Completely off my radar screen, GOP Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann apparently was a guest on the Tonight Show last night. According to commentary, and video posted on the Gawker today, Leno chose the occasion to take off his ass-kissing Tonight Show mask, and be more himself, engaging in some serious and rather dogged questioning about her anti-gay policies: http://gawker.com/5841296/jay-leno-grills-michele-bachmann-on-gay-rights
I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but even if it was all fluff, these 2 minutes would make the substantive-fluff ratio pretty high. Leno is always most effective in these kinds of conversations when he leans on his 31 years of marriage to his first and only wife (unlike the Bohemian Dave, who has been divorced, lived with several women in sin, and screwed a few others). I am not sure if Bachmann's people were lulled into a false sense of security from watching decades of Leno interviews and assuming they would only get softballs, or if Tea Partiers in Minnesota really think that the "I thought that was pray the grey away" line was so hilarious it would diffuse the issue. Bachmann has been running away from the conversion therapy and anti-LGBT policies of her counseling clinics for a couple of months now - her and her husband's standard response when pressed is that the clinic does not try to convince LGBT clients to change their orientation, but instead only provides the services their clients ask for. This is literally right out of the book of the main fundamentalist Christian pseudo-scientific defense of sexual orientation change therapy (Ex-gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation by Jones, S. & Yarhouse, M., 2007). The tactic here is to create such a diffuse and impenetrable cloud of pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo that no outsider can find their way to the core. I think the core is this: There is no reliable and valid evidence that efforts to change a gay man (Kinsey 5 or 6) to a straight man (Kinsey 1 or 2) are likely to be effective in a significant fraction of cases (more than 3-5%). There is considerable survey evidence that a significant fraction of gay men who are subjected to these change efforts (even when they ask for them) suffer significant, negative consequences (including increased symptoms of mood disorders, substance abuse, unsafe sex practices and suicidal thoughts and behaviors). It is unethical for a therapist or professional counselor to provide a service which is not based on valid evidence of effectiveness, especially if it also poses a reasonable likelihood of substantial harm. I can think of no other intervention with a benefit to cost ratio even close to this one being considered ethical. And, of course, there is the added problem that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, so this is a treatment in search of a disease. I am pretty sure the Bachmanns avoid serious discussion of the issue because the only real justification they have is that he is not a licensed therapist, and not a member of the main mental health professional associations, and so is not bound legally or ethically to restrict his behavior to ethical professional standards. But they probably don't want that sound bite. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
