The Church and the Homosexual by McNeill John J

Author:McNeill, John J. [McNeill, John J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7924-9
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 1993-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Szasz sees the modern medicine man playing the same role vis-à-vis the homosexual community that the Inquisition did of old. He points out that for many decades the insinuation of homosexuality about one’s adversaries has been an accepted strategy in American political life. However, if the psychiatrist really believes that homosexuality is an illness like any other, why does he not protest when it is used as a means of social degradation and political disqualification?

Szasz’s conclusion is that psychiatric opinion about homosexuality is not a scientific proposition but a medical prejudice. In fact, Bieber carries that prejudice to the absurdity of classifying bachelorhood itself as a form of mental illness: “Failure to marry in either sex is the consequence of the fear of it. There is increasing recognition that bachelorhood is symptomatic of psychopathology.”34 One can only wonder what treatment (i.e., punishment) he would prescribe for the celibate priest or religious? Another psychiatrist, Robert Lindner, concludes that the psychiatric opinion concerning the homosexual as mentally ill reveals

the same hostility for the invert and his way of life and the same abhorrence of him as a person that has been the tradition in Western society. That we now employ such terms as “sick” or “maladjusted” to the homosexual appears to me to make little difference so far as basic attitudes and feelings are concerned. As a matter of fact, I suggest that precisely these designations reveal the ugly truth of our actual animus toward homosexuals and the sham of modern social-sexual pretensions; for in the current lexicon such words reflect the nonconformism of their referents—and nonconformism is the major, perhaps the only, sin of our times.35

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