Heresy homosexuality

These included claims of heresy, homosexuality, murder and worship of a mysterious deity called Baphomet. Rumors surfaced of a second, even more mysterious Rule within the inner circle of the Order. 

The change from a religious and moral to a social and medical conceptualization and control of personal conduct affects the entire discipline of psychiatry and allied fields. Perhaps nowhere is this transformation more evident than in the modern perspective on so-called sexual deviation, and especially on homosexuality. We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy,... 

Our position on the disease concept of homosexuality and its social control through medicine could be vastly clarified were we to apply to it our experience with the heresy concept of homosexuality and its social control through religion. Indeed, the parallels between these two sets of theoretical concepts and social sanctions need to be extended only to include one additional consideration— the legitimacy or illegitimacy of combining religious and medical ideas and practices with political power. 

Our secular society dreads homosexuality in the same way and with the same intensity as the theological societies of our ancestors dreaded heresy. The quality and the extent of this aversion is revealed by the fact that homosexuality is considered both a crime and a disease. ... 

The homosexual seeking to emigrate to this country finds that he is unwelcome. I shall examine a 1967 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on the deportability of an alien solely on the basis of homosexuality for the evidence it provides for my thesis that homosexuality is a kind of secular (sexual) heresy. 

---