Month: May 2001

What are we to make of the latest study from Dr Robert Spitzer that some highly motivated gay Christians can, with intense therapy and support, eventually function as heterosexuals? The answer, I think, is: not much. Plenty of studies have “found” this before. This study is, in fact, one of the weakest empirically on the table. All the evidence about the change comes from the subjective statements of the people themselves, who were all recruited from ex-gay ministries or psychiatrists, and who have an obvious reason to engage in wishful thinking. They were all interviewed on the telephone, which makes such thinking easier. There’s no clear definition in the study of what is meant by “gay” and what is meant by “straight.” Plenty of the subjects could have been bi-leaning gay or bi to start with and plenty acknowledge that they have gay thoughts and feelings to this day. Moreover, the “success” stories mean: “being in a sustained, loving heterosexual relationship within the past year, getting enough satisfaction from the emotional relationship with their partner to rate at least seven on a 10-point scale, having satisfying heterosexual sex at least monthly and never or rarely thinking of somebody of the same sex during heterosexual sex.” Sex once a month with your partner, while often thinking about members of the same sex, is not what I would call a “cure.” It’s what many gays have done for centuries. It is obviously possible to train or force yourself into such a context, especially if you’re deeply uncomfortable with your sexual orientation. (Likewise, if equal pressure were put on some straight guys, in an all-male context, they might be able to function sexually as homosexuals as well. Prisons and aircraft carriers have pioneered many experiments of this kind.) But I think it’s churlish to dismiss “ex-gay” people’s stories, to call them liars, and so on. If this is the difficult path they have chosen, and that is how they want to live their lives, it’s their choice. Their integrity and sincerity should not be questioned or ridiculed. But by the same token, it’s only fair not to extrapolate from this study that all gays can change this way, or that there’s any conceivable reason that they should. Tolerance surely means accepting “ex-gays” at their word, and accepting “gays” at theirs’. The difference is that gays are quite happy to support the rights of ex-gays to marry, have kids, serve in the military and so on. But the ex-gays have no desire to return the compliment.

EX-GAYS, EX-STRAIGHTS II: Shameless plug. The second chapter of my book, Love Undetectable, is a long and detailed essay on psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality, from Freud to today, and examines, I hope fairly, the literature of the ex-gay movement. If you want to read further, please check it out.

Am I the only one savoring the racial ironies of this morning’s papers? In one story, black and Hispanic lawmakers are thinking of joining forces with white conservative Republicans in opposing campaign finance reform – for very different reasons, to be sure. In another, a Republican president is proposing conservative-minded judges for Senate approval, a majority of whom are either racial minorities or women. Some Democrats may well be voting against minority candidates for judicial appointments on ideological grounds. Whatever the merits of each case, it’s surely wonderful that we’re muddying the racial waters here. It’s a positively good thing that some members of racial minority groups aren’t automatically assumed to be loyal Democrats or Republicans. Eventually, with any luck, we’ll begin to use the word diversity again in its original sense – a diversity of view, regardless of race or gender or background. Both parties deserve some credit for this. I’m impressed that Bush seems to be walking the walk on racial outreach. And I’d be truly depressed if the Dems voted for some judicial nominees on racial grounds alone.

JUDGES AND PARTIES: No, this isn’t about drugs. It’s just that I think that some conservatives are going overboard in their hostility to Democratic vetting of Bush’s judicial selections. Paul Gigot has a cow this morning about the temporary withdrawal of Chris Cox from consideration, under pressure from Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. But the Senate’s role in advising and consenting on the judicial branch is a real and important one. I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on cabinet selections, as I think the president deserves to pick his own administration. But the courts are different. For the last several years, Congressional Republicans have waged a scorched earth campaign against many of Bill Clinton’s court picks, even though most were perfectly respectable and qualified. The Congress is very evenly balanced. I think Bush is right to play this more moderately. And I think Republican and conservative wails are largely misplaced.

Some readers have told me that the banning of Mother’s Day in a private New York school isn’t really about gays. It’s also about straights. The school spokesperson suggests it’s about unconventional families of all kinds. Fair enough. I hope I didn’t fall for homophobic spin. But motherhood and fatherhood can obviously be celebrated even by those without either parent. A more salient point, perhaps, is why these Hallmark-inspired events are in the curriculum in the first place.

Ewwww. Our favorite nutball writes about … beating the bottoms of little boys with canes. It’s a classic. I’ve decided to drop my attempt to shame him into not writing about socialist blacks and disgusting gays and just sit back and enjoy him. It doesn’t get much better than this.

MOTHER’S DAY BANNED: All I can say is that this is the kind of thing that makes me want to crawl into a little ball and give up. When will these gay activists and their well-meaning but clueless sympathizers get a grip? They are to the argument for gay equality and inclusion what Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps is to the other side. Man, I’m embarrassed.

“First I’m against the death penalty, second I’m against Timothy McVeigh blowing up people in Oklahoma City, but I’m even more against Attorney General Janet Reno,” – Gore Vidal, on ABC News this morning. Now, I’m no Janet Reno fan. But she’s worse than someone who kills hundreds of innocent civilians in cold blood? Keep digging, Gore. It’s only getting deeper.

37-year-old Eugene Scalia, Nino’s son, gets the top legal job at the Labor Department. Maybe 37-year-old Michael Powell, Colin’s son at the FCC, can throw a party for him.

A neutral study of the soaring costs of prescription drugs finds that … the problem is not price-gouging. The report from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, reported in the New York Times, said “that 42 percent [of the rise in costs] was attributable to an increase in the number of prescriptions written by doctors and filled by pharmacies. At the same time, it said, a shift toward the use of more expensive drugs accounted for 36 percent of the overall increase in spending, while price increases accounted for the remaining 22 percent.” Simply put, this means that most of the cost pressure comes from demand for the newest and best treatments available, which inevitably cost more than older, generic or post-patent medications. The lesson of the study? If we fund a prescription drug benefit for seniors under Medicare, we may as well kiss our fiscal future goodbye. The Bush administration is trying to handle this simply by under-funding this new entitlement. That won’t work. What we need is a full-scale political effort to derail the entitlement altogether. Link the biggest generation in history with the fastest rising cost in our society right now – and you’ve got a fiscal calamity waiting to happen.

THE POST CREAMS THE TIMES: Wanna read a smart, balanced, serious editorial on the U.N. Human Rights Commission mess? Try the Washington Post, increasingly leaving the tired boilerplate of the New York Times’ editorials in the dust.

“I swear that if this current bunch of supposed White House reporters were covering Adolf Hitler back in the early days of his administration, they’d be writing glowing accounts of how successful the German chancellor was in achieving his goals. “There was some concern that he’d have a difficult time convincing the country that it needed to do away with the Jews,” they’d write. “But it’s apparent that he has been able to control the agenda. It’s a crowning accomplishment of his first days in office.” – Dave Zweifel, The Capital Times, Wisconsin. Zweifel concedes his reference might be hyperbolic. He doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s obscene.

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS: Predictably, this wonderful movie about a gay man persecuted by Communist thugs has now run afoul of the European left. A simply astonishing piece in Monday’s Guardian in London includes this quote from a leftist pro-Castro academic, Steve Williamson of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign: “If Arenas even did one third of what he claims to have done in his book, he would have been locked up for life in any other country. The man was outrageous. His prison sentence was basically for having sex with young boys.” So having all-but excused the Castro regime for putting gays in concentration camps (yes, he has the obligatory caveats but now says – absurdly – that Cuba has one of the best gay rights records in Latin America), the man throws in the smear that Arenas was a pedophile. Who said that bigotry was only found on the right?

“Even the best news outlets [in Guatemala] tend to be openly ideological and there is no American- style separation of news and opinion, so the owners’ views can permeate reporting. Many publications offer only news designed to further the owners’ personal or political agenda.” – Tina Rosenberg, New York Times today.

Trying to figure out exactly why Gore Vidal has such a crush on Timothy McVeigh, I had a bit of a eureka moment with the following quote. Vidal has long been motivated in part by a slightly loopy romanticization of America as a republic, of America never really being involved in wars (Vidal is queasy about the Second World War, let alone Vietnam or Desert Storm), and maintaining her pre-imperial virginity. Along with McVeigh’s paranoid fantasies about American power at home, he is also, it turns out, an anti-interventionist abroad. “[W]hat occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time,” McVeigh explained in the London Observer, “and subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. (The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel). I hope that this clarification amply addresses all questions.” It certainly addresses the question of why Vidal loves McVeigh so much.