A Significant Shift: A Pentadic Analysis of the Two Rhetorics of the Post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church Regarding Homosexuality

This paper argues that, since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), there has been a significant shift in the rhetorical stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward homosexuality in which the pre-council rhetoric, which condemned both act (i.e., homosexual behavior) and actor (i.e., the homosexual) has been replaced by two distinctly different rhetorics: a moral rhetoric, which continues the Church's long-standing condemnation of homosexual acts as sins, and a pastoral rhetoric, which argues that homosexuals should be ministered to and embraced. A Burkean pentadic analysis is used to define how the two rhetorics differ from each other and from the earlier rhetoric. The three major influences (i.e., Scripture, Tradition, and Catholic theology/philosophy) that have shaped, and continue to shape, the Church's position regarding homosexuality are described. Some of the socio-political implications of this shift are emphasized.     

“If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It”: Ethical Considerations Regarding Conversion Therapies

Despite the unanimous adoption of a position statement by the American Psychiatric Association objecting to reparative therapy in December 1998, the decision was not without its critics. The current work examines the ethical considerations regarding conversion or reparative therapies in light of the extensive psychological literature documenting the societal stigma (homophobia and heterosexism) suffered by lesbian and gay individuals. Overall, there are two major concerns regarding conversion therapy, namely its ethical inappropriateness, and lack of empirical evidence supporting its efficacy. The author argues that no professional health associations support reparative therapy, homosexuality per se is not an illness and does not require treatment, and, the mental health profession must acknowledge its own role in the oppression of homosexual individuals.     

Kindness in Australia: an empirical critique of moral decline sociology

A new sociological agenda is emerging that interrogates how morality can be established in the absence of the moral certainties of the past but there is a shortage of empirical work on this topic. This article establishes a theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of everyday morality drawing on the work of theorists including Ahmed, Bauman and Taylor. It uses the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to assess the state and shape of contemporary moralities by asking how kind are Australians, how is its expression socially distributed, and what are the motivations for kindness. The findings demonstrate that Australians exhibit a strong attachment and commitment to kindness as a moral value that is primarily motivated by interiorized sources of moral authority. We argue these findings support the work of theorists such as Ahmed and Taylor who argue authenticity and embodied emotion are legitimate sources of morality in today's secular societies. The research also provides new evidence that generational changes are shaping understandings and practices of kindness in unexpected ways.     

A Study of Attitudes Towards Gays and Lesbians in the State of Utah,U.S.A.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine Utahans' attitudes towards gay and lesbian people and their civil rights. Utah politics are dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and the Republican Party, with membership typically shared by the two. However, Mormon sociocultural values are also distinctively pro-family and companionate. We wondered to what extent caring, warmth, and inclusiveness toward family members mitigated against the doctrinaire injunction to reject homosexuality and, if necessary, to reject family members who were homosexual.

We found that proponents of gay and lesbian civil rights were likely to be personally familiar with gays and lesbians, to have empathetic attitudes about gay and lesbian youth and being out, and to possess a commitment to legal rights for gay and lesbian individuals and families. Opponents of gay and lesbian civil rights were driven by moralistic imperatives about sexuality and the roots of sexual behavior, made a sharp distinction between what they perceived as social privileges and legally mandated rights and were not likely to have had much direct contact with gay and lesbian people. Our results suggest that Utahans indeed appear to be torn, or at best ambivalent, about the religious mandate to condemn homosexuality while at the same time prizing family ties and relationships above other values. For the same reasons, political actions directed at obtaining specific legal rights for gays and lesbians appear to have more support than expected, especially in the realms of partner benefits, employment discrimination, health benefits, and private freedoms. Legal marriage, however, is soundly rejected as a possibility, especially in view of the belief that marriage is sacred and exclusively for heterosexuals.     

Positivism,ethics and politics in Africa

Despite the fact that the study of African politics is dominated by ethical postures, as can be seen with the self-proclaimed qualifications of African states and leaders, the debate on ethics per se is not common. The first challenge of this article is to address ethics as an entry point for African political studies. The second challenge is epistemological. It is related to my efforts to examine values and ideals as facts that should be considered seriously in political science. Therefore, positivism is not incompatible with values and ideals. They are part of the political universe. In this regard, African politics shows the symbolic triumph of democratic ethics. Current facts militate for the upholding of those values.     

Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

Ethical turn in the social sciences

This paper discusses the ethical or moral turn of the social sciences, especially in sociology in the works of Zygmunt Bauman and in anthropology in the works of Didier Fassin. These scholars have embarked on relating morals or ethics to their particular area of specialization. We note that their contributions have highlighted the moral or ethical questions in their respective field works and empirical observations and have produced moral or ethical discourses or frameworks in their respective area or field. Ethics or morality (sometimes) morals is not just a theory but also practice in their respective disciplines and advocacies. This moral or ethical practice is translated into questioning our cognitive frameworks and political consequences of globalization or consumerism affecting some groups or individuals in contemporary world. We shall consider morality as human actions while ethics is the reflections on those actions.     

The cut sleeve 1 revisited: A brief ethnographic interview with a male homosexual in mainland China

This paper focuses on a brief interview with a self‐disclosed male homosexual from a Western province in mainland China. While others have reported on homosexuality in China, the sources of information have generally been nonreactive (letters and clinical case notes). To the author's knowledge, this is the first documented face‐to‐face interview with a Chinese male homosexual to reach the Western professional press. Segments chosen for focus include the self‐perceptions of the individual, his sexual orientation and liaisons, and the manner in which he negotiates his alternate lifestyle in a cultural system largely negative to homosexuality in any form. While this example is obviously not representative of homosexuals in China, it does briefly illustrate the kinds of experiences that confront a male homosexual in the post‐Mao Zedong era. Adaptive strategies by this individual also indicate how the expression of a sexual orientation at variance from the norm can be sustained, even in a seemingly closed system.     

Lesbian Identity Management at Various Stages of the Coming Out Process: A Qualitative Study

This qualitative study is designed to explore how women at various stages of lesbian identity development make decisions about managing their identities. Management of identity was studied in terms of how women came out or stayed hidden and how they made decisions both to disclose and to conceal. The Cass (1984) Stage Allocation Measure was used as a means to categorize women at various stages of lesbian identity development. Twenty-five adult women were individually interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. A journal was kept by each woman for one month. The major findings indicated that women at different stages of lesbian identity development use both disparate and similar identity-management and decision-making strategies. Underlying and connecting lesbian identity management and development was the need to maintain self-esteem and safety.     

Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo

Machismo, a stereotype that emphasizes hypermasculinity and associated with the Latin American male, was a legacy of the Conquest of the Spanish conquistadores and their interpretation of and reaction to the indigenous two-spirit. It was the product of the rape of indigenous women, the response to indigenous imperial ritual, and the sublimation of indigenous male sexuality. It was a response to social and religious control of the male body. As such, it is not something that is easily eradicated. Through an understanding of the complex roots of this variant of masculinity, however, it may be possible to filter out some of the negative traits and highlight the more positive. This essay examines the interactions between the Spaniards and indigenous peoples of the Americas and the interpretations of indigenous sexualities, genders, and social roles by the Spanish authorities, and how it all participates in the construction of the Latin American machismo.     

The psychological goods on clinical social work: a content analysis of the clinical social work and social justice literature

The purpose of this content analysis was to evaluate the extant literature on clinical social work and social justice. In July 2009, an online search of the university databases EBSCO Host (1988–2009) was conducted to identify articles on clinical social work and social justice. Thirty-six peer reviewed journal articles were identified and extracted. The majority were non-empirical articles (75%) published in the United States (94%) over a 21-year period from 1988 to 2009. Overall, clinical social work practice was described as psychological and/or sociopolitical interventions that had a direct and/or indirect effect on psychological and sociopolitical level social justice outcomes. Theories and practices consistent with social justice were advanced. These findings suggest that clinical social work's promotion of psychological well-being remains an underdeveloped area in the scholarly and research literature. In this era of professional educational reform, additional research and professional training on social justice based clinical social work practice is warranted.     

The Role of Androphilia in the Psychosexual Development of Boys

ABSTRACT

It is generally recognized that boys, and especially later prepubertal and young adolescent boys, are openly attracted to older boys and men. They identify with these more mature, most often unrelated males; they want to learn about the masculine world; they want to “be like” these people. This article examines previctimological and more recent literature to consider the extent to which boys’ generalized inclinations to explore, experience, and enjoy their emerging masculinity in the company of older males also may be manifested in their psychosexual developmental interests, desires, and activities. Insights from the literature concerning boys’ perspectives are taken into account, and various extraneous factors that may negatively affect boys’ psychosexual development are considered. The authenticity of this juvenile male androphilic sexuality is found to be supported, as is the repression thereof as a significant dynamic in young male social alienation and maladjustment.     

Gender-Deviancy and Crime: An American Fantasy

The political usefulness of such terms as domesticity has changed since the 1950s. Nonetheless, some elements have remained stable over the decades. Of particular interest is the continued use of fear in public representations to create and to stabilize the domestic space. This essay considers several crime narratives of domestic intrusion, written at successive points in this period, and concludes with the Andrew Cunanan coverage, examining how different narratives of criminal intimacy exploit similar codes of failed gender. The essay argues that the crisis announced by the serial killer is less about killing than about the perceived disarray of cultural intimacies and the collapse of the public/private binary that these govern.     

The Development of Parent–Child Relationship Perceptions in Boys from Childhood to Adolescence: A Comparison Between Disruptive and Non-Disruptive Boys

The absence or weakness of the father role is considered by many authors as one of the principal explaining factors of disruptive behavior and other psychopathologies among children. However, empirical studies on the specific role of the father are rare. Boys with stable disruptive behavior from age 5 until age 15 were compared to boys who have never been disruptive during the same time period. The perceptions that boys have regarding their relationships with their fathers from childhood to adolescence was compared to, perceptions concerning their relationships with their mothers. The results indicate that boys from both groups generally feel less loved and less appreciated by their fathers than by their mothers in adolescence but not in childhood. The boys perceived that their two parents love and appreciate them a lot less at age 15, than at age 9 and age 11. They felt less loved and appreciated by their fathers than their mothers. At age 15, disruptive boys considered they were less loved by their two parents than non-disruptive boys did. The differences in the perceptions by the boys concerning the quality of relationships with their parents appear during adolescence.     

Ethical Decision-Making in the Helping Profession

Abstract

First, we examine several of the more prominent theoretical approaches in ethics (the utilitarian, absolute rule, principle based, and ethics of care approaches) and find the principle-based, common morality approach, and the ethics of care approach to be the two approaches that are most relevant to the types of ethical decisions practitioners characteristically are confronted with in a social work setting. We then propose combining these two approaches, taking into consideration the advantages and drawbacks of each, such that in application these two approaches can be seen to complement one another. We show in two brief hypothetical cases how the combined approach can be used to guide practitioners' ethical decision-making in real life situations.     

Identity and Disruptiveness in Boys: Longitudinal Perspectives

After more than 30 years of research on identity, the links between identity and disruptive behaviors are not clear. This study compared the identity formation of boys with stable disruptive behaviors from age 6 to age 15 (n = 16), with the identity formation of boys that were never disruptive during the same period (n = 25). All boys came from low socio-economic status families. At age 9 and 11, identity was assessed with the The Self-Perception Profile for Children (Harter, 1985). At age 15, identity was assessed with the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status (Adams, Bennion, & Huh, 1989) and two scales of the Offer Self-Image Questionnaire (Offer, Ostrov, & Howard, 1981). Differences between disruptive and non-disruptive boys were found only for behavior in childhood and identity in ideological domains at age 15. Explanations for the weakness of the link between identity and disruptiveness are discussed.     

“Why Would Our Heavenly Father Do that to Anyone”: Oppressive Othering through Sexual Classification Schemes in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐Day Saints

In this article, we examine how leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐Day Saints (LDS or LDS Church) responded to the emergence of homosexuality as a prominent social issue by engaging in “oppressive othering” (Schwalbe et al. 2000 ), which refers to the process whereby elites classify members of other groups as morally inferior. On the basis of LDS archival materials, we analyze how LDS elites accomplished “oppressive othering” by constructing sexual classification schemes defining homosexuality as the result of (1) familial, (2) gendered, and (3) sexual dysfunctions. In conclusion, we draw out implications for understanding (1) how elites, religious, or otherwise, construct sexual classification schemes that facilitate the ongoing subordination of sexual minorities, (2) the importance of taking an intersectional approach to oppressive othering, and (3) the ways elites revise institutional doctrines in response to shifting societal issues and concerns.     

The Nature and Value of Sex - A BOOK REVIEW OF: Sex: A Philosophical Primer,Expanded Edition by Irving Singer

Heterosexual and homosexual males who erotically preferred physically mature partners were compared with respect to the erotic impact of the nonpreferred age groups (of the preferred gender) and the nonpreferred gender. Erotic impact was assessed by phallometric test of erotic gender and age preferences. This measures penile volume changes during the presentation of potentially erotic stimuli. Homosexual males who preferred physically mature partners responded no more to male children than heterosexual males who preferred physically mature partners responded to female children. Although heterosexual males showed a (slight) erotic aversion to the male stimuli, and homosexual males did not show an aversion to the female stimuli, this difference was minimal.     

The sexual in Chinese sociology: homosexuality studies in contemporary China

Through a meta‐literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio‐economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party‐state. Fused with the bio‐medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s–1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey‐based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post‐structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homosexual identity in China, questions the hetero/homosexual binary and discusses how an individual makes sense of homosexual identity to form same‐sex intimate relationships. By tracing the epistemology of homosexuality in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality and proposes alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices.