Homosexuality is a Mental Disorder

Have you ever wondered why the U.S. military gives the boot to homosexuals. Well wonder no more. Apparently being homosexual is a sure sign that you're mentally unstable. Now before you start getting all huffy at me, I'm just the messenger. It's an official Pentagon position that homosexuals are loony.

Pentago n lists homosexuality as disorder
A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position. The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders.

visit source for full article

Want further proof? Look no further than Klinger from MASH 4077. He was obviously the most loony person on the entire show and a text-book homosexual. That's not to say that all homosexuals are crazy. Some very well known homosexuals are considered bright but I just can't think of any right now. Still, even in the face of claims that homosexuals are normal people, years of research by the federal government shows that mostly they are a bunch of crazy characters who could snap at any time. You might remember Hannibal Lecter. He was a closet homosexual who we were led to believe was just crazy. Did we ever hear of him eating any women? No. He only talked with women. It was the men he was after. Once again we see crazy and homosexual go hand in hand.

I'd offer more proof but I'm just going to be quiet and let the government research speak for itself. Don't feel bad about being gay, just know that we don't trust you with our lives. The Pentagon wants you out of the military ASAP. Then again, maybe we need some crazy people defending our country. A lot of the terrorist appear to be crazy. Which makes me wonder...are they really strapping explosives to themselves, or are they just so flaming gay that they combust spontaneously killing those nearby?



*If you take any of this seriously then you probably need a vacation. (Except the news article. It's legit)

I think the "proof" you are giving is a little out of whack. Using FICTIONAL characters in tv shows an movies is about as far from proof that you can actually get.

sensfan,

I believe you overlooked something here.

^^^ *If you take any of this seriously then you probably need a vacation. (Except the news article. It's legit)

Man! It's like shooting fish in a barrel around here. The fictional characters used as proof is supposed to be out of wack. I guess I should have put this in the Humor forum. I thought for sure that putting this in chit-chat with a note at the bottom would do the trick. I wonder how many more people will step into this trap.


I'll start adding *Doesn't read entire thread* tags beside names of the offending.
:bash:

Originally posted by dbates
Want further proof? Look no further than Klinger from MASH 4077. He was obviously the most loony person on the entire show and a text-book homosexual. That's not to say that all homosexuals are crazy.

Klinger was a cross dresser and not a homosexual!

It's called reverse psychology. He acts like he's a homosexual so you won't suspect him of being a homosexual. Pretty sneaky that Klinger.

Originally posted by 12m8keall2c
sensfan,

I believe you overlooked something here.

^^^ *If you take any of this seriously then you probably need a vacation. (Except the news article. It's legit)

Well don't I feel like an idiot.

I don't look like one, just feel like one.

Sorry guys ;-) Still love ya!

Historical background







Open bibliography in its own window
Modern attitudes toward homosexuality have religious, legal, and medical underpinnings. Before the High Middle Ages, homosexual acts appear to have been widely tolerated or ignored by the Christian church throughout Europe. Beginning in the latter twelfth century, however, hostility toward homosexuality began to take root, and eventually spread throughout European religious and secular institutions. Condemnation of homosexual behavior as "unnatural," which received official expression in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and others, became widespread and has continued through the present day (Boswell, 1980). [Bibliographic references are on a different web page]
Religious teachings soon were incorporated into legal sanctions. Many of the early American colonies, for example, enacted stiff criminal penalties for sodomy (which the statutes often described only in Latin or with oblique phrases such as "wickedness not to be named"). In some places, such as the New Haven colony, male and female homosexual acts were punishable by death (e.g., Katz, 1976).

By the end of the 19th century, medicine and psychiatry were effectively competing with religion and the law for jurisdiction over sexuality. As a consequence, discourse about homosexuality expanded from the realms of sin and crime to include that of pathology. This historical shift was generally considered progressive because a sick person was less blameful than a sinner or criminal (e.g., Chauncey, 1982/1983; D'Emilio & Freedman, 1988; Duberman, Vicinus, & Chauncey, 1989).

Even within medicine and psychiatry, however, homosexuality was not universally viewed as a pathology. Richard von Kraft-Ebing described it as a degenerative sickness in his Psychopathia Sexualis, but Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis both adopted more accepting stances. Early in the twentieth century, Ellis (1901) argued that homosexuality was inborn and therefore not immoral, that it was not a disease, and that many homosexuals made outstanding contributions to society (Robinson, 1976).


Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud's basic theory of human sexuality was different from that of Ellis. He felt that all human beings were innately bisexual, and that they become heterosexual or homosexual as a result of their experiences with parents and others (Freud, 1905). Nevertheless, Freud agreed with Ellis that a homosexual orientation should not be viewed as a form of pathology. In a now-famous letter to an American mother in 1935, Freud wrote:
"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too....

"If [your son] is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed...." (reprinted in Jones, 1957, pp. 208-209, from the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1951, 107, 786).

Originally posted by dbates
I'll start adding *Doesn't read entire thread* tags beside names of the offending.
:bash:

Yes, I think we need to do that.

I was amazed at the recent thread in BQ&B complaining about the number of "favorite song" threads and people started answering with their favorite song!

I am appalled that the Pentagon lists homosexuality as a disorder. All part of the ostracism of the gay segment of society. Surely they can't get married if they have this 'disorder'

Military research Although dispassionate scientific research on whether homosexuality should be viewed as an illness was largely absent from the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and medicine during the first half of the twentieth century, some researchers remained unconvinced that all homosexual individuals were mentally ill or socially misfit. Berube (1990) reported the results of previously unpublished studies conducted by military physicians and researchers during World War II. These studies challenged the equation of homosexuality with psychopathology, as well as the stereotype that homosexual recruits could not be good soldiers.
A common conclusion in their wartime studies was that, in the words of Maj. Carl H. Jonas, who studied fifty-three white and seven black men at Camp Haan, California, "overt homosexuality occurs in a heterogeneous group of individuals." Dr. Clements Fry, director of the Yale University student clinic, and Edna Rostow, a social worker, who together studied the service records of 183 servicemen, discovered that there was no evidence to support the common belief that "homosexuality is uniformly correlated with specific personality traits" and concluded that generalizations about the homosexual personality "are not yet reliable."

.... Sometimes to their amazement, [researchers] described what they called the "well-adjusted homosexuals" who, in [William] Menninger's words, "concealed their homosexuality effectively and, at the same time, made creditable records for themselves in the service." Some researchers spoke in glowing terms of these men. "The homosexuals observed in the service," noted Navy doctors Greenspan and Campbell, "have been key men in responsible positions whose loss [by discharge] was acutely felt in their respective departments." They were "conscientious, reliable, well-integrated and abounding in emotional feeling and sincerity." In general, "the homosexual leads a useful productive life, conforming with all dictates of the community, except its sexual requirements" and was "neither a burden nor a detriment to society." Fry and Rostow reported that, based on evidence in service records, homosexuals were no better or worse than other soldiers and that many "performed well in various military jobs" including combat (Berube, 1990, pp. 170-171, footnotes omitted).

Today, a large body of published empirical research clearly refutes the notion that homosexuality per se is indicative of or correlated with psychopathology. One of the first and most famous published studies in this area was conducted by psychologist Evelyn Hooker.


Hooker's study
Hooker's (1957) study was innovative in several important respects. First, rather than simply accepting the predominant view of homosexuality as pathology, she posed the question of whether homosexuals and heterosexuals differed in their psychological adjustment. Second, rather than studying psychiatric patients, she recruited a sample of homosexual men who were functioning normally in society. Third, she employed a procedure that asked experts to rate the adjustment of men without prior knowledge of their sexual orientation. This method addressed an important source of bias that had vitiated so many previous studies of homosexuality.

Originally posted by dbates
Look no further than Klinger from MASH 4077. He was obviously the most loony person on the entire show and a text-book homosexual.

That character was married on the MASH show. His character remarried
on the short lived spin off as well. The character wasn't a homosexual.
He wasn't even a real cross dresser. His character was probably the
SMARTEST person on the show ... not the looniest. He pretended to
cross dress because he wanted a section 8 - 'crazy discharge'. But
his character knew when NOT to act that way as well.

Removal from the DSM In 1973, the weight of empirical data, coupled by changing social norms and the development of a politically active gay community in the United States, led the Board of Directors of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Their decision was supported in 1974 by a vote of the membership.
Subsequently, a new diagnosis, ego-dystonic homosexuality, was created for the DSM's third edition in 1980. Ego dystonic homosexuality was indicated by: (1) a persistent lack of heterosexual arousal, which the patient experienced as interfering with initiation or maintenance of wanted heterosexual relationships, and (2) persistent distress from a sustained pattern of unwanted homosexual arousal.

The new diagnostic category, however, was criticized professionally on numerous grounds. It was viewed by many as a political compromise to appease those psychiatrists – mainly psychoanalysts – who still considered homosexuality a pathology. Others questioned the appropriateness of having a separate diagnosis that described the content of an individual's dysphoria. They argued that the psychological problems related to ego-dystonic homosexuality could be treated as well by other general diagnostic categories, and that the existence of the diagnosis perpetuated antigay stigma.

Moreover, widespread prejudice against homosexuality in the United States meant that "almost all people who are homosexual first go through a phase in which their homosexuality is ego dystonic," according to the American Psychiatric Association.

In 1986, the diagnosis was removed entirely from the DSM. The only vestige of ego dystonic homosexuality in the revised DSM-III occurred under Sexual Disorders Not Otherwise Specified, which included persistent and marked distress about one's sexual orientation (American Psychiatric Association, 1987; see Bayer, 1987, for an account of the events leading up to the 1973 and 1986 decisions).


Text of APA resolutions The American Psychological Association (APA) promptly endorsed the psychiatrists' actions, and has since worked intensively to eradicate the stigma historically associated with a homosexual orientation (APA, 1975; 1987).2 Although some psychologists and psychiatrists may personally hold negative attitudes toward homosexuality, empirical evidence and professional norms do not support any linkage of sexual orientation with psychopathology.

Notes


1. Although Kinsey's studies are often cited as documenting that 10% of the U.S. population is gay, Kinsey did not categorize his research participants according to sexual orientation. Instead, he chose to emphasize sexual behavior and fantasy. In addition, because Kinsey did not collect his data from a probability sample, valid inferences cannot be made from them to the larger population.
For a discussion of how the Kinsey data came to be widely understood as supporting the ten percent figure, see Voeller (1990). Support for the ten percent figure was also provided by Paul Gebhard (director of the Kinsey Institute) in a 1977 memo to the National Gay Task Force.


All surveys are likely to underestimate the actual prevalence of homosexuality because, fearing discrimination and stigma, many gay respondents are reluctant to tell a stranger (even anonymously) that they are homosexual. Recognizing this limitation, most research with probability samples suggests that at least 3-6% of the US adult male population is homosexual, with somewhat fewer females (Fay, Turner, Klassen, & Gagnon, 1989; Hatfield, 1989; Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994; Lever & Kanouse, 1996; Rogers & Turner, 1991).

(return to text)


2. The APA voted in 1987 to "urge its members not to use the '302.0 Homosexuality' diagnosis in the current ICD-9-CM or the '302.00 Ego-dystonic homosexuality' diagnosis in the current DSM-III or future editions of either document" (APA, 1987). They took this action because, although the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from the DSM-IIIR, the revised manual was not expected to be published immediately. Furthermore, at the time, another widely used listing of mental disorders – the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases 9th edition (ICD-9) – still included homosexuality as a diagnosis. In 1992, the WHO removed homosexuality from the ICD-10.

Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
I am appalled that the Pentagon lists homosexuality as a disorder.

Up until very recently the best minds in psychology considered
homosexuality a disorder. The pentagon is just reflecting what
was considered 'fact'. The most recent information suggests that
some homosexuals are that way due to environmental factors
(learned behavior) and some are born that way. Many of those
who are 'born that way' were in the womb during a very stressful
period for the birth mother. There is a direct link between high
stress for the birth mother and homosexuality for the child.

The pentagon is just behind the times in modern health and science.
It reflects 'accepted reality' as it was up until 20 years ago. Give it
some time and it will change as the truth seeps through the layers
of government.

Perhaps you're right that the Pentagon will catch up to reality, FF. I just find it strangely disconcerting that the Pentagon is so 'behind'. I kind of had them pictured on the leading edge of things...

Benevolent Heretic it's not the Pentagon thats behind, Its the President and the Republicans who elected him.