Discussion Main / CureYourGays

World News Daily Report is a fake news site. That article is about as factual as anything from The Onion.

Considering the Russian government's stance on homosexuality, I wouldn't be surprised if this was just pure propaganda.

Or how about we just go tell the bigots to go screw themselves? With the exception of a bunch of short-sighted, hateful people with their heads up their asses, it's pretty much agreed that homosexuality is a normal sexual orientation (though not as common as heterosexual) and not a 'disease' or 'dysfunction'. So yeah, that should be mentioned in the article and anyone who wants to pretend that any Real Life examples added are anything but horrendous has another place where they'd fit in better (and should fuck off to).

The response above me illustrates the reason. There's way too much emotional turmoil and blatant intolerance on all sides of the issue. It would be reasonable to have something like what you're proposing, but it really wouldn't be worth it. This is one of those issues where even neutrality, uncertainty, or ambivalence will make many people angry.

Edit: Well... eh, no. It's the sort of thing we should have, I think, but the flaming and edit wars would get out of hand (even though the two sides would be "let's be neutral on a controversial subject" and "let's just take the politically correct side"). If somebody with more faith in humanity than I can muster wants to try, I'll be pleasantly surprised if I'm proven wrong. I'll also eat my hat. Good luck.

A bit of background for my response: I have Aspergers. Now, you may think 'Oh great another self diagnosed Aspie who claims he should get away with stuff because of that'.

But no, that's not why I mention it. I mention it because I also give lectures on the subject (mostly to parents of elementary school age kids), which I started doing as part of a job as a crisis consultant.

One of the subjects I rarely broach if I get a choice, but am sometimes forced to address is the 'Cure for Autism' question. (Namely: Is there one?) Pretty much the answer is that there isn't. There's certain forms of aid and therapy that help improve quality of life and with a bit of work, Autists and their environment can live perfectly happy and normal lives, but once your brain's developed that way, nothing we can currently achieve through medicine or surgery can change that.

What does this have to do with Homosexuality? Well, there are a lot of 'treatments' that claim to be able to cure Autism despite that. And nearly all of them are methods which were devised in the 50's for a different purpose: Curing homosexuality.

In the 70's the APA, basically the last western psychology association to still consider homosexuality a disorder, basically looked at it again and decided that it wasn't. In fact they discovered that most of the 'symptoms' associated with 'homosexuality' as they defined it were symptoms of repressed homosexuality and that it was the desire to be straight when one is actually gay that is an actual disorder to be treated (because it's basically unhealthy to repress anything).

Out of this change two things arose: A load of people with a 'treatment' that no one wanted to use (because there was nothing to 'cure' with it) and a bunch of (mainly Christian) people who, now that serious psychologists no longer wanted to treat Homosexuality as a disease, decided to look for new 'cures'. The former group eventually either started applying their theories to newly popular disorders like Autism, PTSD, Depression and addiction care or went away entirely (like the kind of electroshock therapy you see in movies and the type aversion therapies most famously portrayed rather melodramatically in A Clockwork Orange, neither of which, thankfully, have any credibility even in the 'Cure Autism' movement and of course chemical castration, which at least now is doing something useful in allowing compulsive pedophiles and rapists to control their compulsion).

The latter came up with 'Pray away the gay' camps and the notion that Homosexuality is a 'spiritual disease', because they can no longer get support from real doctors to call it a real disease.

So yeah, those bigots can get stuffed.

That said, the real reason this page doesn't need Real Life examples is that a simple acknowledgement that such programs and places actually exist and that their entire foundation is bullshit would be enough.

Marvel has been paralleling mutantism to homosexuality in the X-books for a while now, so it might fit.

I don't think it belongs specifically here, but it should belong somewhere similar, since it is parallel.