"An Elegant and Unifying Explanation"

Wow. You get one guess at which university pays the salaries of 2 of the 4 "researchers" on this APA paper (emphases mine).

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism—intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r = .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism—intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (—.32); uncertainty tolerance (—.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (—.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (—.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

...conservatives were also less likely than nonconservatives to volunteer for psychology experiments that required openness to experience (i.e., experiments on aesthetic interest, fantasy production, and sexual behavior) but not for experiments on decision making and humor. These findings are consistent with other research indicating that conservatives are less likely than others to value broad-mindedness, imagination, and “having an exciting life”.

...an inventive research program on the dream lives of liberals and conservatives in the United States found that Republicans reported three times as many nightmares as did Democrats (Bulkeley, 2001). This work, although speculative, suggests that fear, danger, threat, and aggression may figure more prominently in the unconscious motivations of conservatives than liberals.

From the press release:

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

Fear and aggression
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
Uncertainty avoidance
Need for cognitive closure
Terror management

...The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.

Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way.

This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition....

So conservatives choose their ideology because they are more likely to fear death, show aggression, prefer dogmatic assertions, cling to certainty and closure, and desire to preserve class inequality. Yep, that is elegant. Oh, and don't forget lower "integrative complexity."

Later I was excited to discover -- this Berkeley/Stanford study of the roots of conservatism was funded by NIH, NIMH, and NSF grants totaling $1.2 million! Love that "hijacked by the hate-filled extreme right wingers" federal government!

Homosexuality, Accepted by the American Psychiatric Association

The APA. Both of them. I wouldn't let a professional psychologist (non-MD) near me or any of my family members at any time for any reason, and I would think seriously about all possible alternatives before I spent a single hour in the professional care of a psychiatrist (MD). Psychiatry as a discipline is almost completely discredited in my mind. I have a couple of relatives who have been put on Prozac, by "professionals", and in both cases their "diseases" were not cured, merely modified, and the process of figuring out the side effects and getting off Prozac was worse than the original indications. Ditto for Ritalin. I would get three or four freaking opinions (from, hellooo, neurologists!) if I was ever diagnosed with a brain chemistry disorder before embarking on any treatment. Lord have mercy.

The Bible doesn't say homosexual acts have, at their root, disease factors, chemical imbalances, psychic trauma, or even run-of-the-mill broken father-child relationships. All it says is, "Don't do it," right along with plenty of other acts God considers wrong. Some folks merely have different temptations than others, but succumbing to any temptation to disobey God damages our relationships with Him. And of course, "all have sinned"; "there is none that does good, not even one."

Homosexuality doesn't have to be an APA-approved, APA-treatable, physiological or psychological disorder for it to be wrong. Nor does it have to have a demonstrable, happens-every-time link to pedophilia for me to be suspicious of having Noah in schools, day care, or scout troops with uncloseted homosexuals -- that issue has much more to do with molding Noah's worldview than the possibility of sexual violations. Pedophiles do their work in secret, and obviously the true villains from whom you most want to keep your beloved ones, are the ones you have no suspicions about. At Great Hills, men are never left alone in a room with young children, ever -- whether they are new or have been members for 30 years. And as you undoubtedly expect, none of them (as far as I know) are openly gay.

The pro-gay argument is made: we can't pick and choose which rules in Leviticus we prefer to keep and which we discard. The distinction between laws from the OT Mosaic Law that are fulfilled vs. moral law that started in OT but carry over to the NT goes back a long way. In the interest of brevity I'll just quote this from Acts. Peter and the other leaders of the (up to this point exclusively Jewish) Christian church give instructions to the first Gentile Christians who have no knowledge of the scriptures:

The apostles and elders, your brothers, To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia: Greetings. We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul-- men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.
(Acts 15:23-29)

The main issue for some of the more "conservative" first-century Jewish Christians was, they thought all believers had to be circumcised according to the Law in order to be saved. The apostles rejected that idea. And it's clear from various places in the NT that sexual immorality includes homosexuality. So today's conservative Christians aren't trying to play fast and loose with Leviticus -- there is precedent for setting aside many of the outwardly religious and theocratic laws (such as how to perform animal sacrifices, which animals are edible, and whether foreskins have to be excised), while keeping the inner moral principles.

So anyway, I understand completely the desire to remove the spectre of pedophilia being the exclusive domain of homosexuals in the public mind. I just don't think proclaiming the gold seal of approval from either APA is the right place to find scientific vindication. But golly isn't it funny that the Keepers of the Flame of All True Knowledge in the field of psychiatry find homosexuality perfectly OK and conservatism a sad, aggressive, fear-driven compulsion.

I saw a biography of Gore Vidal on PBS this week and watched most of it. Absolutely fascinating. Amazing video of Vidal in a debate with William F. Buckley in which Vidal's calm yet vitriolic provocations inspired an incredible bared-teeth threat of bodily harm from Buckley. Wow. I never really knew anything about Mr. Vidal before except that he was Some Big-Time Author. Gore ran for Congress in 1960 in Dutchess County, NY, where I was born eight years later.