The Mother of the Homosexual Movement - Evelyn Hooker PhD

By Hilary White

July 16, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Although few have heard of her outside the movement she helped to shape, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker's contributions to the advance of the homosexual political movement puts her in an historical class with Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood and institutionalized abortion, and Alfred Kinsey the "father" of the sexual revolution.

Hooker, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles for 30 years, is credited in the medical and psychological community, and most especially amongst homosexual political activists, with establishing that there is no measurable psychological difference between heterosexual and homosexual men. Her work introduced and developed the idea that homosexuality, far from being a mental disorder, is merely a normal minority variant on human sexuality.

Hooker's influential study on the issue, first published in 1957 in the Journal of Projective Techniques, was and still is presented as proof that homosexual activity is normal and as valid a lifestyle as heterosexuality. The first of several studies that Hooker published, the 1957 study served as a foundation for most of the homosexual movement's political and philosophical orthodoxies, including the assertion that any objection to the agenda is born from an irrational fear, since labelled "homophobia."

Born in 1907, Hooker lived long enough to receive the 1991 Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest, from the American Psychological Association. The citation on the award read, "Her pioneering study, published in 1957 ... provided empirical evidence that normal homosexuals existed, and supported the radical idea then emerging that homosexuality is within the normal range of human behavior."

A report for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexualityby researcher Jeffrey B. Satinover, cites Evelyn Hooker as "more than anyone else" the one whose work is responsible for normalizing homosexuality.

Satinover writes that Hooker's work has helped the homosexual movement - in keeping with the Marxist theories from which it came - to convince judicial and legislative bodies such as the US Supreme Court that homosexuality comprises an oppressed "class" whose rights have been trampled by irrational prejudice.

Hooker's work itself, however, was the product of a deliberate effort by homosexual activists to bring forward particular, pre-arranged outcomes, an approach that precludes scientific objectivity.

While teaching at UCLA in the late 1940's, Hooker fell in with a group of homosexuals and the newly formed activist organization, the Mattachine Society. Founded by leading thinker and member of the US communist party, Harry Hay, the Mattachine Society members convinced Hooker to embark on a research study of homosexuality on their behalf in order to advance the movement.

The study's subjects were selected entirely by the Mattachine Society, a group that Hooker herself admitted in the report had "as its stated purpose the development of a homosexual ethic...". In the same section she concedes the possibility that homosexuals are indeed pathological. The inadequacy of her methodology was acknowledged by the Journal of Projective Techniques that published it.

In the study, "The adjustment of the male overt homosexual", Hooker administered three standard personality tests to two groups of 30 men, one homosexual and screened by the Mattachine Society and the other heterosexual. Despite the fact that the purpose of the study was ostensibly to examine the possibility of mental instability in homosexuals, individuals who showed signs of mental instability were removed from the groups, which further predetermined the study's conclusion.

As with many other such "groundbreaking" studies seminal to the sexual revolution however, although Hooker's research has been criticised, and for all practical purposes debunked, the movement she helped to launch has not slowed.

To this day, the Hooker study is the only paper referenced in detail on the main website of the American Psychological Association in its discussion of Gay and Lesbian issues. It was one of the two upon which, in 1973, the APA decided to remove homosexuality from the list of psychological disorders. It was the one study discussed in the APA's brief in 2003 in the Lawrence v. Texas case that struck down the criminal prohibition of homosexual sodomy in Texas.

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