On Sept. 28, Truth Wins Out protested a Baptist Press article by ex-gay activist and longtime Exodus member Bob Stith. While mourning the sexual honesty of Christian contemporary singer Ray Boltz, the article unnecessarily and falsely quoted Human Genome Project former director Francis Collins as saying:

Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

Collins never said that; ex-gay political activist Greg Quinlan did. Good As You made the same observation.

Collins had said almost the opposite: He told Ex-Gay Watch:

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence.  But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved.  That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

Collins added:

No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.

Ten days later, Baptist Press finally changed the wording of the article — without acknowledging to readers the nature of the falsehoods that had previously been conveyed, without apparent effort to correct syndicated copies of the article that were circulated around the Internet, without apology to Dr. Collins, and — most importantly — without apparent reforms necessary to prevent future errors.

The only hint of the two-week deception appears at the top the article with this brief note:

REVISED: October 8, 2008 to reflect more accurate wording from “The Language of God” by Dr. Francis Collins.

Stith’s article now accurately conveys what Collins said — but the damage has already been done among readers who walked away from the article (and more than a dozen syndicated copies) believing that a leading geneticist had declared homosexuality a purely environmental choice.

Thus far, it seems Stith might walk away from the damage with nothing more than a quiet admission of fault to one web site, Ex-Gay Watch, which his regular audience never reads. Meanwhile, Quinlan has not acknowledged any deception whatsoever. We have asked Stith for assurances of complete remedial action; he has declined to respond.

Stith’s peers say that he is a man of good character; at one time I believed that, but I became very doubtful 10 days ago and now I am nearly convinced otherwise. True accountability, transparency, and penitence require more effort and integrity than I’m seeing, at present, from a prominent Exodus speaker and policy wonk for the Southern Baptist Convention.

Longtime Exodus International member “minister” and speaker Bob Stith on Sept. 25 became the third ex-gay activist entity in recent times to falsely imply that the Human Genome Project or its director support ex-gay ideology.

In April 2007, A. Dean Byrd of the ex-gay advocacy group National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality cherry-picked partial statements by Francis Collins, Ph.D, of the Human Genome Project, for an article which falsely implied that Collins supported NARTH’s ideological position opposing the existence of sexual orientation as a biological phenomenon.

Collins told Ex-Gay Watch the following month (and repeated this on Sept. 21, 2008):

It troubles me greatly to learn that anything I have written would cause anguish for you or others who are seeking answers to the basis of homosexuality. The words quoted by NARTH all come from the Appendix to my book “The Language of God” (pp. 260-263), but have been juxtaposed in a way that suggests a somewhat different conclusion that I intended. I would urge anyone who is concerned about the meaning to refer back to the original text.

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

[Ex-Gay Watch’s] note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.

Earlier this month, New Jersey ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan and the American Family Association ignored Collins’ warning against NARTH’s interpretation — and further distorted Collins’ position. Quinlan said:

When [gay Christian contemporary singer Ray Boltz] says he’s born that way, we know now for a fact that that’s false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

Collins said nothing of the sort, and a few days after Quinlan’s article, Collins repeated his earlier assertion that NARTH had distorted his position. Quinlan refused to retract his claim — turning it from a mere falsehood into an outright lie.

Despite those events, Stith repeated Quinlan’s lie to his Baptist Press audience on Sept. 25:

For example, in 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, which, among other things, identified each of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. The press release read: “The human genome is complete and the Human Genome Project is over.”

While this accomplishment was widely reported, almost no one reported the words of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the project. Collins, arguably the nation’s most influential geneticist, said, “Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.”

Somehow the major media missed that little tidbit. Collins and others
acknowledge that genetics can predispose but not predetermine. This supports other studies that clearly document the possibility of change for people who struggle with unwanted homosexual desire.

Stith is now the Southern Baptist Convention’s “National Strategist for Gender Issues.” That SBC “gender” panel is actually an ex-gay policy group within the SBC administration. It is dominated by Exodus member activists.

In other words, Stith is no longer a spiritual minister; he has become a professional spin artist.

Stith not only parrots the exposed lie of Quinlan, but also connects that untruth to an illogical assertion that if one bisexual person can “change” their behavior, then any homosexual person can “change” their orientation.

If anything good is to come from all of this ex-gay truthlessness and spin, perhaps it’s that Stith, Exodus, NARTH, Quinlan, and the AFA have become so untruthful that many concerned families of gay people are leaving Exodus and NARTH behind, and seeking help from trustworthy sources of information in mainstream therapeutic and gay-tolerant religious communities.

I invite Stith to apologize, to distribute a retraction to the same media outlets that received his original statement, and to condemn the stubborn untruthfulness of Quinlan and NARTH.

Addendum:

In 1998, Stith spoke the following in his Sunday sermon as an apology to a gay man who attended the church that day:

We have not lived in transparency. We have often cloaked our own weakness and pointed instead at the sins of others. We have settled for a form of godliness which manifests respectability but has no power to change the core of our being.

We do humbly ask forgiveness.

We have manifested more of an interest in being right than in being loving and often succeeded in being neither.

We do humbly ask forgiveness.

Forgiveness requires true repentance, and repentance requires actual change — not merely a token expression of regret followed by more of the same misconduct.

If Stith is truly penitent, then why did he not bother to factcheck — and why does he continue to abuse the word “change”?

Truth Wins Out reported Sept. 15 that the American Family Association and New Jersey ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan lied earlier this month when they claimed that Francis Collins, Ph.D, of the Human Genome Project, supported a core myth of ex-gay ideology. Quinlan said:

When he says he’s born that way, we know now for a fact that that’s false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

That claim about Collins apparently originated in April 2007 from the ex-gay think tank NARTH. It was repudiated by Collins in May of that year, via Ex-Gay Watch. Collins wrote:

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

[Ex-Gay Watch’s] note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.

But NARTH didn’t retract its deception then — thereby making the claim an intentional lie. Quinlan and the AFA then proceeded to parrot the lie.

Late last week, Quinlan retaliated against the exposure of his lie, accusing Ex-Gay Watch of fabricating its 2007 interview with Collins. Ex-Gay Watch responded early this week with hard proof and confirmation from Collins that the interview took place. Collins said:

I am happy to confirm that these e-mail communications from May 2007 and yesterday are indeed authentic, and represent my best effort at summarzing what we know and what we don’t know about genetic factors in male homosexuality. I appreciate your continuing efforts to correct misstatements that seem to be circulating on the internet.

Quinlan, AFA, and NARTH still refuse to retract and apologize for their lie.

Christian contemporary music singer Ray Boltz (pictured) recently emerged from decades of effort to be “heterosexual” and honestly declared that he is same-sex-attracted. His story of sexual and religious struggle was reported last week in The Washington Blade. In short order, New Jersey ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan and the American Family Association’s “OneNewsNow” lied about Boltz’s action.

The AFA falsely stated that Boltz “has publicly announced he’s living a homosexual lifestyle” and falsely characterized a person’s honesty about sexual attraction as a “decision to engage in homosexuality.”

Quinlan went further — misquoting established science regarding the biological impulses that define sexual attraction and the psychological impulses that define romantic attraction. In particular, Quinlan misquoted Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project:

When he says he’s born that way, we know now for a fact that that’s false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

Quinlan’s fiction, however, was exposed as such sixteen months ago. After the ex-gay pseudoscience outfit NARTH also misquoted Collins, Collins told Ex-Gay Watch in May 2007:

It troubles me greatly to learn that anything I have written would cause anguish for you or others who are seeking answers to the basis of homosexuality. The words quoted by NARTH all come from the Appendix to my book “The Language of God” (pp. 260-263), but have been juxtaposed in a way that suggests a somewhat different conclusion that I intended. I would urge anyone who is concerned about the meaning to refer back to the original text.

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

Your note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.

Sidestepping any discussion of science, the Gospel Music Association mischaracterized Ray Boltz’s honesty, saying, “We do not comment on the lifestyle choices of people in our community.” (Emphasis is TWO’s.)

For more insight into the (mis)handling of sexual orientation by the Christian gospel music scene, check out averyfineline.

Addendum: Good As You notes that Francis Collins is — contrary to any forthcoming ex-gay smears — an evangelical Christian.

At the University of Toledo in Ohio, administrators apparently made the mistake of hiring a bigot to administer university hiring policies which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.

In an April 18 article in the Toledo Free Press, Crystal Davis Dixon, associate vice president for human resources for the university, declared her support for discrimination on all three counts:

• she was willing to enforce her own antigay religious views upon university employees and students possessing less-homophobic, more-genuine religious beliefs,
• despite university hiring policies to the contrary, she denied that gay people have civil rights or that discrimination victimizes them, and
• she implicitly denigrated gay African-Americans.

Dixon also denied the natural existence of intersexed and gender-variant people who might apply for jobs at the university — and threatened God’s wrath against such people:

She concluded: “My final and most important point. There is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose. There are consequences for each of our choices, including those who violate God’s divine order.

Dixon was fired for flouting the policies that she was hired to enforce, and religious-right media have been in an uproar ever since — accusing the university of discriminating racially and religiously against Dixon because it would not permit her to deny religious freedom to others, nor to arbitrarily violate campus hiring and employment policies with impunity.

Two ex-gay activists have now leapt to Dixon’ defense with a bizarre assertion that antigay African-Americans somehow enjoy a special racial and religious right to discriminate against others on the basis of victims’ religion and sexual orientation, whatever local laws and employer hiring policies may say to the contrary.

(Read More)