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Baker Publishing Group - Jeffrey Satinover

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150 pages

English

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Extrait

Description

A Christian psychiatrist examines the latest research, refuting the alleged genetic basis for homosexuality and assessing the social power homosexuals have gained.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 février 1996
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441212931
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0749€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

©1996 by Jeffrey Satinover
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Previously published by Hamewith Books
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1293-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture references are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture marked KJV is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
This book is a beacon of light to anyone struggling to emerge from homosexuality or struggling with the homosexual debate. In clear, eloquent prose, Dr. Satinover demonstrates that homosexuality, though not a “choice” and deeply embedded, is neither innate nor unchangeable.... With so many lives at risk and with so many young people confused about love, family, and sexuality, his point of view desperately needs to be heard. Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth is a definitive handbook that should be read by every concerned parent, teacher, counselor, minister, priest, and rabbi as well as by the many people who struggle with homosexual feelings and behaviors, and who, for purely political reasons, have been misled into thinking that there is no way out.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president, Toward Tradition
To my wife, Julie (M.E.)
Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Endorsement
Dedication
Introduction
Part 1 Gay Science
1 Neither Scientific nor Democratic
2 Who Says? And Why?
3 Is Homosexuality Desirable? Brute Facts
4 Finding a Needle in the Ocean
5 Two of a Kind
6 A Cluster of Influences
7 The Gay Gene?
Part 2 Straight Mores
8 Wired to Be Free?
9 The Devil’s Bargain
10 The Unnatural Natural
11 To Treat or Not to Treat
12 Secular Treatments
13 Christian Treatments
14 Homosexuality and Judaism
15 Putting the Pieces Together
16 The Pagan Revolution

Postscript
Notes
Resources
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Introduction

H omosexuality didn’t start out as a major focus of my professional life, but the day it came home to me is one I will never forget. It was 1981. I had just returned home from the medical center in New York City where I worked. Physicians in inner-city hospitals spend week after 70- to 80-hour week witnessing, battling, and occasionally salvaging people from the most horrendous savagery done to their bodies by illnesses and fellow human beings. After awhile, most doctors develop a battle-hardening that allows us to escape the horror in order to do our jobs effectively.
Still in the early years of my training, my armor had nonetheless begun to grow. But however thick it becomes, that armor is never completely effective. Some “cases” always get under one’s skin mostly involving young people.
That day was particularly difficult. I had been called in for a neurological assessment of a young man suffering from multiple problems, some of which had begun to affect his nervous system and mind. Perhaps the difficulty arose merely because I had restored personhood to the “case”: I was young myself and therefore identified with him; I’m inclined to think, however, that it went beyond that.
Somewhere under the surface lies the belief that for all the grief and sense of loss that attends sickness and death, when old people get sick and die (and the vast majority of ill people in a hospital are old) there is something expected and even proper about it. But when someone young dies something rises up within us and shouts at heaven, “No! This is wrong! You can’t do this!” As that silent cry of protest and rage breaks through the armor, the true horror comes flooding in, if only briefly.
In order to assess my patient, I had to don another kind of armor as well the full complement of sterile isolation precautions: latex gloves, a full-length gown, a surgical cap, and paper booties. As I had spent many years as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst before returning for medical and psychiatric training, I was especially aware of how isolating my appearance would seem to this poor man. Had he grown accustomed to it? Foolishly, I hoped so.
Something about this garb inevitably suggested to me that I was protecting myself from him because he was infectious and I was not. (The illness ravaging his nervous system had been diagnosed as an “unusual fungal infection.”) This thought recurs no matter how many times one goes through the routine. So this time, too, I reminded myself that I was not protecting myself from him; I was protecting him from me from the untold trillions of germs that surrounded me like a cloud and followed me everywhere I went, clinging with tenacity to each exposed surface of my body. Under normal circumstances, the bacteria and viruses that were now ravaging his body were part of the microscopic fauna and flora that form a benign background to our everyday lives. But because this young man was in a state of severe suppression of his immune system, many of these normally innocent fellow travelers had turned viciously destructive to him.
I braced myself for the encounter, trying to squeeze every bit of empathy I could into my eyes, the only part of my body left open to his view. The young man lay stretched out on the hospital bed, his eyes closed. I saw from the clipboard that he was in his thirties. His disheveled, straw-colored hair framed a face so pale that all the blood seemed to have drained out of it, like someone already dead. A tangle of intravenous lines entered both his arms and chest; the pumps that fed these and the various electronic monitors that surrounded and clung to him whirred in a constant high-tech din. The medications being administered through these lines were the most potent available to modern medicine, so potent, in fact, that most of them carried grave risks of their own. As with cancer chemotherapy, such drugs are used only when “treatment” consists of a race to see which the chemical agents will kill first: the illness or the patient.
Though terribly gaunt, the man at one time had obviously been strikingly handsome. I introduced myself warmly, trying to sound less the doctor and more the human being, but in response I got a barely audible, unintelligible gurgle. He opened his eyes and rolled them vacantly around the room, responding to my greeting as to a vaguely perceived stimulus of some sort. I knew immediately that a formal examination of his mental status would be fruitless. As I anticipated, the neurological exam revealed multiple severe abnormalities.
Subjectively, most striking in the exam were the angry purple welts that covered most of both arms and wrapped around his sides toward his back. These, I knew, were Kaposi’s sarcoma, a virulent, ugly cancer once so rare that a single incident instantly made the medical literature. Now suddenly it was popping up in clusters of two, three, ten at a time at major medical centers across the country, especially in San Francisco and here, in New York.
By the time my visit ended, it was apparent that the entire consultation was more important to me from an educational perspective than to him. He would surely not survive the week.
The story of this young man, of his all-too-brief life and painful, wasting death, soon appeared in a landmark report in one of the world’s premier medical journals along with the nearly identical stories of seven others. AIDS had appeared on the scene, the deadly modern disease that has stalked our lives, headlines, and imaginations like a medieval plague. It was known to us then simply as GRID, “gay-related immune disorder.” This name reflected the fact that in Europe, America, and Asia, AIDS was then as it remains today dramatically disproportionate among male homosexuals.
Alone, Terrifyingly Alone
Tired and empty when I arrived home, I poured myself a glass of orange juice and stood in my cramped New York kitchenette, distractedly flipping through that Sunday’s New York Times. Without serious interest, but nonetheless being curious, I came to the obituaries and idly perused them as I usually did. Suddenly my attention was arrested by the name of someone I knew, a man who though only thirty-nine was reported to have died of “viral pneumonia.” I was stunned, realizing that he, too, had died of this new “gay-related immune disorder.” I hadn’t thought of him in some time and so had never put it together. The syndrome had not yet been discovered when I knew him, but now all the pieces fell into place.
A few years before, Paul (not his real name [1] ) had come to me for psychotherapy. His chief complaint was a chronic sense of listlessness and fatigue associated with a vague feeling of depression. His internist was a well-known and well-respected professor at a major medical center who had been unable to help him; thinking that his problems might be psychosomatic, Paul came to me. The internist made it clear that although he himself had no idea what was wrong with his patient, he was skeptical that it was anything psychotherapy could fix. My treatment, too, was probably a waste of his patient’s time and money just as had been his earlier pilgrimage to a specialist in Alabama who diagnosed him (and everyone else he saw) as suffering f