The success of Gay activism has been due to portraying Gays as a persecuted minority group, identifying with historically persecuted minorities like blacks, women, Jews. This illusion cannot survive Spitzer's findings, that being Gay is a treatable psychological condition like any other, not an inborn identity.
In the current political debate about same-sex marriage, all talk is of persecuted minorities and human rights, while Spitzer's truth of a treatable condition is nowhere to be heard. Gay activist Rodney Croome thinks back to the Aborigines and accuses the Prime Minister, who opposes same-sex marriage, of denying gays "the full humanity of a disadvantaged group".
In The Australian, Former AMA President Dr Kerryn Phelps likewise accused the Prime Minister of "apartheid" against the gay "minority" in denying them marriage rights. But turning from that bogus racial minority model to Spitzer's therapeutic model, we see that gays can in fact marry, and in Spitzer's study many were married - but first they had to become biologically marriageable by successfully reorientating from homosexual to heterosexual.
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The titanic illusion of homosexuality as a fixed inborn identity will take time to sink, but Spitzer's therapeutic iceberg will be more liberating than destructive. Below decks are the passengers I care about, and they need to know that it is OK to want to escape the suffering of same-sex attraction, and possible to do so. And our health professionals, who alone can man the life rafts, owe them a duty of care in aiding that escape.
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