinosaur tracks....all ignored by mainstream science.

The Egyptologists led by Hawass (Jackass?) are one of the extreme ones; refusing to acknowledge scientific proof of the age of the sphinx and the pyramids. Cheops, Khufu didn't come around until thousands of years after they were made. The forgery of the pharoahs name in red paint circa 19++ was exposed a number of years ago by a witness who worked there.

 

[njlauren]

You have to be very careful about classifying science in this way, that they are like fundamentalist Christians or Islamic fundies, that is like saying all religious people believe the earth is 6000 years old or are anti science.

There is no doubt there are all kinds of types in science and yes, it can be block headed. As you point out, continental drift/plate tectonic theory took many decades to be accepted; Fred Hoyle and his colleagues promoted an idea of 'continuous creation' as opposed to the big bang, and it took many decades before the big bang took over as the predominant theoretical construct of cosmology. And yeah, sometimes it is ugly, they were ready to throw the guy who said ulcers were caused by bacteria out of the profession, and the guy who came up with the homocysteine path to heart disease was pooh poohed by cardiologists, now it is mantra..... there is politics there, there can be religious interference, or things like, for example, American indians fighting recent discoveries that say they weren't the first people to come to North America.....likewise, for a long time, tales of Vikings reaching the new world were pooh poohed, until they found the settlements and such.

However, in most cases, even with stubborn resistance, the idea that has backing wins, because the proof becomes overwhelming, and science is based on proof, not speculation. Velikovsky's hypothesis of world's colliding was never proven, his idea was of fill size planets colliding with one another, that had civilizations and so forth, and wiped out earlier civilization..he was in one way right, the moon came about because the semi molten earth was hit by an asteroid that caused a chunk of the earth to be expelled that became the moon..and yes, there is evidence of that, the moon does not have the nickel/iron heavy core the earth does, it is composed of lighter elements that make up the earth's crust and mantle, which would be what you would expect if an asteroid had hit the earth early in its formation.

As far as dating the pyramids goes, in archaelogy dating is inexact, but it can be dated in some ways. The materials found in the tombs, for example, can be radiocarbon dated to within 500 years (not exact, obviously, but al least close). The story of the Jewish Exodus could very well be tied to the myth of atlantis, if the destruction of Thera is assumed to be the origin (I suspect it is), though history also casts doubt on the whole premise of exodus (that large groups of Jews ever lived in Egypt as slaves or whatever, for example). THe idea that the pyramids were built by slaves (and especially the idea they were Jewish slaves as in exodus) was blown apart in recent decades when they found egyptian records and it was clear the workers were paid......

There is nothing wrong with speculating, but as with Erik von Dannikan with his "Chariots of the God's" stuff, it isn't enough. For example, he argued that the plain of Nazca in Peru represented an ancient landing strip for aliens, that the people there couldn't have built the figures on the group since they could only be seen from the air, that the people couldn't do it, which is ludicrous (and if those figures were offered to their Gods, it would explain why they would make it visible like that....)..the figures on the ground were no mystery, they are figures from the calendar of the indigenous tribes, something anthropologists and archaeologists knew. Likewise, it is idiotic that Aliens who could travel across time and space would need a landing strip with markers, if their ships could traverse space and time, they wouldn't need something like that. I loved the one when he showed a rock that had a carving of a dinosaur on it, supposedly showing how man knew about the dinosaurs, and the show I saw found the guy who made those rocks and had sold some to him...... does that mean aliens haven't visited the earth? No, it means that the 'proof' he offers up is stuff taken out of context to prove his hypothesis, and it fails tests put to it in terms of explanations.

True science is not fundamentalist, and while some scientists have the mentality, it is why science requires verification and validation of ideas, hypotheses, whatever; religious fundamentalism is based on the idea that what a bunch of bronze age people wrote in a book is 'literal' truth, 'written by God', when that can be blown apart quite easily by facts; not just the silliness of some of the things in the bible "The Sun Stopped in the sky"..really? The sun goes around the earth...but also in how the bible was written, the history of it, that for example there is no such thing as a 'true New Testament", there is no orginal text of the books in it, and the Hebrew Scripture by Jewish history was written over a period of almost 800 years and wasn't 'locked down' until 200bce..doesn't mean the bible isn't valid, only that the supposition 'god write it' is of dubious worth, given that the Hebrew scripture was written by scores of people over many centuries, and the NT texts had a winding history, starting as oral tales and eventually copied and written here and there, and finally put together by a group of Bishops who decided what they liked and didn't and also edited the texts in some cases.........

As far as the human footprint found next to the dinosaur in Texas, that was discredited a long, long time ago, it is something fundamentalist Christians use to prove that dinosaurs existed in the Garden of Eden....the footprint in question was determined to be that of a type of dinosaur well know to paleontologists, but there is a wrinkle to it, someone took a plaster cast of the track, and then added toes to it and voila, instant human footprint......if you look at the original track, it is clearly non human, the plaster casts were 'modified' to make them appear human. The facts of radiocarbon dating are such that even if off by thousands or 10's of thousands of years, dinosaurs died out 10's of millions of years before man was around in any way, shape or form and no proof has shaken that. If more evidence other then that silly track had come up, I would be willing to entertain it, but every theory that tries to say man was around when dinosaurs tries to base its claims on 'holes' in science knowledge, much as creationists, who cannot prove their ideas, keeps trying to base arguments against evolution in the 'holes' in evolutionary theory (which no one hides)......and often their arguments blow apart as science keeps working, something lazy religion does not. For example, the creationists argued that there never was a 'missing link' between sea and land creatures...until in the past 10 years or so they found the fossil of such a creature, and its attributes fit evolutionary predictions to a t........they argued there was no proof of human/ape hybrid ancestors, which should have happened if humans branched from the other apes, paleo-dna testing has shown that the protohuman and ape families that branched from one another interbred for a period of time, there are dna hybrids of chimp ancestors and humans. Among other things, animals can only breed with each other if they are closely related; a donkey and a horse can mate because they share a common ancestor not all that long back, so are genetically similar enough to breed.

Does science always work as it should? No, it doesn't, biases and prejudice come into it (for example, scientists for years argued that birds cannot be truly intelligent, despite what work with African grays and so forth showed, that they can understand speech, use it in context and also recognize homonyms.....they argued that the structure of the bird's brain wouldn't allow that, that only man could do it...part of it was lack of knowledge of how brains work, part of it was arrogance/pride in that 'only man can do that'.....in the last couple of years, what they have discovered is a)birds are smart and b)their brains work differently then man's.....but the key thing is, people questioned the prevailing wisdom, something fundy religious doesn't allow. It may take time, but science is self regulating, ias Richard Feynman said, Science begins, progresses and ends with a question, and that questioning should never end.

 

[EMPRESSLAINIE]

OMG I ran into one this morning......Jesus will cure her daughter of being gay, but the child just won't go to church.

Being gay and being trans is a life style and you choose it! WHAT BS and CRAP, the woman is completely ignorant and totally brainwashed by the entrepreneur who built this lovely edifice he created with other people's money for his church so he can be rich from their contributions, which help to keep them from being sinners, and out of hell.

Too bad we cant BAN religion and all spoken and written words about religion and gods (except the olde gods!) I rather like Thor and Zeus.

And 72 years of the Soviet Union still didn't do it!

 

[njlauren]

The answer isn't banning religion, it is tempering religion with reason. Many religious groups hold out the concept of faith that is based in scripture, church teaching and reason, and that is the answer to fundamentalism and extremism.The soviet union failed to stamp out religion because the soviet union itself was a religion, the peasants running the show there took a book of economics and turned it into scripture and the reason they tried to suppress other religious was competition for the state religion.

The problem with religion is when religion's power is unchecked or when it is combined with the state's power, the Catholic Church in medieval times was a perfect example of this, and even today the church's mindset is that they cannot admit that the church has ever done anything wrong because it would erode their power,it is why the church is so slow to admit things needs to change (the RC didn't drop the earth centered solar system until 1922)...they won't admit that being gay is not a sin or that birth control is okay because they have staked so much in it, they are afraid they will lose face if they say we were wrong. In other cases it leads to ludicrous contrivances to stay relevant. The church doesn't allow divorce, but right now the church issues 50,000 annulments a year, which is a joke (annulments are only supposed to be used in sparing cases, but meanwhile you have marriages annulled where there were kids, or even multiple marriages as with Newt Gingrich).....

Yeah, a lot of the crap that gays and trans people face came from religion, and religion is full of all kinds of things that are less then savory (the anti semitism that led to the holocaust didn't exactly come from a virus, it came from religious bigotry promoted by Christian churches for many centuries), but it also does a lot of good things, as long as it is tempered with reason and following the precepts of their own faith, to love others as ourselves and let God sort out the saints from the sinners.