ScienCentral News has a good piece up today summarizing the current scientific debate about the origins of homosexuality–and the political controversies attendant to it (I wish I could link to the full Scientific American Mind article the author is referencing, but it’s behind a subscriber wall).

The linked article correctly points out that much of today’s debate centers on the research of Columbia Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, and his 2003 study analyzing the possibility of change in a small, committed group of ex-gay patients. It includes some great Spitzer quotes clarifying his position:

“Do gays have a choice?” — Spitzer replies, “They have a choice whether to go into therapy, about whether they adopt a gay lifestyle, whether they tell their friends and their family. They don’t have a choice as to whether their basic sexual orientation is gay or straight — that they don’t have a choice about.”

Read the whole thing. Spitzer is absolutely right, of course. One of great lies of the exgay movement is that people have a choice about who they are attracted to sexually. We all must choose our sexual behaviors, but we don’t choose our attractions. It takes a great deal of intellectually dishonesty to conflate those two distinct ideas.

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