In the 1970's The American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association both declared homosexuality not to be a pathology, disease, neurosis, malfunction, or illness of any sort. Homosexual inclinations are, as the avant garde policy of the Mattachine Society of Washington stated in 1965, merely a preference, propensity or orientation fully on par with and not different in kind from heterosexuality.

The Family Research Council press release, aiming to publicly excavate a buried controversy about homosexuality as a disease, was promptly echoed in a syndicated Gannett newspaper column by the archly concerned homophobe, Cal Thomas. The Council statement read:

Although at its meeting the American Psychological Association denounced such conversion therapy efforts, the Family Research Council worried inadvisably in advance about what the APA would do. Would it try to put a stop to conversion therapy?

The APA did not, in fact, do what the FRC feared: expressly forbidding "conversion therapy" ( those long discredited attempts to eradicate any semblance of homosexual desire) though most APA members, no doubt, now regard such "therapy" as at best a highly questionable attempt at professionalism or, at worst, a vicious scam.

Cal Thomas, in his August 20 column calls heterosexual "conversion therapy" by the name that best suits his ideology: "reparative therapy." The words "conversion therapy" may evoke for him, it has been suggested, his obsession about fundamentalist religious conversions.

Thomas says, "I fully believe that homosexuality is a learned response to early painful experiences and that it can be unlearned." Like bogus psychiatric propagandists from the 1950's and 1960's, religious-rightest Thomas plays snake-oil salesman to a new generation.

Of 860 ex-gay clients at the fundamentalist "psychological" front, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) "ninety nine percent said they believe treatment to change homosexuality can be effective and valuable." "Zealotry is never having to admit you're uncertain," said a well-known gay-friendly psychologist about this high percentage.