Is the Pope Obsessed with the Devil? - by Dr. William Oddie

In Crisis 

Bethany Blankley writes in the Christian Post Opinion website that “The mainstream media is at it again”: “‘The Pope And The Devil: Is Francis an Exorcist?’ an Associated Press (AP) headline reads. The AP reporter writes that ‘Francis’ obsession with Satan’ is because he has mentioned the devil ‘on a handful of occasions’ within a two month period.” Ms. Blankley’s own headline expresses well the obvious rebuttal: “No, Pope Francis is not ‘Obsessed with Satan,’ He’s Just a Christian who Believes in the Devil.”

And indeed, belief in Satan, for Catholics certainly, is not an optional extra. Here’s the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

(391) Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the Church’s Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called “Satan” or the “devil”. The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”

(392) Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This “fall” consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter’s words to our first parents: “You will be like God.” The devil “has sinned from the beginning”; he is “a liar and the father of lies.”

David Mills, in First Things, quotes C.S.Lewis, not from Screwtape but from a sermon he preached during the war: “nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is Our Lord Himself. People will tell you it is St Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.”

So why don’t we? In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has a senior devil called Screwtape impress on the mind of an apprentice tempter the vital importance of maintaining disbelief in the existence of Satan, his devils, and their activity in the world, by convincing the object of his attentions of the absurdity of any such idea.

If we disbelieve in the devil’s existence, says Lewis, then that is because Satan himself has successfully convinced us of his non-existence. It’s quite a thought. Here’s Screwtape: “I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arrive in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that he therefore cannot believe in you.”

People who write at all regularly about the Church keep one eye on the website of Sandro Magister, who is not only well-informed about events in Vatican City, but is also a regular source of perceptive comment on what’s going on.

Quite a few writers have spotted and quoted from his recent piece “Francis and the Devil,” in which he begins with the stand first “He refers to him continually. He combats him without respite. He does not believe him to be a myth, but a real person, the most insidious enemy of the Church,” and he goes on to point out how rarely we hear of the subject, despite its centrality to the biblical witness: “In the preaching of Pope Francis,” begins Magister, “there is one subject that returns with surprising frequency: the devil. It is a frequency on a par with that with which the same subject recurs in the New Testament (my emphasis). But in spite of this, the surprise remains. If for no other reason than that with his continual references to the devil, Pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio parts ways with the current preaching in the Church, which is silent about the devil or reduces him to a metaphor.”

But why, why, why? The existence of Satan and all his angels, ever since I became a Christian, has seemed to me self-evident; that prayer we all say after Mass in the Usus Antiquior (in other words that practicing Catholics without exception once said regularly) for me has a particular and vivid credibility: “Holy Michael Archangel, defend us in the day of battle; be our safeguard against the wickedness of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray: and do thou, Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God thrust down to hell Satan and all wicked spirits, who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

This is no Catholic invention: it is fundamental to the New Testament vision of the world and therefore to the Christian faith: In the words of that unforgettable injunction of St Peter himself:  “Be sober, be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring Lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (I Peter 5:8);  “Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world” (I Peter 5:9). 

It is excellent practical advice; and if you want to know more about its biblical origins, Sandro Magister reproduces an article by Inos Biffi, originally published in Osservatore Romano, called “How the Scriptures speak of the devil,” which Biffi ends by expressing his astonishment at “the absence in preaching and catechesis of the truth concerning the devil. Not to speak of those theologians who, on the one hand, applaud the fact that Vatican II declared Scripture to be the ‘soul of sacred theology’ (Dei Verbum, 24), and, on the other, do not hesitate, if not to decide on [the devil’s] nonexistence, to overlook as marginal a fact that is so clear and widely attested to in Scripture itself as is that concerning the devil, maintaining him to be the personification of an obscure and primordial idea of evil, now demystified and unacceptable.

“Such a conception is a masterpiece of ideology, and above all is equivalent to trivializing the very work of Christ and his redemption.

“This is why,” concludes Biffi, “those references to the devil which we find in the discourses of Pope Francis seem to us anything but secondary.” Precisely so.

Extraordinária desfaçatez - por Nuno Serras Pereira

30. 05. 2013

Um dito-cujo casou-se, emprenhou a sua esposa, nasceu-lhes um filho, divorciou-se da mulher, apegou-se sodomiticamente com um macho, “casou-se” ficcionalmente (nos termos da “lei” intrinsecamente injusta que colabora na farsa fraudulenta), por circunstâncias várias fica só ele com a paternidade do filho; agora exige num berreiro de vitimização que o seu cobridor possa co-adoptar o filho, que será um desgraçado se assim não for.

Dois ideólogos homonazis ou gayzis (o livro) decidem, em nome da “homoparentalidade”, ter um filho para estabelecerem “família”. Encomendam a um estranho a semente, que é introduzida por técnicos numa lésbica amiga; passado o tempo, deu ela à luz a criança, que entregou aqueles dois, que se autoproclamam orgulhosamente pais; um deles adopta “legalmente” a criança; mais tarde entram os dois em estridentes zaragatas, que desembocam no apartarem-se; em nome do “superior interesse” e dos “direitos” do “filho” é gizada e reivindicada a co-adopção.

Após todas estas brutalidades, coisificando friamente as crianças, reclamam, com extraordinária desfaçatez, como salvaguarda imprescindível do “bem” dos “filhos” mais essa violência desumana chamando-lhe co-adopção!

E depois nós é que somos os agressores, violentos ofensores e algozes de seus “filhos"; pois...

O Direito a um Pai e a uma Mãe - por Pedro Vaz Patto

             Foi aprovado na generalidade um projeto de lei que permite a coadoção por pares homossexuais, ou seja, a adoção por uma pessoa casada com outra do mesmo sexo (ou a ela unida de facto) quando em relação a esta já esteja estabelecida a filiação, natural ou adotiva. O que significará que por esta via se poderá tornear facilmente a atual proibição da adoção conjunta por pares do mesmo sexo, deixando-se «entrar pela janela aquilo a que se fechou a porta»: basta que uma das pessoas adote singularmente, ou que uma mulher recorra à procriação artificial num país que não a proíba (os casos mais frequentes na prática), e depois o seu cônjuge, companheira ou companheiro, solicite a coadoção. Dizem os apoiantes do projeto que se trata apenas de proteger situações já existentes. Mas função de uma qualquer lei não é reconhecer factos consumados ou regular situações já existentes, ela vigora para o futuro e abre (ou não) as portas a novas situações. Aqui, trata-se da possibilidade de alcançar, pela via indicada, alguns dos resultados a que chegaria através da legalização da adoção conjunta. É bom ter presente este facto para não cair na ilusão de que o projeto aprovado difere substancialmente dos que foram rejeitados e que admitiam a adoção conjunta por pares do mesmo sexo. Trata-se de uma opção estratégica de alcançar o mesmo resultado de forma gradual e menos ostensiva.

            Corresponde a uma intuição do bem senso, e sempre tal foi afirmado pelos manuais de psicologia do desenvolvimento infantil, que o bem da criança e o seu crescimento harmonioso reclamam a presença de uma figura materna e de uma figura paterna, sendo de todo lamentável a ausência de qualquer delas. Nenhum pai substitui uma mãe, tal como nenhuma mãe substitui um pai. Como afirma o filósofo e teólogo Xavier Lacroix, todos crescemos num duplo jogo de identificação e diferenciação, todos recebemos o amor segundo estas duas cores e estas duas vozes, masculina e feminina, pois nenhuma delas esgota a riqueza do humano. Assumir legalmente a filiação por duas pessoas do mesmo sexo é, de acordo com a filósofa Sylviane Agacinsky, negar violentamente a incompletude e finitude de cada um do sexos em relação ao outro, é simbolizar, aos olhos dos visados e de toda a sociedade, a negação da limitação de cada um dos sexos e, consequentemente, a negação da riqueza da dualidade sexual.

            Não é por acaso que a filiação envolve dois progenitores, não só um, mas também não três ou quatro: porque cada um deles, na sua unicidade, é portador de uma especificidade (a que é própria do seu sexo) que completa e enriquece a do outro.

            O pedopsiquiatra Christian Flavigny, por seu turno, salienta (em Je veux papa et maman – «père- et- mère» congédiés par la loi; Salvator, 2013) como a identidade da criança se constrói a partir da noção de que foi gerada pela união entre o pai e a mãe. Isso é possível quando ela é adotada por um homem e uma mulher, que sempre poderiam ser seus pais biológicos, mas nunca quando é adotada por duas pessoas do mesmo sexo (ou coadotada por uma delas), que nunca poderiam ser seus pais biológicos, como ela sabe. Neste caso, a adoção serve de ficção legal falsificadora e geradora de uma confusão prejudicial à construção dessa identidade. Convenhamos que será difícil explicar a essa criança (numa nova versão da “história da cegonha”) como é que na sua origem pode estar uma relação entre pessoas do mesmo sexo…

            É por estas razões que sempre o regime da adoção foi concebido no sentido de a aproximar da filiação natural, para que a criança adotada se sinta o mais possível semelhante à que é criada pelos pais biológicos. E também para que a criança adotada não se sinta diferente das que o não são, muitos pais adotantes procuram ocultar de outras crianças o facto de ela ser adotada, o que nunca será possível quando é adotada por um par do mesmo sexo.

            Ao contrário do que muitas vezes se diz, não há “consenso científico” a respeito da ausência de malefícios da educação de crianças por pares do mesmo sexo. O estudo mais extenso até hoje realizado, do professor da Universidade do Texas Mark Regnerous, publicado na revista Social Science Research, demonstra o contrário.

            Também foi aprovada recentemente em França a legalização do casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo, associada à possibilidade de adoção. Mas o que a todos surpreendeu e ultrapassou todas as expectativas, foi a mobilização popular de oposição a esse projeto, que continua e não dá sinais de cessar. Realizaram-se, por várias vezes, manifestações das mais numerosas dos últimos anos. Juntaram-se pessoas de sensibilidades muito diferentes: católicos, mas também fieis de outras denominações religiosas e intelectuais laicos e de esquerda. Essa mobilização provocou, de acordo com as sondagens, a inversão da opinião geral a respeito do projeto: de uma aceitação claramente maioritária a uma oposição.

            Um sinal de que não estamos perante “conquistas irreversíveis” contra as quais nada pode fazer-se.

The New Birds and the Bees - by Mark Regnerus

In The Public Discourse 

For all of their intelligence, sophistication, and cosmopolitan ways, Westerners are increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from.

I realize it’s a humorous and ironic claim to suggest that moderns—who dwell in an over-sexed, over-sensualized world—might actually be uncomfortable with the subject matter of sex. But I’m serious. They’re growing increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from.

Confused?

While over 98 percent of babies are still generated by vaginal sexual intercourse—the clinical term I use so that everyone understands what I’m saying—it’s become increasingly commonplace to disassociate sex from babies in the mind.

Birth control is widely practiced, and almost an assumption. Surrogacy is surging. Artificial reproductive technology (ART) is too, and not just due to rising reliance on in vitro fertilization. Additionally, alternative forms of heterosexual sex—in which ejaculation occurs outside the vagina—are increasingly common in accounts of sexual relationship behavior (and in porn are normative). In step, reported use of “withdrawal” as a contraceptive method has actually increased over time—from 41 percent in 1995 to 59 percent in 2008. Homosexual sex doesn’t involve ejaculation at all—in the case of women—or, with men, is not poised to fertilize anything.

Thus “sex” is an inclusive word. In that sense it’s a bit like “hooking up,” a catch-all term that leaves to the imagination the details of what did or did not happen between a couple. Unless, however, such sex is “unprotected.” We know what that means.

In other words, what we mean when we think of sex has shifted—and expanded—rather dramatically. Some celebrate this, concurring with Huxley’s Brave New World character that “fertility is merely a nuisance.” Some lament it. Others struggle to have it both ways, echoing the words my wife and I heard one physician’s assistant utter: “Isn’t it strange how we spend our twenties trying our best to avoid pregnancy, only to spend our thirties doing the opposite?”

Yes, we are increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from, no doubt about it. Our lingo betrays us. And it doesn’t take a social conservative to perceive it.

Anthony Giddens is a premier social theorist from Britain, a leading intellectual figure in England’s Labour Party, and one of the most famous sociologists alive today. Before retiring, he was director of the London School of Economics. He wrote a book called The Transformation of Intimacy, published a full twenty-one years ago already. Although not chock full of statistics or even original data analyses of any sort, it’s nevertheless excellent as a masterful work of prediction.

Giddens asserts:

Effective contraception meant more than an increased capability of limiting pregnancy . . . [It] signaled a deep transition in personal life. For women—and, in a partly different sense, for men also—sexuality became malleable, open to being shaped in diverse ways, and a potential “property” of the individual. Sexuality came into being as part of a progressive differentiation of sex from the exigencies of reproduction. With the further elaboration of reproductive technologies, that differentiation has today become complete. Now that conception can be artificially produced, rather than only artificially inhibited, sexuality is at last fully autonomous.

Fully autonomous. In other words, free from embeddedness in relationships. By extension, having little to do with moms, dads, and babies. See what I mean? We’re ambivalent about the procreative aspect of sex. Sex is rather all about pleasure, or, to use the lingo of a public-health friend of mine, all about the f***ing. (Forgive my being blunt and crude, but if the shoe fits . . .)

Indeed, the very word procreative is typically met with eye-rolling, guffaws, and LOLs.

Our reticence about where babies come from is also reflected in a new children’s book—ironically titled What Makes a Baby—that’s generating plenty of attention, including over at The Atlantic Monthly where Noah Berlatsky describes its unusual approach to explaining the birds and the bees:

Indeed, the book doesn’t even mention the word “mommy” or “daddy.” Instead, What Makes a Baby explains that “Not all bodies have eggs in them. Some do, and some do not”; and that “Not all bodies have sperm in them. Some do, and some do not.” Similarly, sex isn’t so much tip-toed around as it is relegated to one unspecified option among many. “When grown ups want to make a baby they need to get an egg from one body and sperm from another body. They also need a place where a baby can grow.”

We’re becoming boosters of both outsourcing babies—aided considerably by its association with gay rights—and treating ART as if it’s as plausible and natural as intercourse. As Giddens puts it:

[W]hat used to be “nature” becomes dominated by socially organized systems. Reproduction was once part of nature, and heterosexual activity was inevitably its focal point. . . .

Even though nearly 99 percent of human reproduction remains of “nature” by this definition, it makes a big difference that we no longer automatically associate the two, since naming something in the social world—unlike in the natural world—not only classifies it but often acts back upon the social world, changing how people navigate it. Giddens wrote about that, too—the double hermeneutic—as did sociologist James Hunter, who notes that “to classify something in the social world is to penetrate the imagination, to alter our frameworks of knowledge and discussion, and to shift the perception of everyday reality.”

Done.

ART cycles have increased 37 percent between 2001 and 2010. Live-birth deliveries from ART have jumped 60 percent in the same time, constituting just under 62,000 babies. That may or may not sound like a large number, but it works out to be just under four babies per state per day (to put things into time-and-space perspective).

Together with birth control and rising familiarity with diverse sexual acts, the social result is a univocal shift in our thinking about sex and where babies come from. Instead, sex is primarily about pleasure—something with which even our most distant ancestors were no doubt acquainted—secondarily about bonding, and somewhere down the list are the babies that were once equated with consistent paired sexual expression.

Great (infertile) sex is now a priority, a hallmark of the elusive good life. Hence the rise in talk of “needs” and even “rights” when discussing sex. You’d think that quality sexual experiences were as pivotal to human flourishing as clean air, potable water, edible food, and ample shelter. To many today they are. Giddens asserts that our new approach to relationships has introduced the idea of sex as an art form

into the core of the conjugal relationship and makes the achievement of reciprocal sexual pleasure a key element in whether the relationship is sustained or dissolved. The cultivation of sexual skills, the capability of giving and experiencing sexual satisfaction, on the part of both sexes, [has] become organized reflexively via a multitude of sources of sexual information, advice and training.

Even when sex becomes about reproduction, we presume—incorrectly, given rising ART rates—that we retain complete control over the when, where, and how we have children. Popular cultural author Wendell Berry recognizes this, but has chosen to tag it with less optimism than many as constituting an element not of the organic and virtuous life but as a synthetic compound of our penchant for more, larger, and cheaper—a postmodern intersection where Wal-Mart meets Dan Savage. Berry writes:

…our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of “sexual partners,” orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex . . .

Meanwhile, the most organic citizens in our midst are portrayed as the most restrictive, misogynist, and backwards. Among all the ironies that greet us in the domain of human sexuality, this is one of the most profound. Our language about sexuality is dominated by public health, with its talk of risk, “protection,” health, choice, and rights. It’s not natural and productive. It’s mechanical and consumptive.

And hence we scoff at babies—the crowning glory of natural human creativity—and where they come from.

We are not a rational people. We are a strange people.

Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Homosexuals are born that way, gay activists argue vehemently. How is it that so many have changed? - by Robert R. Reilly

In MercatorNet

Science has been enlisted to depathologize homosexuality in so far as it can lend credence to the assertion that homosexuality is an immutable condition. The immutability issue is as irrelevant to the moral nature of homosexual behavior as it is to alcoholic behavior. Alcoholics, by definition, are alcoholics for life. If they wish to remain sober, they may never drink again.

Are homosexuals like this, also? Will they forever suffer from (or celebrate) their inclination? There is mixed evidence regarding this. Of those wanting to change, some have been able to; some have not. However, except in the very real terms of personal hardship, it does not really matter. After all, everyone is disposed in some morally disordered way or another. The immutability of the condition or of the inclination is irrelevant to the moral character of the acts to which they are disposed.

Of course, some homosexual apologists find the genetic excuse exculpatory. Therefore, they need it for the rationalization of their behavior: if I am this way by nature, how can I help what I do? However, the alcoholic could use the same justification for his drunkenness. In neither case does the inclination neuter free will or responsibility for actions.

However, this issue is extremely important here in the US because homosexual activists wish to establish the immutability of their condition in order to constitute themselves as a “class”. Legally, a “class” can be determined only by accident of birth, by such traits as race or sex. This explains the enormous interest in establishing sexual orientation as genetic or biological. Homosexuals want to be designated a “class” so they can game the legal system for the spoils of discrimination. Therefore, this issue has huge legal and financial consequences.

We can see the burgeoning significance of this matter in Attorney General Eric Holder’s 2011 letter to Congress, explaining why the Obama administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being between one man and one woman, in court. A group can be defined as a “class”, explained Mr. Holder, if individuals “exhibit obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group”. Therefore, everything hinges upon whether homosexuality is an unchangeable characteristic. Mr Holder announces that, “a growing scientific consensus accepts that sexual orientation is a characteristic that is immutable”. So great is this consensus that, according to him, claims to the contrary “we do not believe can be reconciled with more recent social scientific understandings”.

This bestows upon homosexuals the privilege of being a class, just as are blacks, Hispanics, or women. As a class, they can be discriminated against. Has there been such discrimination?

Mr Holder answers that, “there is, regrettably, a significant history of purposeful discrimination against gay and lesbian people, by governmental as well as private entities, based on prejudice and stereotypes that continue to have ramifications today”.  One of those ongoing ramifications is the restriction of marriage to one man and one woman by the Defense of Marriage Act. Thus, he concludes, this law is discriminatory against homosexuals as a class and, therefore, unconstitutional and indefensible.

Judging “immutable characteristics”

But let us try to put these claims in perspective. Let us say that in cannibals, cannibalism is an immutable characteristic. They simply can’t stop eating people. Identifiable as cannibals, they could be discriminated against as a class. But this begs the question as to whether discrimination against them would be justified or not. Surely, one would think, it would be warranted because eating other people is wrong. Therefore, the discrimination against them is based not so much on cannibals as people, but on their activity of eating other people. If there were nothing wrong with eating other people, there would be no moral basis for discrimination against cannibals.

Likewise, even if homosexuality is an immutable characteristic, what distinguishes homosexuals is their sexual activity. Therefore, like cannibals, discrimination against them would be based not so much on who they are, as on what they do. The whole question, then, turns upon whether what they do is right or wrong. Mr. Holder’s letter clearly assumes that this question has been settled and, in his answer, we see the profound ramifications of the Lawrence v. Texas case and its vindication of sodomy. Using Lawrence, Mr. Holder declares, in an opprobrious tone, that, “Indeed, until very recently, states have ‘demean[ed] the existence’ of gays and lesbians ‘by making their private sexual conduct a crime’. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 578 (2003)” – meaning, of course, that it was wrong to do so.

Change you can believe in

However, even if one were to grant that sodomy is a morally fine act, the contention that homosexuals are a “class” is indefensible because sexual orientation is not an immutable characteristic – even if some are unable to change it. There is simply too much clinical and other evidence that proves otherwise. A black man has never become a white man, or an Hispanic, a Chinese. A woman has never become a man, or a man, a woman – without massive surgical and hormonal intervention. However, there is ample fluidity, particularly in younger years, in sexual orientation. Straight men have become homosexuals, and homosexuals have become straight. The mutable cannot be immutable.

In 2003, Dr Jeffrey Satinover, a board-certified psychiatrist, testified before the Massachusetts Senate Judicial Committee on this subject. He said that the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) study of sexuality was completed in 1994 by a research team from the University of Chicago and funded by almost every large government agency and NGO with an interest in the AIDS epidemic.

“They studied every aspect of sexuality, but among their findings is the following, which I'm going to quote for you directly: ‘7.1 [to as much as 9.1] percent of the men [we studied, more than 1,500] had at least one same-gender partner since puberty. ... [But] almost 4 percent of the men [we studied] had sex with another male before turning eighteen but not after. These men. . . constitute 42 percent of the total number of men who report ever having a same gender experience.’ Let me put this in context: Roughly ten out of every 100 men have had sex with another man at some time – the origin of the 10% gay myth. Most of these will have identified themselves as gay before turning eighteen and will have acted on it. But by age 18, a full half of them no longer identify themselves as gay and will never again have a male sexual partner. And this is not a population of people selected because they went into therapy; it's just the general population. Furthermore, by age twenty-five, the percentage of gay identified men drops to 2.8%. This means that without any intervention whatsoever, three out of four boys who think they're gay at age l6 aren't by 25”.

In “Homosexuality and the Truth”,  former homosexuals Sy Rogers & Alan Medinger, both involved in the Exodus Global Alliance, provide the following references for the contention that homosexuality is not immutable:

“Dr Reuben Fine, Director for the New York Centre for Psychoanalytic Training, says in his 1987 publication 'Psychoanalytic Theory, Male and Female Homosexuality: Psychological Approaches': ‘I have recently had occasion to review the result of psychotherapy with homosexuals, and been surprised by the findings. It is paradoxical that even though politically active homosexual groups deny the possibility of change, all studies from Schrenck-Notzing on have found positive effects, virtually regardless of the kind of treatment used...a considerable percentage of overt homosexuals became heterosexual... If the patients were motivated, whatever procedure is adopted, a large percentage will give up their homosexuality. In this connection, public information is of the greatest importance. The misinformation spread by certain circles that 'homosexuality is untreatable by psychotherapy' does incalculable harm to thousands of men and women.’ (pp.84-86)”

Here is what Dr Irving Bieber and his colleagues concluded:

“The therapeutic results of our study provide reason for an optimistic outlook. Many homosexuals become exclusively heterosexual in psychoanalytic treatment. Although this change may be more easily accomplished by some than others, in our judgment, a heterosexual shift is a possibility for all homosexuals who are strongly motivated to change.”

Bieber stated 17 years later: “We have followed some patients for as long as ten years who have remained exclusively heterosexual.”

Dr. Robert Kronemeyer, in his 1980 book, Overcoming Homosexuality says: "For those homosexuals who are unhappy with their life and find effective therapy, it is 'curable'." "The homosexual's real enemy is... his ignorance of the possibility that he can be helped." says Dr. Edmund Bergler, in his book, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?

In his 2003 testimony to the Massachusetts Senate, Dr. Satinover said,

“A review of the research over many years demonstrates a consistent 30-52% success rate in the treatment of unwanted homosexual attraction. Masters and Johnson reported a 65% success rate after a five-year follow-up. Other professionals report success rates ranging from 30% to 70%”.

Stanton L Jones, Provost and Professor of Psychology, Wheaton College, conducted a more recent study of people seeking change in sexual orientation “through their involvement in the cluster of ministries organized under Exodus International”. The span of the study was 6 to 7 years. His reported results are as follows: “Of these 61 subjects, 53% were categorized as successful outcomes by the standards of Exodus Ministries. Specifically, 23% of the subjects reported success in the form of ‘conversion’ to heterosexual orientation and functioning, while an additional 30% reported stable behavioral chastity with substantive disidentification with homosexual orientation. On the other hand, 20% of the subjects reported giving up on the change process and fully embracing gay identity”. Dr. Jones said, “I conclude from these data and years of study that homosexual orientation is sometimes mutable”.

The futility of immutability

If it is even sometimes mutable, then it cannot be immutable. The evidence for this is often disregarded or treated with tremendous hostility by homosexual activists because it imperils their “class” designation and all the goes with it. Therefore, tremendous pressure has been exerted within and on the American Psychological Association and other professional societies to declare that such change is impossible and, in fact, undesirable. Homosexuals who have made the change are viciously attacked and attempts are being made, and have so far succeeded in places like California, to pass legislation prohibiting reparative therapy.

In 2012, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 1172, which “prohibit[s] a mental health provider, as defined, from engaging in sexual orientation change efforts, as defined, with a patient under 18 years of age. The bill would provide that any sexual orientation change efforts attempted on a patient under 18 years of age by a mental health provider shall be considered unprofessional conduct and shall subject the provider to discipline by the provider’s licensing entity”. Therefore, but for the stay of a court order, it would now be illegal in California for therapists to aid teenagers struggling with same-sex attractions from performing any type of reorientation therapy on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender minors.

The Bill announces the premise upon which it is based: “An individual’s sexual orientation, whether homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, is not a disease, disorder, illness, deficiency, or shortcoming”. The Bill also quotes an article in the journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2012, which states “Indeed, there is no medically valid basis for attempting to prevent homosexuality, which is not an illness”.

While the bill speaks volubly about the dangers of conversion therapy, for which there is only anecdotal evidence, it never once mentions the far greater dangers of the homosexual life, for which there is ample scientific evidence. Perhaps the reason is that its principal sponsor was a homosexual legislator, which also helps explain why the bill does not prohibit therapists from helping straight youths to become homosexual – only the other way around. The totalitarian impulse underlying the rationalization of homosexual behavior is here revealed by the attempt to forbid those seeking help from obtaining it.

Even some pro-homosexual rights scientists are appalled by the outright denial of reality. Dr Nicholas Cummings said:

“I have been a lifelong champion of civil rights, including lesbian and gay rights. I [was] appointed as president (1979) [of] the APA's first Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Issues, which eventually became an APA division. In that era the issue was a person's right to choose a gay life style, whereas now an individual's choice not to be gay is called into question because the leadership of the APA seems to have concluded that all homosexuality is hard-wired and same-sex attraction is unchangeable. My experience has demonstrated that there are as many different kinds of homosexuals as there are heterosexuals. Relegating all same sex-attraction as an unchangeable – an oppressed group akin to African-Americans and other minorities – distorts reality. And past attempts to make sexual reorientation therapy ‘unethical’ violates patient choice and makes the APA the de facto determiner of therapeutic goals… The APA has permitted political correctness to triumph over science, clinical knowledge and professional integrity. The public can no longer trust organized psychology to speak from evidence rather than from what it regards to be politically correct”.

The effect of this political correctness on those seeking help was poignantly related by former homosexual Rich Wyler. His therapist’s name was Matt.

“The first order of business on my first visit with Matt was for me to sign a release form required by the American Psychological Association. Reparative therapy was unproven, the form said; the APA’s official stance was that it didn’t believe it was possible to change sexual orientation; attempting to do so might even cause psychological harm. Yeah, right, I thought, as if the double life I was living was not causing psychological harm enough”.

In fact, the Journal of Human Sexuality (Volume 1, 2009) has reported that, “Those who have received help from reorientation therapists have collectively stood up to be counted—as once did their openly gay counterparts in the 1970s. On May 22, 1994, in Philadelphia, the American Psychiatric Association was protested against for the first time in history—not by pro-gay activists, but by a group of people reporting that they had substantially changed their sexual orientation and that change is possible for others (Davis, 1994). The same thing happened at the 2000 Psychiatric Association convention in Chicago (Gorner, 2000), and again at the 2006 APA convention in New Orleans (Foust, 2006)”.

As mentioned before, some homosexuals who wish to change their orientation have been unable to do so, but many others have. By itself this is substantial and incontrovertible evidence against the theory that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic. (If it were immutable, where has this “class” been throughout thousands of years of recorded history? As Justice Anthony Kennedy said in Lawrence v. Texas, “the concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century”.) As such, the case for constituting homosexuals as a “class” falls apart and, with it, all the legal and financial benefits from having been discriminated against.

Nonetheless, society as a whole is now being invited, or rather coerced, into the double life of the big lie – to pretend what is, is not: and what is not, is. There is something worse than disease; there is the denial of its existence. This is all part of what Fr James Schall calls the “systematic effort not to name things what they really are so that we are never faced with what we are actually doing”. However, a double life leads to a double death. One is physical, the other spiritual. The worst thing, Socrates warned, is the lie in the soul about “what is”.