The October 23, 2008 Denver Post featured an article about Focus on the Family’s Love Won Out roadshow, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend in Colorado Springs. The article itself is well-balanced, featuring counterpoints from ex-gay survivors Peterson Toscano and Christine Bakke alongside the usual talking points from LWO spokespersons. Unfortunately little is done to directly examine LWO’s claims, which can seem more impressive on first glance than they really are.
According to the article, “Focus says more than 50,000 gay people and family members have attended 52 conferences around the country in the past decade.” Casual readers might assume from that statement that gays and lesbians constitute a significant percentage of those participants, when in fact the vast majority of LWO attendees are heterosexual, as Box Turtle Bulletin’s Jim Burroway learned when he attended the Phoenix conference in 2007.
Melissa Fryrear was more candid about LWO’s target audience: “We’re ministering to Christian families. They are devastated when a loved one is living homosexually. They can’t condone what falls outside biblical truth.” As always, “living homosexually” (like its rhetorical sibling “the gay lifestyle”) is left undefined, and “biblical truth” as defined by Focus on the Family is assumed to be something so clearly delineated in the Bible that no disagreement is possible.
Perhaps the most interesting statement in the article comes from Focus on the Family’s founder, James Dobson: “Dobson said there are more than 800 known former gay and lesbian individuals who have found ‘wholeness in their newfound heterosexuality.’” While Dobson gives no indication of where this number came from, it does seem to be considerably more realistic than the “tens of thousands” or “hundreds of thousands” (or even “millions”) of successful ex-gays that Exodus spokespersons often claim exist.
Even 800 may be a bit high, given the difficulty that Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse had in rounding up 100 participants for their ex-gay survey, and given the low success rate reported within this highly motivated group.
In any case 800 is hardly an impressive number, considering that the ex-gay movement has been around for more than three decades with over a hundred ministries (and an unknown number of private counselors) currently available to help those seeking to become straight. And Dobson’s statement further confirms what many Exodus and LWO spokespersons have begun denying in recent years, that heterosexuality is indeed the goal of most ex-gay programs.
Left unspoken, even by Dobson, is whether those 800 have become fully heterosexual, or whether their newfound change is “ambiguous, complicated, conflicted, and incomplete.” But then, being up front about such details would hardly help LWO’s sales pitch; the switch is best held in reserve until after the bait has been taken.
As a student of psychology it is astonishing to me that the APA continues to allow these forms of “therapy” without requiring therapists to disclose the reality of the statistics to those who may want to engage in the so-called “reparative process.” There should, at minimum, with a therapy that has absolutely NO scientific backing to it, be a requirement for the therapist to inform clients of the scientific findings relative to this “therapy” and the dangers associated with it. IMHO, failure to inform clients of the risks of engaging in this process is a violation of the client’s rights. It’s becoming more and more likely that the only way to require this and prevent the negative experiences many ex-ex-gays have encountered is for a legal suit to be filed against the therapists who conduct said “therapy” without full disclosure. The FDA currently requires that alternative treatments that have not undergone rigorous scientific testing must, by law, state this fact on their labels (they must specify that the treatment is not intended to cure or prevent a disease) so that persons purchasing it are not tricked into buying the product under the assumption that it will do something for them that it has not been proven to do. Is this not what LWO and Exodus are being allowed to do, at the psychological expense of hundreds, if not thousands, of people? It’s time for the APA to take more action on this and for health insurance companies and the government to require APA approval of specific therapies in order to legally protect the right of the client. If a particular therapy such as “conversion therapy” is deemed to have no demonstrable therapeutic efficacy, then therapists should be required by law to provide the client with a disclaimer similar to that currently mandated by the FDA on alternative supplements. It is a disgrace that people who claim to be Christians would be at the forefront of such disceptive practices.
It would seem to me that when Dobson said that, “there are more than 800 known former gay and lesbian individuals who have found ‘wholeness in their newfound heterosexuality.’” He might have been using the words “wholeness of their newfound heterosexuality” as a code to indicate that these 800 were, in fact, married. That would seem to mean that many more were still outside of that “wholeness of their newfound heterosexuality” and thus celibate homosexuals. Perhaps by a factor of 10.
But that seems to be somewhat stretching it, I guess.
Just a thought, but by the claim of heterosexuality based on marriage, someone should tell Mr. Dobson that it is more than 800 minus two since Quinlan and his wife got divorced, then minus countless other couples who met the same fate.
He should also start counting those who left the “ex-gay lifestyle” to reconcile with who they are, and those who keep on “falling from grace” like Ted Haggard and many others. Add to that, the ex-gay survivors.
I’m quite certain that Dobson wasn’t counting celibate homosexuals among the 800. But then, celibates don’t make good showcases for their splashy “change is possible” ads and are of minimal value to an organization like Focus that has worked so hard to try to convince the world that homosexuals don’t really exist. And the fact that celibacy is all that ex-gay programs can offer the vast majority of their participants exposes the rhetorical doublespeak of the “freedom from homosexuality” mantra.
Love Won Out advertises heavily to pastors too, which isn’t mentioned here. That’s how a friend and I went and neither of us are gay. From my perspective, only a tiny minority of attenders were lesbian or gay. The attendance itself was exaggerated when I attended. They said later there were over a thousand people but seeing everyone at the general sessions, there were clearly only about 300.
Ah, the old ex-gay movement. You want to have a look at this ex ex-gay movement. HERE