Joseph Nicolosi, former president of the ex-gay therapy think-tank NARTH, responded last week to allegations that he counseled Exodus International conference attendees to cure themselves of homosexuality via heterosexual pornography.
Here’s what Exodus president Alan Chambers said about Nicolosi on Facebook:
Chambers also was quoted saying: “Joe Nicolosi and a few others are on record in workshops and other places saying that they employ pornography. We do not wish to slander Joe, but it is important for people to know that this is a part of the RT practice even if it wasn’t used in your therapy. This is a fact.”
In his e-mailed response to Chambers, Nicolosi implies that he invites patients to practice a kind of aversion therapy with their gay pornography:
I do ask them (if they wish to do this; some clients do not, and I never expect my clients to do anything they do not wish to do) to bring up a compelling image from gay porn that they wish to reduce the power of, and we work on diminishing its power (a technique with which we have had considerable success).
However, I do not use straight porn; I use pictures of women they find attractive in mainstream magazines and we work on developing a physical attraction to them, through their imagination, while looking at these non-pornographic pictures.
Nicolosi also defended the judgmental and unprofessional practice of damning LGBT people to hell — not for religious reasons, but because showing Christian grace to sexual minorities “gives people very little reason to struggle against a condition which has very deeply negative implications for both themselves and for our culture.”
In other words, Nicolosi contends that gay people should be damned to hell in order to coerce patients to pay more for ineffective and counterproductive ex-gay treatments and conferences.
Yet another of Nicolosi’s numerous inconsistencies. The trouble with not telling the truth is that it makes it more difficult to remember what you’ve said previously and to make sure that what you’re saying now is consistent with it. In an interview some time ago Nicolosi said that NARTH rejects “patients” who want to “change” because they’re afraid of going to hell.
He is to be commended, however, for his frank admission “that homosexual attractions will persist to some degree throughout a person’s lifetime.”
So what are these “very deeply negative implications”? They sure seem to be able to say they exist, but never what they supposedly are…
Also, I guess women don’t exist? He uses pictures of “women”, not “members of the other sex”.
Say what they like, I’ve yet to meet a genuine aitheist reparative therapist because all roads for NARTH and the like lead back to religious biased heterosexism.