Blogger Willie Hewes of Free Z. has been dialoguing a bit with Love In Action executive director John Smid. Here is Hewes’s letter and Smid’s reply.
Smid’s reply is worth a quick read — it is spoken with the tone of someone who possesses competency in professional therapy, even though few staffers at LIA have actually earned such credentials.
Strangely, the letter to Hewes was followed by another message by Smid to someone else, misaddressed to Hewes. That message claims very high success rates at improving youth-parent communications and faith commitment, but the stats are apparently based on a sample of just 24 youths. And the means by which the stats were derived is not indicated, so one can’t ascertain whose opinions of success rates are really being surveyed — the youths, the parents, or the pricey counselors.
Quickly:How can Smid have figures “fluctuate month by month” when he has less than one client a month?Also, if only 10% left with an “ongoing desires to pursue homosexuality”… why did 40% go do a big roll-in-the-gay-hay within less than a year? Wonder how many do with 2 years? Or 5 years?Hmmm, perhaps LIA is really a recruiting agency.
Re: “Hmmm, perhaps LIA is really a recruiting agency.”
What are you saying? With enemies like that, who needs friends? 😉
I think the 10% are the one’s who said “screw you smid I’m gunna run straight from here to a gay bar and grab the first guy I see”. I don’t think it includes the ones who said “yeah yeah, straight, sure, can i go now?”
Timothy, exactly.Smid’s as slippery as a seal in sewerage — a “only 10%” claim combined with the true outcome (40% within 12 months, and remember these are young men only just coming out…) means the marketing speil about 90% finding honesty and openess and deeper relationships and improved communications is all based on what you said — “Yeah, I’ve changed. Can I go now?”I don’t blame those kids for lying if it gets them out of such a coercive, manipulative or menacing environment. I don’t think there’s a gay man or woman alive who hasn’t needed to play straight at some time or other.Reminds of that time we walked into that Maori biker bar in Auckland… doh.
Let’s charitably assume, just for a moment, that Smid’s statistics are based on real measurements from actual surveys conducted by a neutral third party. (A party that Smid did not identify. Acchhem.)
Then let’s look at that 30 percent that didn’t initially acknowledge ongoing desires but then engaged in same-sex genital behavior within the first year.
My guess would be that many of those individuals were not intentionally lying to others in order to save their own skins, but rather misleading themselves with the standard exgay word trick: If I call myself heterosexual, then I am heterosexual — regardless of what my attractions or behaviors really are.
This truly is a statistical mess. He talks about 80% of the parents without telling us how many parents there are. Does he refer to 80% of the 24 kids, and their parents indirectly? It seems at least unwise to assume that 24 kids must yield 48 parents. The number could be as low as 24, or maybe even lower, if siblings are involved. Or, there may be something on the order of 100 parents if step parents, exstep parents, on and on, are included.
This particular passage is amazingly unilluminating.