Alex Wong: Celebrate freedom, not a lifestyle

In a few days, homosexual communities throughout the nation will be celebrating National Coming Out Day. According to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, the day is devoted to "encouraging people to come out and be honest about themselves."

Evidenced by this statement and by the HRC's broad moniker, the gay rights movement is not simply about sexual freedom, but about the freedom to be who you wish and to be happy doing so. For decades, homosexual rights activists have been working to ensure that people are treated with respect and given the opportunity to live their lives free of oppression, no matter what their sexual orientation. This era of gay rights is an era in which individuals -- and not society -- determine who they are.

But in one subset of the gay rights movement, these principles are checked at the door.

The mention of sexual reorientation -- a person consulting with psychological practitioners to change his sexuality -- is taboo not just in the homosexual community, but in both the clinical community and society as a whole. Ever since homosexuality was taken off the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders a quarter century ago, those who provide reorientation therapy and, more disturbingly, those who wish to undergo it are stigmatized and labeled as threats to the gay rights movement.

Following the moral logic adopted by the gay rights movement -- and not the rhetoric of homosexual haters -- this stigma is flat-out wrong.

When it comes to sexual reorientation, the principles of being who you want to be without the burden of outside interference are abandoned and pushed aside by a rigid adherence to a visceral, political agenda. In the same way that opponents of homosexuality need to view sexuality as a pure choice to reconcile it with their moral system, the interests of gay rights proponents are best served when sexuality is defined as an immutable, hard-wired, genetic trait. The truth that sexuality's secret likely lies somewhere between these two extremes is ignored on both sides.

That voluntary ignorance on the part of the gay rights movement infringes on the sexual freedoms of those who make the conscious decision to attempt a sexual reorientation.

This is not a question about overboard parents forcing their kids into re-education camps. This is not a question of psychiatrists telling gay patients that they must change. This is about people who believe that their lives and their true identities would be best served by reorientation therapy.

In a part of life that is so personal, so crucial and so mysterious as sexuality, no one has the right to impose their politics on what should be an individual decision.

No one has the right to tell the 45-year-old man with a wife and kids that he needs to embrace his homosexual thoughts regardless of how important his family is to him. No psychologist should tell a conflicted student looking for help that he cannot help him overcome his homosexual feelings because his hands are tied ethically.

No one should be forced to accept on the pressure of political correctness what they do not believe to be their true identity.

In a way, this stigma against reorientation is indicative of how far gay rights have come in this country. Thirty years ago, homosexuals who claimed they were happy with their lifestyle were not to be believed and thought to be in denial. Now, those who wish to change are falsely labeled as repressed. The argument has been totally reversed.

But the fact that this reversal has gone too far is evidenced by the story of Columbia Psychology Professor Robert Spitzer. This past spring, Spitzer released a study of 200 self-proclaimed ex-homosexuals. He concluded that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women, through therapy, were able to experience "good heterosexual functioning." This indicated that sexuality is in fact variable.

Sensing a threat to their ideology, gay rights groups wasted little time in mobilizing a smear campaign. According to The Wall Street Journal, Spitzer was labeled as a charlatan selling "snake oil packaged as science" by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The Human Rights Campaign said his study was plagued by "anti-gay views" and tainted by "close ties to right-wing political groups."

But what makes this story extraordinary is that 30 years ago, Spitzer was the darling of the gay rights community as he spearheaded the campaign to dash homosexuality from the psychological diagnostic books.

This is not a man working to forward a bias agenda or throw the progress of gay rights back a generation. Motivated by scientific curiosity, Spitzer sought to answer a fundamental question about the variability of human sexuality. He sought an answer not structured or censored by political tunnel vision.

Spitzer proved that those who truly wish to reorient their sexuality can do so. And those of us who believe in individual freedoms, who believe that we should all be honest with ourselves, should not get in their way.

Alex Wong is a senior English major from Wyckoff, N.J.

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