Cranks have no place in the Courier Mail

Many readers would be aware of Family Council of Queensland spokesman David van Gend’s offensive article ‘Brace for a new stolen generation’, published by News Ltd’s Courier Mail newspaper on June 29 in which he claimed homosexuality was a curable condition.

“A black person cannot stop being black, but a gay person can certainly stop being gay,” van Gend wrote, pointing to research published by American psychiatrist Robert Spitzer in 2003.

This is only the latest in a series of offensive claims by van Gend and having published him in the past, the Courier Mail should know better.

Some of van Geld’s past gems include “It is self-evident that something has gone terribly wrong, when one man is erotically attracted to another man”; “Homosexuality [is] a complex disturbance of emotional development”; “By its very nature, homosexuality has … stepped outside the circle of life.”

But van Gend is not just a spokesman for the Family Council of Queensland. As recently as 2009 he was a card-carrying member of the US ex-gay therapy group the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and he has essentially been rewriting the same article with the same claims since Spitzer published his research in 2003.

In that study — not a survey of gay men, not even a random survey of people who had attempted reorientation therapy, but a specially selected group of ex-gays who claimed to have overcome their homosexuality — only 66 percent of males and 44 percent of females had what Spitzer called “good heterosexual functioning — and this from a group where many were themselves leaders of Ex-Gay ministries”.

In the intervening years, Spitzer has had a lot to say about organisations, including NARTH, that misrepresent his research.

“It would be a mistake to interpret the study as implying that any highly motivated homosexual could change if they were really motivated to do so,” Spitzer wrote in 2003, “I suspect that the vast majority of gay people, even if they wanted to, would be unable to make substantial changes in sexual attraction and fantasy and enjoyment of heterosexual functioning”

“I believe that such change is rare. In many cases, attempts to change sexual orientation can be harmful,” he wrote in 2006.

Cranks like van Gend have a right to believe whatever they want, but giving him a platform to spout this harmful rubbish is about as ethical as giving one to someone who thinks you can cure cancer with toothpaste.