Dr. Gary Remafedi Says Conservative Group Guilty of “Gross Misrepresentation” And Questions If Focus Actually Read His Article Before Misquoting It

NEW YORK – TruthWinsOut.org published a letter today from a researcher who claims Focus on the Family twisted his work. In the letter, Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, asked Focus on the Family’s leader James Dobson to stop misrepresenting his findings from a key 1992 study.

“I want to draw your attention to a gross misrepresentation of our research at the website of Focus on the Family,” Remafedi wrote in his letter to Dobson. “More important, had the authors of “Myths and Facts” actually read the article, they would have found no support for their contention that ‘many children experience a period of sexual-identity confusion when they can be influenced in either direction.’”

(Full Text of Letter Below)

Remafedi’s report was published in Pediatrics in 1992. The study explored patterns of sexual orientation in a representative sample of more than 34,000 Minnesota students in grades 7 to 12. Focus on the Family distorted his findings to make the case that young people should not learn about homosexuality because they were sexually confused, and could thus be influenced by educational material.

“Focus on the Family has engaged in a disturbing pattern of misrepresenting the work of legitimate researchers to further their anti-gay agenda,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of TruthWinsOut.org. “We call on Focus on the Family to immediately expunge all falsehoods and fallacies presented as‘facts’ from their past and present literature.” (Read More)

When speaking across America, people often marvel when I talk about the strange, unnatural things so-called “ex-gays” do to change their natural sexual orientation. On the list of forbidden objects for ex-gays is sexy underwear.

This week, an “ex-gay” man actually asked to be taken off an underwear mailing list because pictures of the garments were leading him to temptation. He also chastised the company’s workers for leading people to sin.

Check out this nutty ex-gay’s letter to the company by clicking HERE.

On April 25, antigay activists — among them, Exodus and Focus on the Family — sought to disrupt antiviolence vigils in schools across the country. They sponsored walkouts and demonstrations in which religious activists, parents, and bullies sought to change the topic of the day from stopping violence in schools to venting prejudices and hostility toward gay youths. They followed up their efforts to shout down antiviolence vigils with a religious-right “Day of (Un)Truth” in schools on April 28; that day was dedicated exclusively to broadcasting religious rightists’ antigay prejudices and arrogant religious judgmentalism in public schools during school hours.

Because of antigay authorities’ refusal to stop antigay violence in schools, support for Days of Silence continues to grow. Plans are afoot for Days of Silence are afoot in Russia, Poland and Slovenia — regions where U.S. antigay pastor and Exodus speaker Ken Hutcherson has fueled antigay violence through his co-leadership of the Slavic hate group called Watchmen on the Walls. (Read More)

“Dr. Sacasta is giving a platform to spread backwards and outdated views that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with marketing and public relations.”

By CHRIS JOHNSON

A controversial symposium to address the relationship between religion and homosexuality is causing consternation among some psychiatrists and some gays, who argue that holding such a dialogue will legitimize homophobic views.

Controversy surrounding the event prompted a gay religious figure who was scheduled to speak at the event to cancel.

Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay, non-celibate priest to be ordained a bishop by the Episcopal Church, had planned to voice his opinion at the forum, but has since pulled out. (Read More)

Sources have told TruthWinsOut.org today that Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson has pulled out of a controversial symposium featuring an infamous “ex-gay” therapist. The May 5 symposium, at the APA’s 2008 convention in Washington, was dealt a major blow with the news of Robinson’s decision. TruthWinsOut.org opposed the panel because it featured Dr. Warren Throckmorton, an unlicensed psychologist who compares “leaving” homosexuality to quitting smoking.

“We are pleased that Bishop Robinson has not lent his credibility to a political right wing platform disguised as a scientific symposium,” said TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen. “The debate over whether homosexuality is a curable metal illness was settled decades ago and is not debatable. This forum is nothing more than an underhanded way for anti-gay activists to make their outdated and intolerant views look respectable.”

In the United States on Friday, Exodus featured speaker and megachurch pastor Ken Hutcherson led Snoqualmie, Washington, students in a school walkout and protest against silent opponents of antigay violence. In other words, he led a student protest in defense of antigay violence, which Hutcherson himself favors.

Exodus followed up today with an endorsement for the April 28 “Day of Truth” protest which supports antigay bigotry and refuses to even acknowledge — much less discuss or oppose — antigay violence in schools.

The moral failure of Exodus and other conservative religious organizations to stand in solidarity with antiviolence advocates is fueling new initiatives in the United States and abroad. (Read More)

In a disgraceful example of journalistic malpractice, the college newspaper The Daily Mississippian printed right wing talking points - while calling it an op-ed.

“Homosexuality is unhealthy,” writes Zack Williams, “Not in the way that cigarettes and booze are unhealthy, but in the way that drinking a shot of turpentine every Wednesday afternoon while perusing real estate catalogues for houses near nuclear waste dumps is unhealthy.”

TWO responded with a letter to the editor:

Dear Editor:

I read the anti-gay rant by Zack Williams with a mix of horror and amazement. How could a real newspaper allow such transparent lies to find their way into print? His error-laced article is not only profoundly immoral, but statistically and scientifically inaccurate.

For example, Williams cites that the life-span of gay men is 20 years less than heterosexuals. This lie came directly from Dr. Paul Cameron, a discredited psychologist who was kicked out of the American Psychological Association and Nebraska Psychological Association for distorting statistics about gay men. One would think that the Mississippian would fact check before it prints a hateful article that defames an entire population by citing a debunked researcher. Clearly, you have shoddy journalistic standards. Shame on you.
(Read More)

On May 5, at APA’s 2008 convention in Washington, the group will host a symposium, at which one of the two mental health practitioner-panelists is Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist without state board certification and an advocate for “Sexual Identity Therapy,” which he says he has successfully applied to help patients “alter homosexual feelings or behaviors” and live their lives “heterosexually” with “only very few weak instances of homosexual attraction.”

The symposium, moderated by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Peteet, who chairs APA’s Corresponding Committee on Psychiatry, Religion and Spirituality, is titled “Homosexuality and Therapy: The Religious Dimension.” Indeed, the panel includes two prominent religious figures from radically different perspectives - New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson and the Reverend Dr. Albert Mohler. Robinson came to nationwide attention in 2003 when he became the first non-celibate, out gay person elected an American Episcopal Church bishop, for the Diocese of New Hampshire.

Mohler is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, a nationally syndicated radio host, and a board member of James Dobson’s stridently anti-gay Focus on the Family. The symposium’s primary booster has noted that Mohler has distinguished himself among Christian right evangelicals in acknowledging that homosexuality may not be a choice. Left unmentioned, however, was Mohler’s statement that “if a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use.”

Robinson’s wisdom in appearing with Mohler - and the broader debate about LGBT advocates engaging those on the other side - are not what make this story intriguing, and indeed troubling. Instead it is the embrace by a scientifically-based organization, APA, of an unlicensed practitioner who espouses controversial professional opinions about homosexuality but can point to no peer-reviewed findings that his clinical approach has merit.

Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that the same defender of the symposium who credited Mohler with some degree of enlightenment on gay issues, Dr. David Scasta - a former president and newsletter editor of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists (AGLP) - has circulated a press release for the event dubbing it “a ‘balanced’ discussion,” the sort of characterization one might expect from intelligent design proponents demanding a seat on a panel of evolution experts.

In an Apr. 23 column in the Cherry Creek (Colorado) News, the Rev. Rebecca Kemper Poos recalls how her church’s Christian ceremony for a female couple’s daughter gave a glimpse of true hope to an ex-gay woman named Rachel.

The church and the ceremony also offered Rachel a taste of freedom:

Freedom from fear of damnation, freedom from self-contradiction, freedom from isolation, freedom from prejudice, freedom from judgmentalism, and freedom to be a good mother to her kids.

In other words, they offered Rachel freedom to love and be loved.

Ex-gay activists from Exodus, Focus on the Family and their political co-warriors often talk vaguely about “freedom” — freedom from love, freedom from sexuality, freedom from non-judgmental faith, freedom from having gay neighbors and co-workers. For example, also on Apr. 23, Baptist Press — steered by ex-gay Southern Baptist strategist Bob Stith — launched a series of columns “focusing particularly on the freedom that former homosexuals have found in Christ.”

Ex-gays like Rachel, and former ex-gays, have learned from experience that talk is cheap — that ex-gay ideology is neither hopeful nor freeing.

Whatever their religion or creed, gay-affirming people of faith can offer ex-gays true personal and spiritual freedom — not mere talk.

The April 25 national Day Of Silence unites students in a silent vigil against violence in schools, and in commemoration of the lives of Lawrence King and thousands of other youths who have been killed or assaulted because of their sexual orientation or gender expression.

The April 28 Day of Truth is something entirely different:

It is a pernicious effort by Exodus, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund, Focus on the Family, ex-gay activist Scott Lively, ex-gay activist Stephen Bennett, Mission: America, and other pro-bigotry organizations to divert public attention from school violence in order to discuss their fixation with homosexual sex on public-school property during school hours.

(Read More)