Dr. Robert Spitzer Apologizes to Gay Community for Infamous ‘Ex-Gay’ Study

[Newsjock]

http://www.truthwinsout.org/news/2012/04/24542/

Today, in a letter to Dr. Ken Zucker obtained exclusively by Truth Wins Out, Dr. Robert Spitzer made an unprecedented apology to the gay community — and victims of reparative therapy in particular — for his infamous, now-repudiated 2001 study that claimed some “highly motivated” homosexuals could go from gay to straight:

... I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals..

Robert Spitzer. M.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry,
Columbia University

[obamanut2012]

1. He needs to publish a study saying that gays cannot be "Exed"

And make sure it just a lot of publicity, and then I will give him more than a conditional apology.

I give him some props for at least admitting he was wrong (unlike many others).

[DevonRex]

2. I agree with this.

And shouldn't he make it really, really clear that just because LGBTs can, of course, marry and have sex with people of the opposite sex that it doesn't mean they're straight??? So many who have been brainwashed by that sort of "therapy" have been hurt beyond belief by it when reality sets in. Mostly people who have been raised in fundy households who demonize them for who they are and then they try so hard to please them.

So they do the "therapy" and get married to a fundy spouse. They have kids. Sometime later the person realizes he/she wasn't exed after all and the spouse often doesn't want him/her to have access to the kids because being gay is "evil." The hurt must be unimaginable.

[obamanut2012]

3. Yes -- he needs to really try to right the immense wrong and bigotry

Generated by his study. His study has been used to deny equal human rights for LGBTs for over a decade, and used to sentence teens to "reeducation camps" where they are, quite literally, emotionally and mentally tortured.

[markpkessinger]

4. According to what Rachel Maddow reported last week ...

... Dr. Spitzer tried to publish a retraction in the Journal of Sexual Behavior, the journal in which he published his "ex-gay" study, but they weren't interested.

[ck4829]

5. Kick