Sex and the City – Anglican Mainstream’s homosexual obsession

Anglican Mainstream is not just sex-obsessed – it is homosexual sex-obsessed. I took part in a 30 minute discussion on Premier Radio yesterday afternoon with Joseph Nicolosi, Jeffrey Satinover and Arthur Goldberg, the Sex in the City three, who are speaking today and tomorrow at the conference in London.

It’s about more than homosexuality, they claimed. But homosexuality is the focus of work for all three of them and the discussion was almost entirely focussed on homosexuality. All three are involved with NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. Jeffrey Satinover is the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, distributed to all bishops at Lambeth 1998, a book supporting the view that homosexuality is a changeable, non-innate condition.

I put the question – why the need to fly three heterosexual American men across the Atlantic to speak at a UK conference? If, as they claimed in the discussion, their work is recognised as mainstream by the psychiatric profession, why are there no UK psychiatrists advocating a similar programme of therapy and research available to speak?

Their answer – there’s a conspiracy (clearly a mega, international, co-ordinated conspiracy) in the professional psychiatric community to ignore and judge the work of those involved in ‘reparative’ therapy – the ‘we can make unhappy homosexuals into happy heterosexuals’ school of therapy. Except for these three men, there’s no such thing in reality as ‘a homosexual’ or ‘a gay person’, just people with a homosexual attraction who are really heterosexual at heart.

These men, psychiatrists, live in a world of self-delusion.

Why give homosexuality so much attention if it isn’t real, if there’s no gay gene, if the numbers they are talking about are tiny, so much smaller than the 6% figure used by the British Government? If ‘the homosexual problem’ is, as they claim, a problem caused by unresolved childhood trauma, why can’t it be dealt with by normal psychiatric and psychotherapeutic intervention? In truth, most psychiatry and therapy deals with traumas, usually related to childhood experiences, and homosexuality is different from this.

The three claimed they are up against a political agenda within the psychiatric establishment, and when questioned by me, denied that they were either political or had an agenda themselves. Of course they have an agenda, a fundamentalism, a determination to challenge and change their peers.

To be gay is normal, for those of us who are, as normal as being heterosexual, apart from the ingredient of social and religious prejudice and obsession. We are as healthy or dysfunctional as anyone else, spiritual, prayerful, holy in God’s creation.

Anglican Mainstream is obsessive about working with a tiny minority (unhappy homosexuals who wish to change) of what it falsely claims is an insignificant minority in our society – LGBT people.
Their obsession is dangerous because they attract attention to their unhealthy, control-freak, rule-centred, sin and guilt, judgmental God, sex-obsessed agenda.
It is dangerous for LGBT people because it fuels prejudice and homophobia.
It is dangerous for the church because it reinforces the impression that the church is wildly out of touch, judgmental and dislikes sex – which God created.

They perpetuate false teaching – that heterosexuality is normal and anything else abnormal. As my psychotherapy training taught me, there’s no such thing as normal sex. Why haven’t these three psychiatrists learnt that basic lesson?