Update: Truth Wins Out press release
About.com is a struggling online reference website which dates back to the early dot-com days. Its latest owner, the New York Times Company, just agreed to sell About.com to IAC – which already owns okCupid, Chemistry.com, and other popular dating and trivia sites.
For $300 million, IAC will receive a few hundred gigabytes of amateur-created content, including a section for “Christian Teens.”
That section includes a self-help page titled Praying to Come Out of Homosexuality: Understanding Deliverance.
Like other pages within the Christian Teens section, this page is painfully shallow. It lacks basic hard facts which might help teenagers but upset certain culture warriors. That timid approach might be reasonably harmless for pages involving doctrinal or denominational disputes. But when youth are in crisis — when they are stalked by a religious movement that practices involuntary detention, relentless shaming, abuse, and alienation of family members — such ignorant timidity can cause serious and lasting harm to teenagers, their parents or guardians, and their siblings.
About.com’s pray-away-the-gay page for teenagers sells the benefits but not the dangers of the ex-gay myth:
- the page implies that spending one’s life praying away the gay is harmless
- the page offers no alternatives to praying away the gay
- the page presumes to know God’s priorities, especially where (we are told) those priorities differ from those who don’t pray away the gay or shame gay family members
- the page repeatedly refers to sexual orientation as something to receive “deliverance” from
- the page doesn’t ask teens to seek God for guidance unless they first have decided to “come out of homosexuality”
- the page does not disclose that many families have been permanently harmed by ex-gay therapy, and several “Christian” ex-gay leaders have sexually abused clients.
It’s surprising that the New York Times permitted such one-sided, uninformed, potentially harmful, and inaccurate information on its site.
Christians may disagree about matters of sexual morality. But Christians of different backgrounds need no longer tolerate ex-gay molestation; ex-gay lies about mental-health science; ex-gay distortions of Christian doctrine; ex-gay counselors’ efforts to make teenagers blame their parents and to make parents blame each other; the promotion of sexless and loveless ex-gay marriages; and, perhaps most important, the vile and immoral teaching that gay people are unworthy, broken, incomplete, and disappointing to God and society.
We have written to About.com’s medical review board to inquire about the appropriateness of this content. You may wish to do the same (politely). Ask why About.com is promoting the medically harmful myth that sexual orientation can be changed, and failing to warn of the potential harm.
Faith-based ignorance is not a sound substitute for factual and life-saving information about health, science, and a balanced view of the limitations of religious doctrine.
I have to confess that I wasted time in my teens and early twenties hoping and repeatedly praying for a change in my sexual attractions. It never happened, of course. After I accepted my natural sexuality and came out, I regarded everything that went before as water under the bridge and never gave it another thought. Years later, however, an unexpected encounter one evening triggered a flash-back which fully brought home to me the way that social and religious pressure had robbed those years off me, and the fact that, no matter how much you would like to, you can never go back and put things right.
In the light of that experience, I cannot adequately express my disgust and anger that people in 2012 should still be attempting to steal gay people’s youth in this way. Our attitude to this kind of abuse should be one of zero tolerance. That these misguided people are sincere in their beliefs and that there is a religious ideology underlying them is beside the point. It is alarming to read that the woman who wrote this About.com page “has been working with Christian Teens for almost as long as she has been a Christian” and that she “has significant experience working with troubled teens”. People like her are fully entitled to hold their retarded beliefs, of course, but they are totally unsuitable to counsel gay teens and should be kept well away from them.
I think it is terrible the way these so called pages are acting like they are harmless. I spent 22 years in fundamentalist churches and know what it can do to people who go to them for help.
Apparently its not a myth afterall.
In a new survey of almost 500 people who have ever sought professional counseling to lessen unwanted homosexual attractions, more than half (55%) said the counseling was effective in causing the frequency and intensity of their homosexual attractions to diminish. And seven out of 10 said they were either satisfied (25%) or very satisfied (46%) with their counseling experience.
The People Can Change survey found other reported outcomes from counseling were:
53% of respondents said their unwanted homosexual behaviors were reduced or eliminated
38% said heterosexual attractions emerged or increased
58% said any remaining homosexual attractions became less troubling
69% said their self-esteem improved
69% said their shame diminished
71% became more self-accepting
66% felt more at peace
Hi Frank, I am glad so many men had a positive experience hugging it out with other dudes in the woods. “Name it and Claim it” is the most important lesson anyone can learn if they choose self-delusion. This survey was administered by the very organization that conducted the hug-the-gay-away therapy. It really ain’t science.
Also, I noticed that of the 497 men invited to respond to the survey, 273 chose not to. Without the inclusion of their responses, I find it difficult to take any of those numbers seriously.
Show us the tumescence exams Frank.
Frank:
That you would even present this joke of a study to our smart readers reflects poorly on you. This was a fake industry “study” that is reminiscent of the ones the cigarette lobby used to disseminate claiming that smoking wasn’t harmful. Or that the chemical lobby puts out today saying that climate change doesn’t exist.
Frank, since it is a study/survey, please enlighten us as to where it was published and who peer reviewed it?
Silence I hear?
An appropriate title for the promotional material/crap you just presented would be: “For Profit $650 Ex-Gay Weekend Says Product Works.”
Are we supposed to be impressed?
By presenting this garbage, you are proving how desperate and shallow such programs truly are — as well as the lack of science to back your myth.
Sad and tragic really.
Frank:
http://www.alternet.org/story/146557/what_happened_when_i_went_undercover_at_a_christian_gay-to-straight_conversion_camp
Thanks William for reminding Frankie of the infamous “cuddle room.”
Do we know if there has been any follow-up to the original article. Have About.com responded?
Frank – the fact that these attendees had “unwanted homosexual attractions” is exactly what is wrong. If you came to me and said you didn’t want your skin color the responsible thing for me to do is help you accept and celebrate it not make a quick profit knowing that I really cannot change it.
Chris — we are still working on it. But John’s husband’s mother died and he had to go back to Wisconsin for the week. And I had two projects on the road. So, we are still on it. And John returns tomorrow. But staff shortage last week set us back a week or so.
And now I have a cold. So, we are doing the best we can.