INCORRECT TO HELP GAYS?

Psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons says people who are attracted to same-sex partners can benefit from therapy and some can change their orientation. That’s the message he hoped to give at a one-day seminar course on homosexuality at the University of Michigan Hospital.

But two weeks before the seminar, an official from the Michigan State Medical Association phoned the seminar’s organizers to say the association was yanking its accreditation of Fitzgibbons’ course. The State Medical Association received a “flood of gay-activist complaints” after the conference brochure was mailed out, according to Dr. Cathy Dowling, president of the Catholic Medical Association, Lansing Guild, which supports Fitzgibbons’ course. Gay activists also threatened to disrupt the seminar. Alarmed by the last-minute loss of accreditation, Dowling quickly located scores of scientific articles that documented support for Dr. Fitzgibbons’ claim that homosexuality can be changed.

“We do not believe that people with same-sex attraction must undergo therapy,” Dowling explained in a letter to the Medical Society. “Only that they have a right to know that it exists — and that it can be helpful." But the Michigan State Medical Society refused to reconsider the case. Supporters of the Fitzgibbons seminar wrote the medical society to complain. One letter said “it is political decisions such as this that make patients like me suspicious of ‘treatments’ recommended by any doctors.”

Another writer, a research professional, said homosexuality “is a developmental disorder, its causes and predictors are well-documented, it is treatable in adulthood, and it is highly associated with self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors and maladaptation — and those four preceding points have been politically buried or denied.”

Said another letter-writer: “I am a practicing psychiatrist with over 20 years’ experience. It offends me deeply that all sorts of crackpot psychological ideas and theories are allowed—and even encouraged,” while the argument that homosexuality is treatable gets ‘the ‘politically correct’ all up in arms.”