Gay psychiatrist explains canceled APA panel

In describing the cancelled panel, Dr. David Scasta sounds like he had been searching all along for the reasonable middle. The Bryant Park Project’s Rachel Martin sometimes tips towards typical media mayhem — “You think it’s important to engage the people at the fringe, at the very extreme side?”

While the activists win on points — they are, indeed, correct in many respects — morally and ethically and I think in the very human terms we live every day, Scasta makes some very good points:

Dr. SCASTA: If you grow up in a tradition, particularly a conservative tradition, conservative religious tradition, in which you’re going to Hell if you’re a homosexual person, it begins to influence how you approach therapy. I mean, if you literally believe in a literal hell where you are going to burn, and fry, and be in excruciating pain not just for a moment, but for eternity because you are a gay person, then how do you go to psychotherapy in which somebody like me would be telling you that to have a happy life in this life you need to learn to accept who you are?

So, that compels so many individuals to look for some relief from the risk of damnation, and they then look for therapies that are not well researched, not well supported. But if there’s any chance that that can rescue them from for what them is a very, very terrible occurrence from their religious perspective, they tend to go into these therapies, and that’s where I really believe we’ve got to starting talking with the people of faith.

MARTIN: Let’s talk about who you invited. You were trying to represent a variety of different viewpoints on this, but you had some fairly polarizing figures.

Dr. SCASTA: Very nationally-known figures that certainly – Warren Throckmorton, who’s a psychologist at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, has been the nemesis of gay activists for many, many years. But I was on a talk show in which Dr. Throckmorton was a call-in guest at one point, and we were talking about these kinds of change therapies, or reparative therapies.

And he came in and said, you know, we have to worry about the kinds of damage that can come from these therapies. And he cited a particular study, the Shidlo study, in which there was an effort to try to outline some of the problems that can come from reparative therapies, and said it’s an important and a good study. [...]

MARTIN: [You have someone like Warren Throckmorton, who says] that homosexuality is a sin.

Dr. SCASTA: What he would say is that for many people of faith, they see it as a sin, and that’s something that they need to deal with. He’s not trying to impose his particular theological view on them. On the flip side was Dr. Mohler, who is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s a talk-show host. he’s written a zillion different books. he’s one of the brightest people on the conservative side of the religious spectrum.

He has said to Southern Baptists, 16 million members, you know, you may have to come to the conclusion that homosexuality is not a choice, and that’s a big concession for Baptists. He got a lot of flak for that, so I saw a glimmer of hope that maybe we could talk. And we’ve been meeting as a group primarily through emails. This is not a debate. This is not for us to fight and try to show our particular side as being the strongest side, but rather to lay out where the issues are, and to begin to talk, and to talk in a respectful way, rather than an adversarial way.

Scasta says he regrets the press release, that it wasn’t supposed to get out and that it did misrepresent the panel.

As to Throckmorton, he can’t be that bad. He posts on his blog with pride this account of young straight evangelicals who took part in last month’s LGBT “Day of Silence”

- Thanks Holly!