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A former neighbor of mine gave me a gift subscription to Teachers in Focus, a publication of the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family. The October 2000 issue was a theme issue on overcoming homosexuality. In one article, Joseph Nicolosi, president of the conservative National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, suggested that pro-gay teachers and counselors harm teens by encouraging them to affirm a gay identity before they are able to make informed choices. Nicolosi and other ex-gay advocates may have a valid point.
However, I think it works the other way, too. Those who believe strongly that homosexuality is sick or evil can cause trauma to youth who have homosexual feelings by pressuring them into secrecy or dishonesty, and promoting within them a sense of shame and worthlessness.
Over the past couple years I've come to realize how rigid adherence to an ideology can inhibit one from doing what's best for others. I've learned how it can prevent us from understanding people with different experiences and feelings, from seeing the realities they face, and from helping them most effectively. It can cause a blindness of sorts, and--when ideologies cause division--even a blindness to the dignity and worth of people whom we are called to love.
A friend of mine involved in discussions between pro-gays and ex-gays has taught me that this blindness often occurs on both sides of that debate, as well as between boylovers and recovering pedophiles. Those of us for whom emotional health involves embracing our homosexual or boylove feelings as unchangeable and essential orientations can deny the reality that others have found a change in orientation to be possible and desirable.
Similarly, ex-gays or recovering pedophiles whose previous feelings or behaviors were addictive or destructive often assume that change is the best course of action for all adults attracted to the same gender or to minors. Individuals vary too much to expect that one's own approach imposed on another will be best for them.
The above example also illustrates how ideologies often stem from very intense personal experiences or feelings, and the assumption that those experiences or feelings are representative of everyone else's. Another example comes to mind. Boylovers and their former young friends who experienced positive relationships can assume that all relationships between boylovers and boys are healthy, and dismiss cases of actual abuse. In the same way, former abuse victims and those who work with them can come to believe that all young friends of boylovers are being abused and all boylovers are predators, even youthful ones.
I think that another example shows how unexamined beliefs can hamper understanding and help for those who need it. It is coming to be accepted without question by much of society that while homosexuality is a natural orientation involving feelings of love and affection, boylove is a disorder characterized by delusions and obsessive, uncontrollable, devious behavior. This belief tends to lead society--most significantly the church and the mental health community--to dismiss the experiences and feelings of adults attracted to minors, to reject the possibility of understanding their motivations, and as a consequence, to lack an ability to deal with the issue effectively. I don't see how the resulting absence of societal support for boylovers to live full and responsible lives can do anything but contribute to secrecy, abuse, and suicide.
Yet another example comes from the area of child sexual abuse. I have been reading the work of Ralph Underwager, a researcher and therapist who specializes in this area. He has shown how an understanding of reality is impeded, and how devastating damage is done to children, families, and society, when unexamined beliefs take on more importance than the children they are supposed to protect. He claims that therapists too often operate under an ideology which portrays sex as bad, which too quickly defines sexual or affectionate interactions as abusive, and which criminalizes childhood sexual behavior, with children as young as 4 years old being labeled as sex offenders for childhood sex play. (For an example of his work, see www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume5/j5_2_2.htm.)
A case in point is the horrifying story published four years ago in Salon magazine (www.salon.com/feb97/molested970228.html). When the sexual experimentation of two brothers results in a conviction against the older one (age 13) as a sex offender, he is subjected to an emotionally abusive legal and therapeutic system that forces him to recount every detail of his sexual behavior and thoughts over and over again, in an atmosphere of intense shaming, and to admit that he committed a monstrous crime. The boy's mother, the author of the article, writes that all her attempts to place what her sons did in the context of human sexuality and relationships were rejected by the system.
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