The next two posts dealt with same-sex attraction from a Catholic and psychological perspective. My fear is that gay people or others with same-sex attraction (SSA) who read these posts may hear them as condemnation or rejection, and that is the last thing I want to do. The evidence strongly supports that SSA begins with a very early experience or perception of paternal rejection – either outright, or through a failure to connect and bond at the deep level required. Either are deeply painful – in fact, traumatic. The pain is very frequently intensified by isolation, rejection, and bullying by same-sex peers once the person with SSA enters school.
If involved in a church, the child or adolescent may continue to experience rejection, if the clergy or church members fail to love and accept people with SSA (while rejecting same-sex genital behavior). He or she may generalize this rejection to God, the Father. People with SSA are far more likely to have experienced sexual abuse than other people – another source of pain and betrayal. To sum up, people with SSA have necessarily undergone a tremendous deal of suffering, much of it stemming from rejection and exclusion. Heaven forbid that I add to your suffering: you have gone through enough already!
As I wrote in a previous post (Speak out, Shepherds!), the “safeness” of much of Catholic preaching – while Western civilization is collapsing – can be frustrating and demoralizing. But I’m realizing that I can suffer from the same fear of speaking out lest people dislike or even hate me or what I’m saying. For example, I would give my eyeteeth to hear a strong, loving, balanced homily on same-sex attraction (SSA) and “gay marriage” – one that compassionately addresses the suffering and struggle that people with SSA deal with, while recognizing the tragic spiritual, emotional, relational, and even medical toll pursuit of the gay lifestyle entails – but I have failed to address it more than in passing in this blog.
SSA, gay identity, and “gay marriage” are topics that sorely need to be addressed. They are issues that I am passionate about and deal with frequently in my practice. The media are shouting their own mile-wide inch-deep distorted version, while the Church at the parish level is virtually silent about the issues. They are issues that I am passionate about and deal with frequently in my practice. However, I know that speaking out about it will generate misunderstanding and perhaps hatred from some readers. Also, the reparative therapy I use with same-sex attracted clients who desire to mature into heterosexual identity – or at least reduce unwanted SSA – has just been outlawed as a treatment for minors in California, based on caricatures and misrepresentations of what such therapy actually involves. The move is the first time a state government – rather than state licensing boards – has so intervened. In the present political climate, reparative therapy will probably be outlawed completely; we mental health professionals who feel ethically bound to continue to practice it are correspondingly likely to lose our licenses. But being silent about the truth – besides being wrong in itself! – will “save” us no more than St. Thomas More’s silence “saved” him from a corrupt system determined to destroy him.
“The love that dare not speak its name”, a line from an 1894 poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, was quoted at Oscar Wilde’s trial for homosexuality, and has been used as a euphemism for gay romantic love. But there is another love that scarcely dares to speak in this day and age: the love that speaks the truth, including difficult and unpopular truths about SSA.
The need to speak is pressing. Even many devout Catholics and other Christians – in the teaching vacuum left by the Church on the parish level – have come to accept the media wisdom that people with SSA are 1) “born that way” and 2) cannot mature into heterosexual identity. This is with scant evidence that (1) is the case, and with plenty of evidence that (2) is not the case. At the end of the study trumpeted by the media as supporting a “gay gene”, the author himself cautions against his study being so hijacked for political purposes. In his conclusion, he states that gender identity is far too “complex and multidetermined” to be attributed to a single gene. Nevertheless, many well-intentioned people reason that forbidding sexual activity and marriage for those with SSA – since they are “born that way” – is the same as forbidding, e.g., Latinos or people with disabilities to have sex or marry; that is, sheer bigotry.
Because the trauma that generates SSA can happen so early in life, the person with SSA’s sense that “this is my identity; I was born this way” is understandable, but, according to the research, inaccurate. (The roots of SSA are complex, so I can only address them briefly here. Please go to www.narth.org and www.peoplecanchange.com for in-depth resources as well as hundreds of testimonies of people who have come out of the gay lifestyle into heterosexual identity.) My area of expertise is with the development of male SSA (far more common than female SSA), so that will be my focus. However, both male and female SSA are rooted in disrupted attachments to parents or same-sex peers.To be continued…
