The debate over homosexuality demonstrated to Spitzer and his colleagues how difficult it would be to entirely remove social and political considerations from any process of defining mental disorders. Nevertheless, it reinforced their desire to move away from the reigning approach to psychiatric classification, “because the debates about homosexuality could have been about most other diagnoses, had there been strong differences of opinions and hungry media,” note Kirk and Kutchins. “The debates had nothing to do with the ability of psychiatrists to identify homosexuals, but everything to do with a conceptual and theoretical problem, namely, whether homosexuality constituted a disorder. In order to address that question, psychiatrists would have to define disorder convincingly” (Kirk & Kutchins, 1992, p. 30). The use of narrow, symptom based definitions could make diagnostic criteria seem more objective and, therefore, avoid political conflicts that exposed the field to widespread ridicule.