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Psychologists’ OK of same-sex unions called ‘gay agenda’


NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)–Family advocates were dismayed but not surprised by the American Psychological Association’s embrace of efforts to legalize same-sex “marriage” and to advance homosexuals’ child custody rights, adopted during the group’s annual meeting in Hawaii.

The APA, in a news release July 28, reported, “Prohibiting civil marriage for same-sex couples is discriminatory and unfairly denies such couples, their children and other members of their families the legal, financial and social advantages of civil marriage,” according to a resolution adopted by the group’s Council of Representatives.

“The APA also opposed discrimination against lesbian or gay parents adoption, child custody and visitation, foster care and reproductive health services,” the group’s news release stated.

The report prompted Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, to note, “This is the same group that, at the command of the radical homosexual lobby, supinely took homosexuality off the list of psychological disorders decades ago.

“The APA does whatever the radical homosexual lobby tells it to do,” Land said in a statement to Baptist Press. “It’s nothing more than a professional lobbying group for the radical homosexual lobby.”

Land also noted, “I don’t get my moral compass from the American Psychological Association. The Bible declares same-sex marriage as an oxymoron, and at least two-thirds of the American people oppose it.

“Fortunately, we live in a representative democracy where each member of the American Psychological Association has a vote just like every other American. I’m willing to let the wisdom of the American people, not the APA, decide this issue for American society.”

The genesis of the APA’s embrace of homosexuality, according to BP columnist Kelly Boggs, dates back to the 1970s.

Boggs, in his July 30 column, noted that the events unfolding from an onslaught of homosexual activists initially against the American Psychiatric Association and then the American Psychological Association are recounted in two reputable books:

— “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth” (Baker Books, 1996) by psychiatrist Jeffery Satinover, who holds degrees from MIT, Harvard, the University of Texas and Yale.

— “Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis” (Princeton University Press, 1987, as listed on Amazon) by Ronald Bayer, currently a professor of public health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Boggs writes that the American Psychiatric Association, the first of the organizations to declare homosexuality to be “normal,” took that stance “without a single shred of scientific evidence. Even now the jury is still out on the issue because not one study to date has shown homosexuality to be innate or irreversible. …

“Don’t be surprised, or swayed, by the American Psychological Association’s recent endorsement of homosexual ‘marriage,'” Boggs writes. “It is just one more organization that has been co-opted by homosexual activists.”

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, in a July 29 news release, said the American Psychological Association’s support of same-sex unions “flies in the face of logic, science and the historical experience of every culture on the face of the planet.”

“Let’s be clear: What we’re talking about here is intentionally creating hundreds of thousands of motherless and fatherless families, permanently depriving little boys of a father and little girls of a mother,” Dobson said.

Glenn Stanton, Focus on the Family’s senior research analyst for marriage and sexuality, echoed Dobson’s concerns, noting, “This policy will subject generations of children to the status of lab animals in a vast, untested social experiment with the family. No one can say that is compassionate.”

Stanton also stated, “Study after study has found that boys and girls not raised by both their mother and father are much more likely to, among other things, suffer abuse, perform poorly in school, suffer lower levels of mental and physical health and wind up in trouble with the law.”

Bill Maier, a clinical psychologist and a Focus on the Family vice president, added that the psychological association’s Council of Representatives has concluded that the desires of a tiny minority of the population “are more important than the best interests of America’s children.”

“Every responsible psychologist in the APA should be ashamed; the organization is obviously more concerned with appeasing its powerful gay lobby than it is with retaining any semblance of moral and ethical duty,” Maier said.

The APA, in its news release, noted that its stances on same-sex “marriage” and homosexuals’ child custody rights were recommended by its Working Group on Same-Sex Families and Relationships, a seven-member panel of psychologists appointed by the APA Council of Representatives in February.

The working group members’ qualifications, according to the APA news release, involve “a combination of both scientific expertise in family and couple relations and professional expertise with lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations.” The panel “summarized the research that discrimination and prejudice based on sexual orientation detrimentally affects the psychological, physical, social and economic well-being of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals, that same-sex couples are remarkably similar to heterosexual couples, and that parenting effectiveness and the adjustment, development and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation.”

The members of the APA Working Group on Same-Sex Families and Relationships were Armand Cerbone, Ph.D., Chicago; Beverly Greene, Ph.D., St. John’s University; Kristin Hancock, Ph.D., Graduate School of Professional Psychology at John F. Kennedy University; Lawrence A. Kurdek, Ph.D., Wright State University; Candace A. McCullough, Ph.D., Bethesda, Md.; and Letitia Anne Peplau, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles.

David Blankenhorn, meanwhile, head of the Institute for American Values, told USA Today that the notion of same-sex “marriage” fuels a “marriage-lite” trend in society.

“The whole social fabric depends on stable marriages; how the next generation is raised depends on it,” Blankenhorn said.
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Tom Strode contributed to this article.