I’m on my way to Grand Rapids, Michigan to give a presentation at Grand Valley State University on the harm caused by the “ex-gay” industry. My speech, followed by a panel discussion, is in response to Focus on the Family’s traveling road show, Love Won Out, which will be in town on Saturday. Having countered several of these conferences, I must confess, I still don’t understand what point they are trying to make.

If Focus on the Family’s goal is to convert gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people into evangelical Christians, they are doing a lousy job. It seems convincing gay people to end their relationships is a far higher priority to this ministry than having gay people develop personal relationships with Jesus Christ.

For every guilt-ridden homosexual who temporarily falls under their spell, they lose hundreds, if not thousands, of gay people who view their conversion program as intolerant. If your ministry causes many gay people to write off not just Christianity, but all religion, by what measurement can you consider your evangelizing a success?

At Love Won Out, speakers go to great lengths to profess their deep concern over the mental and physical well being of homosexuals. It turns out, however, that the anti-gay sentiment expressed at these conferences may be hazardous to the health of GLBT people.

A new Emory University study concludes that the bans on same-sex marriage pushed by Focus on the Family can be tied to a rise in the rate of HIV infection. The scientists found that a constitutional ban on marriage equality raised the rate by four cases per 100,000 people.

“We found the effects of tolerance for gays on HIV to be statistically significant and robust, they hold up under a range of empirical models,” says Hugo Mialon, an assistant professor of economics. “Intolerance is deadly,” Mialon said. “Bans on gay marriage codify intolerance, causing more gay people to shift to underground sexual behaviors that carry more risk.”

Earlier this year, a study by San Francisco State’s Caitlin Ryan concluded that “teens who experienced negative feedback (when they came out) were more than eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, nearly six times as vulnerable to severe depression and more than three times at risk of drug use.”

So, if Love Won Out is truly concerned about the health of gay people, particularly teenagers, it will transform into a gay affirming ministry. To continue down their destructive path of judgmental condemnation is senseless and significantly harmful to the very GLBT people that Focus purports to want to help.

Of course, Focus on the Family will insist that they love gay people and just want to help those who are unhappy. But, isn’t it a conflict of interest when you lobby to pass anti-gay laws that make gay people miserable and then offer yourself up as the panacea to the pain? Is it not hypocritical to sponsor a conference supposedly about love, where the main speaker is Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International?

Chambers hosts a Christian television show, Pure Passion, which pollutes the airwaves by repeatedly calling gay people “sexually broken” and “perverse.” Exodus also sells “Pursuing Sexual Wholeness” a book authored by Andy Comiskey that says, “Satan delights in homosexual perversion.” Such pronouncements are often accompanied by exorcisms given by churches affiliated with ex-gay ministries. Obviously, such extreme actions are anathema to creating a welcoming church environment for GLBT people.

Focus on the Family also claims its conferences are for parents, friends, family members or ministry leaders who want to “lovingly reach out with uncompromised faith.”

Genuine love, of course, requires making the very compromises and sacrifices that Love Won Out is telling people are unnecessary. Rejecting a friend or family member’s innate sexual orientation as sinful and defective, rarely leads to a healthy relationship based on trust and mutual respect.

Finally, the investigative reporter Thomas Maier just released a groundbreaking book, “Masters of Sex.” In it, he reveals that the famed sex research team, Masters and Johnson, had fabricated claims of curing gay people in their 1979 book, “Homosexuality in Perspective.” Given this vital new information, why hasn’t Focus on the Family taken the opportunity to review and question the validity of its program? Wouldn’t that be the moral course of action to take?

The hard truth is, Focus on the Family’s leaders are only capable of loving people exactly like themselves, which explains their tremendous efforts to remake gays in their image. While their splashy road show may get high marks for good theatre, it’s ultimately futile because their transparent version of “love” rarely wins converts and succeeds only at convincing most gay people to run out of the church door.

In recent years, the reparative-therapy lobbying group NARTH has taught outdated information, distorted valid scientific data, supplied false information to antigay Catholic authorities, misrepresented the policies of mainstream mental-health organizations, and published strawman arguments about its critics.

At his web site, Michael J. Bayly — who happens to be executive coordinator of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities — offers an excellent overview of NARTH’s efforts, culminating in the latest unraveling of one of NARTH’s foundations: the misguided work of Masters and Johnson.

Exodus International was founded in 1976 by gay Christian men who, at the time, were unhappy with their sexual orientation and eager to believe antigay activists’ Freudian habit — unsupported by reputable and unbiased research — of blaming parents for the formation of politically incorrect sexual orientation, and of telling gay men to pretend to be straight by butching up their behavior, taking a leap of supposed “faith” into a doomed heterosexual marriage, and proclaiming their heterosexuality loudly enough to drown out all signs to the contrary.

Within a few years, the wiser of Exodus’ co-founders left the organization, acknowledging that they had never been heterosexual and that ex-gay dishonesty had damaged their spouses and families.

But in 1979, a glimmer of hope emerged for would-be “ex-gays” when gynecologist William Masters and psychologist Virginia Johnson released a book, Homosexuality in Perspective, that they claimed was a result of years-long research. Conversion therapy was one focus of this work.

According to psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jack Drescher, M.D.:

In their study of 151 homosexual men and women with “sexual inadequacy,” they divided the latter term into two categories: “the sexually dysfunctional and the sexually dissatisfied.” The latter were defined as “men and women who expressed the desire to convert or revert to heterosexuality” (p. 240).

The book claimed to offer observations from the research participants as well as followup regarding short-term and long-term failure rates, although Masters and Johnson admitted that their followup methods were unsound since they relied upon subjective claims of conversion-therapy participants and not objective measures of the subjects’ attraction and orientation.

The data was impressive and served as a basis for much ex-gay literature. But it now appears that much of the key data may have been falsified by Masters.

Writing for Scientific American, Thomas Maier discovers (and Drescher and Matt Algren emphasize):

Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex . . .

When the clinic’ top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny‚Äîwho had never seen any conversion cases himself‚Äîbegan to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.

Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn’t have a college degree and depended largely on her husband’ medical expertise.

With Johnson’ approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process. “That was a bad book,” Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing [medical] literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, “Bill was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.

Maier has published a book, Masters of Sex, about Masters and Johnson — their personal relationship, their studies, and the impact of their work. Says Drescher:

Apparently Masters and Johnson may be just the latest in a long series of conversion therapy proponents, who when pressed, have been unable to substantiate their findings to outside sources.

When will Exodus International remove its praises of Masters & Johnson from its website and publications? And when it does, will it admit that the articles were false, or will it leave a decade’s worth of readers with misinformed and unchanged minds?