In Maine and Maryland, Victories at the Ballot Box for Same-Sex Marriage

By ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times
Originally published on November 7, 2012

Voters in Maine and Maryland approved same-sex marriage on an election night that jubilant gay rights advocates called a historic turning point, the first time that marriage for gay men and lesbians has been approved at the ballot box.

While six states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage through court decisions or legislative decisions, voters had rejected it more than 30 times in a row.

Results for the other two states voting on same-sex marriage, Minnesota and Washington, were still coming in late Tuesday, but rights groups said that the victories in two states and possibly more were an important sign that public opinion was shifting in their direction.

The entire story is here.

Can Gay and Lesbian Parents Promote Healthy Development in High-Risk Children Adopted From Foster Care?

Justin A. Lavner, Jill Waterman, Letitia Anne Peplau

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
Volume 82, Issue 4, pages 465–472, October 2012

Adoption is known to promote cognitive and emotional development in children from foster care, but policy debates remain regarding whether children adopted by gay and lesbian parents can achieve these positive outcomes. This study compared the cognitive development and behavior problems at 2, 12, and 24 months postplacement of 82 high-risk children adopted from foster care in heterosexual and gay or lesbian households. On average, children in both household types showed significant gains in cognitive development and maintained similar levels of behavior problems over time, despite gay and lesbian parents raising children with higher levels of biological and environmental risks prior to adoptive placement. Results demonstrated that high-risk children show similar patterns of development over time in heterosexual and gay and lesbian adoptive households.

The entire article is here.

Malaysia holds seminars to help teachers spot 'gay children'

Light-coloured clothes and large handbags for boys listed as signs, as government forges ahead with anti-gay agenda

The Guardian

Originally published on September 14, 2012

The Malaysian government has begun holding seminars aiming to help teachers and parents spot signs of homosexuality in children, underscoring a rise in religious conservatism in the country.

So far, the Teachers Foundation of Malaysia has organised 10 seminars across the country. Attendance at the last event on Wednesday reached 1,500 people, a spokesman for the organisation said.

"It is a multi-religious and multicultural [event], after all, all religions are basically against that type of behaviour," said the official.

The entire story is here.

Anti-Gay Bias or Academic Freedom?

By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published September 4, 2012

The gay alumni group at Franciscan University of Steubenville last week tried to draw attention to a course it views as anti-gay, and ended up embroiled in disputes not only over that course but over the group's right to link itself to the university in a public way.

Franciscan is a university that prides itself on strict adherence to Roman Catholic teachings, and the alumni group has no official connection to the university. But it has called itself, based on its members and their affiliations, Franciscan University Gay Alumni and Allies. Under that name, the group last week issued a news release questioning why the university offers a course that links homosexuality with forms of deviant behavior.

The course description, pulled from the university's catalog, states: "DEVIANT BEHAVIOR focuses on the sociological theories of deviant behavior such as strain theory, differential association theory, labeling theory, and phenomenological theory. The behaviors that are primarily examined are murder, rape, robbery, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, and drug use. The course focuses on structural conditions in society that potentially play a role in influencing deviant behavior."

The entire story is here.

Rift Forms in Movement as Belief in Gay 'Cure' Is Renounced

By Erik Eckholm
The New York Times
Originally published on July 7, 2012

Here are some exerpts:

Alan Chambers, 40, the president, declared that there was no cure for homosexuality and that “reparative therapy” offered false hopes to gays and could even be harmful. His statements have led to charges of heresy and a growing schism within the network.
      

“For the last 37 years, Exodus has been a bright light, arguably the brightest one for those with same-sex attraction seeking an authentically Christian hope,” said Andrew Comiskey, founder and director of Desert Stream Ministries, based in Kansas City, Mo., one of 11 ministries that defected. His group left Exodus in May, Mr. Comiskey said in an e-mail, “due to leader Alan Chambers’s appeasement of practicing homosexuals who claim to be Christian” as well as his questioning of the reality of “sexual orientation change.”

(cut)

“I believe that any sexual expression outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage is sinful according to the Bible,” Mr. Chambers emphasized. “But we’ve been asking people with same-sex attractions to overcome something in a way that we don’t ask of anyone else,” he said, noting that Christians with other sins, whether heterosexual lust, pornography, pride or gluttony, do not receive the same blanket condemnations.

(cut)

Mr. Pickup, an officer of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, composed of like-minded therapists, said reparative therapy had achieved profound changes for thousands of people, including himself. The therapy, he said, had helped him confront emotional wounds and “my homosexual feelings began to dissipate and attractions for women grew.”

      

Some in the ex-gay world are more scathing about Mr. Chambers.

The entire story is here.

Court Upholds Counseling Program's Requirement That Students Accept Gay Clients

By Peter Schmidt
Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published June 26, 2012

Jennifer Keeton

A federal district court has thrown out a civil-rights lawsuit challenging the Augusta State University school-counseling program's dismissal of a student who said her Christian beliefs preclude her from affirmatively counseling homosexual students.

Judge J. Randal Hall of the U.S. District Court in Augusta, Ga., dismissed the lawsuit last week, rejecting its claims that the graduate counseling program had violated the student's rights under the U.S. Constitution by demanding that she demonstrate a willingness to counsel homosexual students in a nonjudgmental manner.

In upholding the counseling program's decision to kick out the student, Jennifer Keeton, for refusing to complete a remediation plan intended to change her position, Judge Hall said the plan was based on a "a legitimate pedagogical interest in cultivating a professional demeanor" and concern that Ms. Keeton "might prove unreceptive to certain issues and openly judge her clients."

Ms. Keeton was motivated by her religious beliefs, but those she sued were not, Judge Hall concluded in rejecting her claims that professors and administrators at Augusta State, and officials of the University System of Georgia, had violated her rights under the Constitution's First Amendment and Equal Protection Clause.

Rejecting the idea that the case represented "a public contest of values," Judge Hall said the facts it had presented "amount to no more than this: a student enrolled in a professional graduate program was required to complete a course of remediation after being cited for purported professional deficiencies by educators in her chosen field of study; she refused to do so and was dismissed from the program."

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this story.

Christian Group Backs Away from Ex-Gay Therapy

By Patrick Condon
The Associated Press
Originally published June 26, 2012

Alan Chambers

The president of the country's best-known Christian ministry dedicated to helping people repress same-sex attraction through prayer is trying to distance the group from the idea that gay people's sexual orientation can be permanently changed or "cured."

That's a significant shift for Exodus International, the 36-year-old Orlando-based group that boasts 260 member ministries around the U.S. and world. For decades, it has offered to help conflicted Christians rid themselves of unwanted homosexual inclinations through counseling and prayer, infuriating gay rights activists in the process.

This week, 600 Exodus ministers and followers are gathering for the group's annual conference, held this year in a Minneapolis suburb. The group's president, Alan Chambers, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the conference would highlight his efforts to dissociate the group from the controversial practice usually called ex-gay, reparative or conversion therapy.

The entire story is here.

Same-sex couples raising children on the rise

By Elaine Quijano
CBS Evening News
Originally published June 16, 2012

On this Father's Day Eve, we take notice of a sea change. The Census Bureau estimates that the percentage of same-sex couples raising children has more than doubled in just 10 years, from 8 percent in 2000, to 19 percent in 2010. We visit one of the couples behind the numbers.

As a same-sex couple, Sean McGill and Luigi Caiola say they never contemplated fatherhood.

"We never imagined or never thought that children would be an option for us," said McGill.

But after almost 10 years together, they were drawn to the idea of parenting.

The entire story is here.

Leading Psychiatri​st Apologizes for Study Supporting Gay 'Cure'

By Benedict Carey
The New York Times
Originally published on May 18, 2012

Dr. Spitzer

The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.      

(cut)

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.

What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was.

And he would later learn that a World Health Organization report, released on Thursday, calls the therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people.”

The entire story is here.

Does Medicine Discourage Gay Doctors?

By Pauline W. Chen, M.D.
The New York Times - Well
Originally published April 26, 2012

During my surgical training, whenever the conversation turned to relationships, one of my colleagues would always joke about his inability to get a date, then abruptly change the subject. I thought he might be gay but never asked him outright, because it didn’t seem important.

But one morning, while we working at the nurses’ station with several of the other doctors-in-training, I realized it was important, because at the hospital, he really couldn’t be himself.

That morning, one of the senior surgeons stormed over. He had found one of his patients feeling slightly short of breath, no doubt because of an insufficient dose of diuretic overnight.

“Which of you idiots,” he growled at us, “gave my patient a homosexual dose of diuretic?”

The entire story is here.

Anti-Gay Student's Suit Rejected

By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higer Ed

A federal appeals court has upheld the right of Augusta State University to enforce standards of its counseling graduate program -- even when a religious student objects to requirements to treat gay people in a nondiscriminatory manner.

While the ruling may be appealed, it represents a strong victory for advocates of counseling standards that require that students be trained to treat a range of clients in supportive, nonjudgmental ways. The student who sued Augusta State, and already lost in a lower court, maintained that her First Amendment rights were violated when the university required her to complete a "remediation plan" over her willingness to treat gay people.

She had stated her intent to recommend "conversion therapy" to gay clients and to tell them that they could choose to be straight. (A wide consensus among psychology and sexuality experts holds that people don't select their sexual orientation and that encouraging people to change their orientation can be seriously harmful to them.)

The student, Jennifer Keeton, argues that her religiously motivated beliefs are being challenged by Augusta State's policies -- and that a public university may not do so. Keeton was expelled when she declined to participate in the remediation plan, and she asked a federal district court and the appeals court to order her reinstatement in the program.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that Augusta State had legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons to enforce its rules. The counseling program's accreditation depended in part on adhering to a code of conduct, and faculty members believed it was their responsibility to train students to work with a wide range of clients, the court found. The decision placed the counseling department's actions at Augusta State in the broader context of faculty members training professionals who must pay attention to the ethics of various fields.

"Just as a medical school would be permitted to bar a student who refused to administer blood transfusions for religious reasons from participating in clinical rotations, so ASU may prohibit Keeton from participating in its clinical practicum if she refuses to administer the treatment it has deemed appropriate," says the decision.

"Every profession has its own ethical codes and dictates. When someone voluntarily chooses to enter a profession, he or she must comply with its rules and ethical requirements. Lawyers must present legal arguments on behalf of their clients, notwithstanding their personal views.... So too, counselors must refrain from imposing their moral and religious views on their clients."

Read more here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this article.

More Schools Take Action to Stem Anti-Gay Bullying

By Christina Hoag
Los Angeles, Associated Press
Published on October 22, 2011

A history teacher amends his lessons on the civil rights movement to include the push for gay equality.  A high school removes Internet filters blocking gay advocacy websites. Six gay students sue their district, saying officials failed to protect them from bullies.

After anti-gay bullying led to a spate of teen suicides last year, school districts across the country are stepping up efforts to prevent such incidents, while more students are coming forward to report bullies.

"It's an issue that has taken over the public consciousness since last fall," said Jill Marcellus, spokeswoman for the Gay-Straight Alliance Network. "People realize it doesn't have to be this way. We can make it better."

Awareness of anti-gay bullying is increasing as acceptance of gay people has grown in society. Gay marriage is legal in several states, gays are now permitted to serve openly in the military and, in California, schools will soon have to teach gay-rights history.

Kids, even as young as middle school age, feel more emboldened to openly express their sexual or gender orientation, but many are not prepared for a possible backlash, gay-rights advocates say.

According to a 2009 survey by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, 85 percent of gay teens reported harassment at school within the previous year and two-thirds felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation. The problem also extends to boys perceived as effeminate and girls deemed masculine.

A lot of people have the idea that coming out as soon as possible will make themselves feel more comfortable," said Raymond Ferronato, a 16-year-old gay junior in Antioch, Calif. "I tell them come out when you're ready to come out, and only do it when you're safe."

Schools became aware last year of how unsafe it can be.

Five gay teens, ranging from middle school to college age, killed themselves in California, Indiana, Minnesota, Texas and New Jersey, after being bullied, in some cases for years. Last month, 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer killed himself in Buffalo, N.Y., after years of homophobic harassment.

The rest of the story can be read here.

Suicide Draws Attention to Bullying of a Gay Teen

By Anahad O'Connor
The New York Times



Five months ago, Jamey Rodemeyer, a Buffalo junior high school student, got on his webcam and created a video urging other gay teenagers to remain hopeful in the face of bullying.

The 14-year-old spoke of coming out as bisexual and enduring taunts and slurs at school. And he described, in at times desperate tones, rejection and ridicule from other teenagers.

Jamey made the video as part of the It Gets Better project, a campaign that was started last fall to give hope to bullied gay teenagers. “All you have to do is hold your head up and you’ll go far,” he said. “Just love yourself and you’re set. … It gets better.”

But for Jamey, the struggle apparently was just too much. This week his parents announced that their son was found dead, an apparent suicide. He didn’t leave a note, but his parents said he had endured “constant taunting, from the same people over and over.” They added that his school had intervened to help, and that Jamey appeared to be benefiting from counseling.

News that a bullied teenager had succumbed to the very pressures he urged others to resist came as a shock to supporters of the It Gets Better project. And it provided a sobering reminder that bullied teenagers who appear to be adjusting may still be in trouble.

Dan Savage, the advice columnist and co-founder of It Gets Better, noted on his blog on Tuesday that Jamey’s death showed that “sometimes, the damage done by hate and by haters is simply too great.”

It sounds like Jamey had help — he was seeing a therapist and a social worker and his family was supportive — but it wasn’t enough. Whatever help Jamey was getting clearly wasn’t enough to counteract the hatred and abuse that he had endured since the fifth grade, according to reports, or Jamey’s fears of having to face down a whole new set of bullies when he started high school next year.

As suicides among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teenagers have gotten more attention in the past year, researchers have sought to identify the factors that play the largest role. One study published in the journal Pediatrics in May, which looked at nearly 32,000 teenagers in 34 counties across Oregon, found that gay and bisexual teenagers were significantly more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. The risk of an attempt was 20 percent greater among gay teenagers who lacked supportive social surroundings, like schools with gay-straight alliance groups or school policies that specifically protected gay, lesbian and bisexual students.

An editorial accompanying the study said the findings pointed to the need for schools to adopt policies that create “more supportive and inclusive surroundings.”

“By encouraging more positive environments,” the report stated, “such policies could help reduce the risk of suicide attempts not only among LGB students, but also among heterosexual students.”

Watch Jamey’s It Gets Better video above.

The entire story was found here.

This story captured the attention of Lady Gaga, gay rights activist and a supporter of anti-bullying programs.  Lady Gaga dedicates a song to Jamey.

Medical Schools Teaching Little About Gay Health

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, AP Medical Writer

Future doctors aren't learning much about the unique health needs of gays and lesbians, a survey of medical school deans suggests.

On average, the schools devoted five hours in the entire curriculum to teaching content related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients, according to the survey results appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. A third of the schools had none during the years students work with patients.

More than a quarter of the medical school deans said their school's coverage of 16 related topics was "poor" or "very poor." The topics included sex change surgery, mental health issues and HIV-AIDS.

While nearly all medical schools taught students to ask patients if they "have sex with men, women or both" while obtaining a sexual history, the overall curriculum lacked deeper instruction to help "students carry that conversation as far as it needs to go," said lead author Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver of the University of California, San Francisco.

Without such education, doctors are left guessing and can make faulty assumptions, Obedin-Maliver said. For instance, lesbians need Pap tests, which screens for the sexually spread virus that causes most cervical cancer, as often as heterosexual women do. But some doctors assume they don't need them.

"I'm an ob-gyn and I have had lesbian patients come to me and say I haven't had a Pap test in 20 years because my doctors said I didn't need one," Obedin-Maliver said.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Medicine reported that there's little research to guide doctors in the treatment of lesbians and gays. But some things are known: There are increased risks of depression, suicide attempts, homelessness and being victims of violence for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. Lesbians and bisexual women may get less preventive care to stay healthy, and have higher rates of obesity and breast cancer.

The Association of American Medical Colleges recommends that medical schools ensure students master "the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to provide excellent comprehensive care" for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender patients.

The new findings are based on a Web-based survey that drew responses from 85 percent of U.S. and Canadian medical schools.

That's a remarkably high response rate, which shows the deans believe it's an important issue, said Dr. Raymond Curry, vice dean for education at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

In an accompanying editorial, Curry wrote that the researchers missed the opportunity to find out how many medical schools have gay and lesbian faculty and how many have student groups for gays and lesbians.

"Trying to assess the adequacy of a curriculum in addressing these issues is perhaps not best approached in counting hours of instruction," Curry said.

Original article in JAMA found here.

Upcoming Article: Is Coming Out Always a 'Good Thing'?

*Social Psychological and Personality Science* has scheduled an article for publication in a future issue of the journal: "Is Coming Out Always a 'Good Thing'? Exploring the Relations of Autonomy Support, Outness, and Wellness for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Individuals."

The authors are Nicole Legate, Richard M. Ryan, and Netta Weinstein.

Disclosing a lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) identity to others, or ''coming out,'' has been shown in past research to be associated with mental health benefits (e.g., Ragins, 2004).

Yet, in a world that can be unaccepting of nonheterosexual orientations, coming out also involves risk. LGB individuals may anticipate stigmatization, negative judgments, or rejection feelings that deter them from self-disclosing their sexual identity.

Recent legislation like Don't Ask Don't Tell provides a clear example of this risk: those who came out as LGB in the military were discharged from service. Indeed, some research suggests that coming out can result in other negative consequences such as costs to well-being (D'Augelli, 2006).

It is thus the case that many LGB individuals are selective, varying from context to context in how much they disclose their sexual identity to others.

In the present article, we explore this within-person variability in disclosure using a self-determination theory framework (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000). SDT (Ryan & Deci, 2000) is a theory of personality and motivation that concerns how social contexts impact motivation and well-being.

According to SDT, social contexts vary in their levels of autonomy support, defined as interpersonal acceptance and support for authentic self-expression (Lynch, La Guardia, & Ryan, 2009; Ryan, La Guardia, Solky-Butzel, Chirkov, & Kim, 2005).

In environments high in autonomy support, people feel accepted for who they are, are free to act and express themselves, and are more open to rely on others. In contrast, in controlling environments, people feel pressured to appear, behave, or perform a certain way (Deci & Ryan, 1985), and they exhibit less openness and more defensiveness (Hodgins et al., 2010).

It is thus likely that autonomy supportive environments reduce perceived risks for coming out, whereas in environments perceived as controlling individuals may be less likely to express a potentially stigmatized part of themselves that could incur censure.

In addition, we argue that the autonomy supportiveness of an environment influences the well-being experienced in that environment as a result of disclosure. Specifically, we expect that LGB individuals who disclose in environments low in autonomy support will not experience the typical boost to wellness from coming out reported in the literature.

Here's how the article ends:

"This research has implications for practitioners providing treatment to LGB individuals because it suggests that people experience greater wellness when they come out in certain contexts, but certainly not all contexts. This research also has implications for workplaces. Providing autonomy support is beneficial for all employees (Baard et al., 2004), but may be especially important for LGB employees' wellness and productivity. Future research should look at disclosing in workplaces that foster self-expression versus controlling work environments and compare wellness and productivity of employees of different sexual orientations. More generally the findings may speak to factors that can facilitate greater openness and wellness in individuals who face stigma, as well as to the costs of controlling social contexts and the self-concealment they often foster."

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.

Social Environment and Suicide

Suicide awareness and prevention is a significant concern among psychologists.  Having a strong knowledge base about suicide risk factors will help psychologists function at their highest levels.  In a previous blog post, a military study highlighted unit cohesion as a factor in decreasing suicidal ideation. Here is an abstract from the journal Pediatrics that indicates how the social environment plays a role in teenage suicide rates.

The Social Environment and Suicide Attempts in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the social environment surrounding lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth may contribute to their higher rates of suicide attempts, controlling for individual-level risk factors.

METHODS: A total of 31 852 11th grade students (1413 [4.4%] lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals) in Oregon completed the Oregon Healthy Teens survey in 2006–2008. We created a composite index of the social environment in 34 counties, including (1) the proportion of same-sex couples, (2) the proportion of registered Democrats, (3) the presence of gay-straight alliances in schools, and (4) school policies (nondiscrimination and antibullying) that specifically protected lesbian, gay, and bisexual students.

RESULTS: Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth were significantly more likely to attempt suicide in the previous 12 months, compared with heterosexuals (21.5% vs 4.2%). Among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth, the risk of attempting suicide was 20% greater in unsupportive environments compared to supportive environments. A more supportive social environment was significantly associated with fewer suicide attempts, controlling for sociodemographic variables and multiple risk factors for suicide attempts, including depressive symptoms, binge drinking, peer victimization, and physical abuse by an adult (odds ratio: 0.97 [95% confidence interval: 0.96–0.99]).

CONCLUSIONS: This study documents an association between an objective measure of the social environment and suicide attempts among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. The social environment appears to confer risk for suicide attempts over and above individual-level risk factors. These results have important implications for the development of policies and interventions to reduce sexual orientation–related disparities in suicide attempts.

Hopefully, this research will shed light on the importance of environmental influences and risk factors relating to suicide.  Prevention programs, suicide awareness among professionals, and competent suicide assessments are keys to decreasing the silent epidemic of teen suicide, especially with GLBT youth.