GI Jitters: The Pentagon's Deep-Seated Sexual Anxiety
Excerpts: A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position.
The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders….
The document, called a Defense Department Instruction, was condemned by medical professionals, members of Congress and other experts, including the American Psychiatric Association. "Based on scientific and medical evidence the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 - a position shared by all other major health and mental health organizations based on their own review of the science," James H. Scully Jr., head of the psychiatric association, said in a letter to the Defense Department's top doctor earlier this month...
The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders….
The document, called a Defense Department Instruction, was condemned by medical professionals, members of Congress and other experts, including the American Psychiatric Association. "Based on scientific and medical evidence the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 - a position shared by all other major health and mental health organizations based on their own review of the science," James H. Scully Jr., head of the psychiatric association, said in a letter to the Defense Department's top doctor earlier this month...
So let's see if we've got this straight (pardon the pun): Feeling a physical attraction for another human being is a "mental disorder." But launching an unprovoked war of aggression that maims, eviscerates and murders tens of thousands of human beings and sends the entire planet deeper into a spiral of chaos, hatred and terror is "sane."
Just so we're all clear on that. ***