Quote: Pariah said: Until 1973, society wasn't as open to homosexuality. The 70s was the borderline where it started bending over backwards for homosexuals. See where this is heading?
I see that you're alluding to the 1973 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM) wherein homosexuality was removed as a diagnosable mental illness.
But you make it sound like members of the American Psychological Association woke up one morning in 1973 and changed their minds on homosexuality.
It isn't like that. Individual clinicians and theoreticians had been reviewing and recosnidering their opinions on homosexuality throughout the 20th Century. As an exmaple, Sigmund Freud did not argue that homosexuality was a mental illness, though he told one mother whose son was homosexual that being homosexual won't offer him any advantage in society, but he did not decry her son as mentally ill or "sick."
Theories and understanding of mental illness evolved from mental illness being viewed within a Demonic/Witchcraft Model to the more current Medical Model.
Is a homosexuality really a mental illness? Is mental retardation a mental illness? Maybe yes to both. But that doesn't mean that we deny opportunities to either in those groups if they are able to function and succeed within those opportunities.
I think I'm on record as having said my life would be a whole easier if I were str8. But I'm not and I can't change that aspect of myself. But because I can't that doesn't mean that gays should be looked upon as lesser creatures deserving of a lesser life.
