Alas, time and experience has demonstrated, regrettably over and over again, that otherwise sane people really do hold such silly ideas and go to great lengths to expound on them. Endlessly.

In some sense it really isn't that bad -- it's a big enough country, a big enough world, to each their own and all that. If someone takes great pleasure in fearing the rain, or sunlight, or the cracks in the sidewalk, well, it's their life to waste.

I paused over the entries above, and only bring the site, Writing Right to attention here, Dear Readers, because there's just a touch of embarrassment when I read that page. The author is one Stacy Harp, an educated woman who still manages to post some wincing, stomach turning doozies. My embarrassment isn't because I know her -- she isn't a friend of mine ala one of the guys who posts here. No. It's because she's... well... . oh, I'll just come right and say it.

She's a Marriage and Family Therapist.

While I may have left my social service career behind recently, I still have pride in my old vocation. Twelve years split between being a therapist and a social worker does leave a mark. When I read stuff by people like Ms. Harp, peddling what really amounts to their own pain served up with a steaming side of bullshit to those who are often in desperate straights, I wish there was a way to revoke their credentials. My "live and let live" ideals crash head first into my "But she's hurting people" realities.

While the conventional wisdom is that higher education broadens the mind by pruning illogic and misunderstanding from the cognitive garden, again, real world experience has taught me that higher education often does the opposite: it steels personal prejudice behind an armor of ignorance and paints it darkly with a "learned" hubris.

I could be over reacting. Dan did alright for himself and he saw Dr. Joe "Papa NARTH" Niccolosi -- a Ph.D. psychologist who pays his bills with empty rhetoric and bad art -- during his college years. Rhetorically, intellectually, Ms. Harp isn't in Nicolosi's league. Read her website and then ponder the irony of her surname. While the legions of asshats are large and ever expanding, and even if there were enough toilet-paper in existence to clean up their messes, chasing after such people would be a futile, full time job -- the ignorant do breed quickly -- this one came across my desk and I just had to say something bitchy about her site before I threw it into the trash.

Take for example her response to a news article about the under reporting of HIV infection in China. The author of the article she quotes is skeptical of the Chinese governments claim about their rates of men-who-have-sex-with-men infection rates. (I mean it is China after all): Although nobody anywhere really knows the percentage of the population who are gay, it is certainly more than .0000018 Stacy takes the side of the Chinese government and says:

"All the stats I've read suggest between 1-3% [of the population is gay] so this percentage isn't that far off."

Now, perhaps it's because I've left the world of therapy and moved into the even crazier world of screenwriting that I'm rather sensitive to percentages. Math wasn't my strong suit in college, but after being around all the shady, silver tongued satans of La-La Land, I brushed up on your numbers. If I tell my agent, Shyster MacShyster JD, that my bottom line is 1% of the gross receipts as part of my fee and he negotiates, signs and obliges me to an amount five orders of magnitude smaller than that I'm going to be pissed. When said movie does Titanic box office and he tells me in all sincerity that ".0000018 isn't that far off from .01," no one will begrudge me for beating him senseless with his diploma. In a similar vein, shaking one's head and going "Stacy, Stacy, Stacy" over both Ms. Sharp's failure of simple math and failure at simple reasoning, is as also a fairly standard response

Her recent posting about a supposed drug to "reverse" Male Homosexuality is another tisk, tisk-er. Track back the source of her linked story and you find that the original article had nothing to do with homosexuality. It was a Reuters story detailing the reasons for the start of Phase 3 Clinical trials for a drug that will aid 6.3 million men with a deficiency in the production of testosterone. The homosexuality angle snuck in from some dude with a graduate degree in Economics who bills himself as an "award winning journalist" and who posts his deceptively intelligent thoughts at that on-line journal of cutting insight Redstate.

I don't know which is worse, a "journalist" who didn't take the time to check his own homophobia at the door and research that there is no testosterone difference between male heterosexuals and homosexuals (Journal of Hormonal Behavior, 1987; issue number 21, pg 347-57) or the "psychotherapist" / fool who takes said evidence as fact, posts it on her blog, then spins wonderfully fanciful notions of gay men being afraid to "change" as a result. I got my degree in Virginia, where we we were taught how to discern good research from bad. Perhaps California psychotherapists are burned with such a task. Or perhaps it was just Ms. Harp's school that was free of such instruction. Or perhaps she was just sick that month.

If you are going to style yourself as an "expert" on the etiology of homosexuality, as Ms. Harp does over and over again, it would help that one actually know something factual about the subject. Fanciful notions are great for fiction, but not for helping others. On that point, Research currently suggests that a reduction in DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone), the chemical cousin of testosterone and estrogen, might be one of the factors that in utero causes homosexuality in men (and perhaps women.) But if this is one of the reasons for differing sexual orientations, this happens before a child is born. It stops a section of the brain from targeting sexual expression to the opposite gender. Testosterone still has the same effect on gay boys as it does in straight boys -- makes them loud, active and horny. If you start plowing a kid you think is gay with a new drug to up his testosterone load, as Ms. Harp ruminates about, you aren't going to make a queer kid straight, but rather ready to fuck anything that doesn't move fast enough to get away. And if you know anything at all about what adolescent boys, of any sexual orientation, are willing to fuck with their puberty induced high levels of testosterone, this thought should scare you to no end. ("Honey, where's my newspaper?")

Education is supposed to free you of the logical fallacies epitomized by by complaints such as this, where Ms. Harp sees any critique of her ignorance as "proof" to

...[those] who can think clearly, see clearly and actually be honest that the homosexual movement is anything but "loving."

. Alas, at her site, this is not the case.

Psychology, perhaps the most Humanist of disciplines, is a great tool for helping others. It's also a wicked stick that can be wielded maliciously to wound others with marks and bruises that mirror one's own. It allows you to lob insults varnished with psychobable ("you have serious issues," "you have attachment disorders," "I see evidence of 'shame'"), to elevate ones own broken ego at the expense of anothers. It allows you to cheat and only get caught by the few who know more than you. Fill in the details, Dear Readers.

As a rule, I don't like to analyze from a distance -- it's really tough to "figure a person out" simply by what they write on their site. The deeper currents that push people aren't usually visible from a simple read of what they choose to share on a page.

Be that as it may, I'll first close out here by bending that rule a bit and pointing out telling series of posts from Ms. Harp's site that may indicate both why she says the nasty things she does and show her in a way more nuanced than as a simple, homophobic shrill.

As penance for bending my rule, I'll share something of myself that positively shows insight into my own character and illustrates some of the lessons I've learned along my way. As to how her disclosures and mine are illustrative of The Deeper Things, I'll leave that for you, Dear Readers, to ponder.

Ms. Harp, after criticising a woman who complained about a frankly offensive anti-gay ad posted in her neighborhood (a valid and non coercive exercise of Free Speech rights) of being "intolerant", she explains the reason for the woman's intolerance is because of her "failed lesbian "marriage"" and the custody fight that ensued.

Pray for [the woman] that she would see the truth about her lifestyle and sexual choices.

We can't hold anything the lesbian says as valid because of how her pain was caused, Ms. Harp seems to say.

But ironically, Ms. Harp disclosed that her own reasons for being the advocate for "rightness" that she considers herself to posses , is fueled by her own traumatic childhood:

One of the reasons I am so passionate about sexual sin is because my childhood was poisoned by the sexual sin of another towards me. I didn't have the blessing of entering my marriage without knowledge of sex because a relative had taken my innocence away and poisoned what God intended through porn, and various forms of sexual abuse. While I remained pure and a virgin until I was married, unfortunately my innocence was taken by the evil of this relative....And the only good that can come out of such evil is that the Lord has given me a voice to declare the truth about such evil. I often find it ironic that the real victims of abuse in society are often ignored, trampled upon, or not believed. While there are others who fabricate such things and cry for victim status...I find it ironic that in a day and age when sexuality and sexual deviance is so rampant, that there are so few voices out there telling the truth about so many little girls and boys who are being molested by evil people in their lives...Well, I have news - I'm a voice for the real victims and Dr. Jerry Kirk is also a voice for the real victims. And Jesus Christ is a voice for the real victims because it is only through Jesus Christ that one can heal from such trauma and victimization...And as a therapist when I sit with clients who share their stories with me, I remember what He did for me, and how He used a few great therapists to help me through my pain. I'm thankful and I'm overwhelmed that He would choose me for such a calling to minister to the truly brokenhearted.

Hold what I say as being valid because of how my pain was caused, Ms. Harp seems to say. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

Now, as promised, my last remark.

At the ripe age of 21, neck deep in my education for my M.Ed in Counseling, waist deep in my AIDS prevention work, but only toe-deep in the currents of my own life, I found myself under the tootledge of a 78 year old Anglician minister. The Reverend Jim Petty, M.Div in Pastoral Counseling, former student of Fritz Perls, dioceses expert on sexual abuse by priests, and the first pastor to start a live-in AIDS hospice in the rich D.C. suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia, would become an excellent teacher, a great therapist, and even an awesome friend. Jim asked me early on why I wanted to be a therapist. Speaking from that vast well-spring of certainty that every 21 year old has, I told him I wanted to heal the world. To save it. He smiled at me and said "That Gods' job."

I'm not superstitious. I have no belief in gods. At 21, I had a little, but I was moving fast away from it, so I didn't think much of his remarks. "God? Pishposh. I don't believe in that." While gods aren't real, the stories about them are, and the insights contained in stories are the most real things of all. 14 years later, after tripping through my life, jumping from AIDS educator, to counselor for the Terminally Ill, to those with Chronic Mental Illness, to still later, confronting angry, armed men while taking away their abused children, I got his point. (He had many more. I'm still working on those.)

We don't get to heal the World -- we just aren't that good. (Besides, I'm not really convinced the world needs healing.) We really don't even get to save anyone else -- His Noodly Apendage knows how much I tried. We console, we support, we prop-up, we listen, but we don't really heal. Each person does that for themselves. We can only heal ourselves. We can only hope that in the process others are so changed. My Self is the limit of my power. And if you see that as a paean to "selfishness," read all the above again for you've missed my point.

As in counseling, so to in writing. My story is the only thing I'm good at. With any certainty, with any conviction, with any power, it's the only thing that ever comes out right. My story is the only thing I -- or anyone else -- is qualified to tell.