If at one time mental-health clinicians felt enjoined to convince every patient to embrace heterosexuality, now the situation is in some cases reversed.
Clinicians are under pressure to encourage homosexuality.
Aside from further controversy as to the origins and personal significance to a patient of having homosexual impulses, this practical problem is bothersome. We seem to be devoted in so many ways, as a profession, to helping people to find their own answers. It feels odd to me to take a firm stand to impose our own values on a patient, and to be inflexible about what the meanings of the behavior are to the particular patient. While I applaud APA's backing the preservation of civil rights for all people, I deplore a tendency to put any human behavior beyond the scope of scientific investigation. Somehow, this has happened with homosexuality, with fallout that constrains clinicians.