Penn State President Needs To Explain Why University Promotes Homosexuality

by Gary L. Morella

In regard to the President of Penn State Graham Spanier’s call for an explanation from the United Way regarding their funding of the Boy Scouts, Spanier needs to explain to the taxpayers of the Commonwealth why Penn State promotes activities that are based on the lie that an orientation to homosexual behavior implies an innate, unchangeable, final condition. There are many research references that totally debunk this claim. Even if there was such a gene, would that make the resulting aberrant behavior any more acceptable? Of course, it would not be. Similar gene arguments have been made for alcoholism. Does that make alcoholism a behavior to be encouraged?

Penn State officially promotes homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle in an affirmative action civil rights sense through the Vice-Provost Office for Educational Equity. It proudly trumpets the work of faculty who encourage our youngest children toward homosexual lifestyles as evidenced by the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of Outreach Magazine, which devoted an entire section to the promotion, and celebration of homosexual lifestyles for our youth.

Prominent psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, M.D. defended the possibility of sexual reorientation at a press conference held outside the recent American Psychiatric Association annual meeting at which the APA had announced it would host a debate on the ethics and effectiveness of reorientation therapy. Spitzer organized the debate. He is considered the architect of the 1973 questionable decision, which removed homosexuality from the list of disorders. He is now conducting reorientation research.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the director of NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) appeared at a joint press conference with Spitzer at the APA meeting. Dr. Nicolosi said, "We came close to getting the evidence out for open discussion because this morning Dr. Robert Spitzer had scheduled an open forum on the ethics and effectiveness of reorientation therapy. After the debate had been formally put on the meeting schedule, the two gay psychiatrists who were debating the opposing position dropped out and shut down the forum. Our challenge is to the APA Board of Trustees: Look at the data. It’s either one way or the other: If people do change, then you have a responsibility to change your policy. If they don’t change, i.e., no behavioral or identity shift is accomplished, and they leave therapy feeling worse about themselves than when they came in, then we really are doing harm to our patients. We’re ready to open the debate; let’s put the evidence on the table."

Nicolosi defended homosexual strugglers in their right to redefine themselves. "These people insist that ‘gay is not who I am,’" he said. "They are entitled to the help of the mental-health profession in their pursuit of change." Fifty ex-gay ministry leaders from around the country gathered to protest the APA’s cancellation of the debate on reorientation therapy.

If the Supreme Court could argue that prayer or Bible reading being offered in school was coercive to those who did not share the Judeo-Christian view and, therefore, an impermissible infringement on the separation of Church and State, then a university advocating homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle could hardly be construed as less invasive or less of a breach of that separation. The fact that a state funded university is offering services which legitimize so-called alternative lifestyles means that the university feels that these lifestyles are a good thing to promote, and by extension, a good thing for all employees to accept. The exchange is by its nature coercive and open to legal challenge.

Moreover, since it is a fact that some homosexuals have changed and abandoned that lifestyle, they ought not to be included as a class under civil rights legislation designed to protect blacks, women and the disabled from discrimination. Such laws were written because of a person’s status, which cannot change. Homosexual practice is about behavior, which can change, a fact which homosexual advocates won’t even open to debate at APA meetings.

The explanation owed is by Spanier to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for promoting a social engineering agenda rooted in fantasy, not fact.