And then goes on to bash gay activists as scheming thugs.
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Anti-gay/exgay therapist, Christopher Doyle of The International Healing Foundation, recently penned an op-ed in the Christian post.
These feelings [same-sex attractions (SSA)] are the result of many factors, mostly environmental and familial, mixed-in with one genetic factor, a sensitive temperament. [emphasis added]
Anti-gay/ex-gay activists often claim “there’s no gay gene” to support their “not born gay” meme. For Christopher Doyle, sensitivity and empathy are not only the cause of homosexuality, but a genetically-based one at that.
In twenty-three years, we have found that 99 percent of our clients who experience homosexual feelings have very sensitive temperaments. … This is what I believe to be the foundation for the development of SSA…
Using that logic, teaching them how to be heartless monsters would cause them to experience heterosexual feelings.
And that’s the end of that theory, let the bashing begin…
He continues with the clichéd assertion that we equality-agenda driven, pro-gay activists are all mindlessly following Kirk and Madsen’s “homosexual manifesto,” After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. (You know, the one we all carry around in our back pockets.)
This landmark book blueprinted how to indoctrinate the public into the innate-immutability myth of homosexuality – that people are born this way and cannot change. … Their biggest problem, however, in achieving all their goals, is the advent of the former homosexual, or ex-gay. Because if homosexuals can change, the whole foundation of ‘born this way’ tumbles like a stack of cards.
We and our “powerful” influence wielding organizations …ignore, defame, or disqualify [gay to straight] research for some reason.” Because it is “…biased, or fatally flawed for whatever reason.” [emphasis added]
He then goes on to tout a thoroughy debunked anti-gay-parenting study to make his point.
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The second tactic is to paint SSA persons who seek sexual orientation change as victims by their counselors.
So, life-maimed survivors of “ex-gay” therapy, like some at Beyond Ex-Gay and a myriad of those elsewhere are no more than pawns in our political ploy to undermine the ex-gay movement?
They are now recruiting clients who are unable to achieve sexual orientation change to sue their former therapists in the name of consumer fraud…
Unable to change, you say?
The third and final method is to attack former homosexuals who have come public with their stories of change.
That “attack” is well deserved when so-called “ex-gay” persons like, Mr. Doyle, use the word “change,” ambiguously, to imply that euphemisms like “ex-gay,” “formerly homosexual” and “post-gay” mean the equivalent of heterosexual.
His marriage, children and not having “relapsed in eight and a half years” in no way prove or even indicate that same-sex orientation can be “changed” — across the board — to an opposite-sex orientation.
Further, There are PLENTY of gays and lesbians who are married with children who have never had sex or a relationship with a member of the same gender.
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You can read his delusional perception that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is waging a “hate campaign” on the ex-gay counter-movement here, and Wayne Besen’s (of Truth Wins Out) scathing rebuttal to it here.
https://youtu.be/GfMXwnRgons
“mixed-in with one genetic factor, a sensitive temperament”
There’s another name for that “sensitive temperament”. It’s called “being gay”!
Ex gays truly make me nauseous. I don’t think I’ve ever heard, spoken to directly or read people who are just weak people. They are weak, or were influenced during a period of weakness, but it all points to something very specific and appalling: that for any of these ex gay influences to work, requires systemic prejudice, bigotry and societal threat in everything. It requires ignorance in the public, and fear in the gay person to achieve this result of REPRESSION.
Ultimately, very young gay people pay a heavy price and ex gays don’t care about that. They, like the straight people in control, are made to believe that heterosexuality is an accomplishment, and a higher moral calling with religious belief threat and discipline involved.
And even more infuriating, is this smug attitude that equality supporters gay and straight are ‘threatened’ by ex gays.
Well, in a way that’s true.
But not because ex gays are doing good work, or are exemplary people, but because they have to exploit threat, ignorance and fear to maintain what is already a brutal legacy against gays.
The stakes are much higher than they are willing to defend, and because they are cowardly and weak, won’t even own the fact that they are, and in the greater scheme, are capitulating to a cause to see gay people disappear.
And they have to talk out of two sides of their faces. They might talk the talk that gay people deserve compassion (oh poor lost souls!), but won’t change their sinful ways unless coerced by continued bigoted social and civil public policy.
But ex gays don’t walk the walk, that it’s a moral impossibility to defend what you yourself don’t want to be and have abandoned.
And that they now have the socio/political advantage and even as Christians, are unwilling for gay people to have the Constitutional protections they have in civil and public policy.
Ex gays are so full of it, it’s surprising their guts are bursting all over the place with it.
I tire of cowards and liars in denial. I tire of weak people who don’t own the damage they are doing to young people who are the vulnerable people they used to be.
And I feel no reason to restrain myself or be civil any more to spare the delicate little sensibilities of ex gays.
There are gay children dying out there. From suicide, because of the torment they are subjected to by the very people ex gays are de facto supporting. Gay children are at high risk of parental abuse, family abandonment because of it.
I have kids like this to protect, and I will. If I have to be hard about it, I will.
I’m a LOT stronger than people like Doyle. Guys like him know it too.
A classic case of someone generalising from personal experience to a broad theory.
Thank you for alerting us all to this article by Doyle. I think reparative drive theory is bunk; but Doyle makes the issue, in my opinion, even less credible every time he writes and speaks.
It would be so terrible if young males had sensitive temperament. I mean, it has to be pathological. Healthy young boys are preoccupied with violence, hurt small animals, break things, and pick on smaller kids and insult old people. Yeah, totally, sensitive temperament is something we need to be wholly alarmed over because *gasp* it might lead to a boy growing up to be gay, but when the boys are throwing rocks at the little girls, killing stray cats and being genuinely *manly* we should be happy they’re normal and healthy. *snark snark
This anti – sensitive BS is false, and worst of all it ends up endorsing the worst stereotypical caricatures of what masculinity is all about. I read into it a massive amount of insecurity and self-loathing.
Interesting that he believes in a genetic cause for sensitivity.
These ex-gay salespeople make a big thing of “no-one’s found a gay gene so there is no genetic factor making the sex drive operate towards the same sex”. Yet he blithely seems to accept that there is such a thing as a ‘sensitive nature’ gene. Why should a sensitive nature not be caused by family dynamic also?
If there are genetic components to having a sensitive nature, why can’t there be genetic components to the direction of the sex drive?
@Phil
I thought the very same thing; and, what is even more inconsistent is the fact of heterosexual men with sensitive natures. How, then, can Doyle consistently account for the sensitive nature in what concludes to be a straight man (later in life) not leading to homosexuality as it allegedly does in homosexual men? I think his theory is bogus and, frankly, ridiculous and incredulous.
Doyle, like another spokesface shilling for NOM, is stuck on stupid when it comes to no respect for individual character. There is way too much belief in males and females as uniform, and narrowly defined. That there isn’t supposed to be such a thing as fluidity in gender and gender expression. That what faith communities want men and women to do, is conform and have their gender enforced.
The more fundamental the faith community, the less individual identity and personal style or expression. They require everyone dress alike, look alike, have the same hairstyle and eventually they are difficult to distinguish from one another.
Ex gays aren’t too distinguishable from each other in belief, in personal experience (as they report it anyway), or their understanding of their own orientation.
Frankly, ex gays bore the crap out of me they are so beige.
@William Birch
Good points, William. And of course, you are right about it all being bogus.
@Regan DuCasse
It’s the argument I label, “all men are alike. All women are alike. All marriages are alike and yours isn’t like ours.” Nonsense on the face of it.
Re: Doyle, Via Truth Wins Out:
Key ‘Ex-Gay’ Activist Admits He Molested ‘Little Girls’
Maybe they have a “sensitive temperament” because their self confidence and self-esteem has been destroyed by self-loating gay bigots such as Christopher Doyle