In 2007, Mark Yarhouse of Pat Robertson’s Regent University co-wrote an informal study of ex-gay therapy. The study was funded by Exodus International — the North American network of evangelical ex-gay activists — and co-written by Stanton Jones, another evangelical who is employed by the conservative Wheaton College in Illinois.

Exodus falsely marketed the study as “peer-reviewed” — it wasn’t — and Yarhouse and Jones were criticized for rigging the sample of subjects and standards of success or failure in order to guarantee a result that would satisfy Exodus.

Specifically, Jones and Yarhouse’s work suffered from the following flaws:

• The study originally sought 300 participants, but after more than a year of seeking to round up volunteers, they had to settle on only 98 participants.
• During the course of the study, 25 dropped out, and one participant’s answers were too incomplete to be used.
• Of the remaining 72 only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Most of these 11 remained primarily homosexual in attraction or, at best, bisexual, but were satisfied that they were just slightly more attracted to the opposite sex, or slightly less attracted to the same sex.
• After the study ended, but before the book was finished, one of the 11 wrote to the authors to say that he lied — he really wanted to change, had really hoped he had changed, and answered that he had changed. But he concluded that he hadn’t, came out, and is now living as an openly gay man.
• Dozens of participants experienced no lessening of same-sex attraction and no increase in opposite-sex attraction, but were classified as “success” stories by Jones and Yarhouse simply because they maintained celibacy — something many conservative gay people already do.
• The study purposely declined to interview any ex-gay survivors: people who claim to have been injured by ex-gay programs and who have formed support groups such as Beyond Ex-Gay. Despite — or because of — this omission, Yarhouse and Jones made the unfounded claim that there is little or no evidence of harm resulting from unproven, unsupervised, unlicensed, and amateur ex-gay counseling tactics.

In short, the study design was so flawed that no mainstream, peer-reviewed, mental-health journal would publish it.

Nevertheless, Exodus, Focus on the Family, and other Christian Right political groups immediately cited the study as proof that anyone can change their orientation without fear of ill effects from disproven methods or disreputable amateur counselors.

Now, however, Yarhouse is backing away from some of the early reactions to the study.

At a Sept. 25 symposium at Regent, Yarhouse said — according to The Virginian-Pilot — that while same-sex attraction may be changeable in some individuals, not everyone can change.

“For me, in my own practice, I would not focus on change of orientation,” said Yarhouse, a psychologist and counselor who teaches at Regent, an evangelical Christian school. …

Yarhouse’s study focused on those who said their same-sex attractions collided with their religious beliefs. He said his research found that there was “modest” movement away from homosexuality among some Exodus participants, but categorical conversions to heterosexuality were rare.

Yarhouse recommended that counselors avoid uniformly steering struggling gays toward heterosexuality and focus instead on the best outcome for the individual.

That could include celibacy or exploring different faith groups with various attitudes toward gays and lesbians, he said.

Despite Yarhouse’s statements, no one on the Christian Right who misreported the study’s findings in 2007-2008 has yet retracted their false boasts. Until Yarhouse becomes much more vocal, the public in general and Christian Rightists in particular will remain purposely misinformed about the inability of most same-sex-attracted persons to change their orientation.

In a brazen effort to preempt an American Psychological Association report on human sexuality, scheduled for release in August, an anti-gay organization unveiled its own report, which amounts to rubbish in the guise of research.

The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality’s (NARTH) “new” study, “What the Research Shows: NARTH’s Response to the American Psychological Association’s Claims on Homosexuality”, is so embarrassingly slipshod that no scientist would take it seriously.

But, the goal, of course, is not to impress researchers who would cackle at the kookiness. The real aim, according to Dr. Jack Drescher, a renowned psychiatrist and author, is to confuse the public and gullible media into believing the APA and NARTH are equally credentialed scientific bodies engaged in a legitimate dispute over homosexuality.

The truth, however, is that NARTH is a fringe group held in ill repute by anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of science. The organization is best known for encouraging male clients to drink Gatorade and call friends “dude” to increase masculinity.

The first clue that this study was utter trash was the fact that NARTH and Focus on the Family referred to it as “new”. Indeed, not one iota of fresh research took place. Not one moment was spent in the lab, nor were any subjects recruited to broaden the base of knowledge on the etiology of sexual orientation.

The study was basically a compilation of everything negative ever written about gay people, no matter how invalid, idiotic or biased the conclusion. NARTH essentially blasted sh** out of a cannon, hoping at least some would stick to the wall. (Read More)

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’s 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—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began 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’s medical expertise.

With Johnson’s 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?

Debbie Thurman, of Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, has founded an ex-gay web site: theFormers.com.

What, one might wonder, qualifies Thurman to mislead people into joining ex-gay political groups?

Almost nothing, apparently — she has no professional training in counseling or mental health. Her autobiographical sketch cites a college degree in English and a stint as public affairs officer in the Marine Corps. Despite her lack of competence, Thurman has spent years profiting from shell “ministries” that inflict her ignorance upon Christians who suffer from clinical depression.

Thurman’s site is well-designed, but it offers little if any original content. TheFormers.com seems to be merely another in a family of religious-right linkfests for Exodus International, Focus on the Family, NARTH, and PFOX — a pricey method of inflating the Google PageRank of these organizations. (Read More)

The second researcher in less than a week has confirmed that the religious-right American Family Association and its allies lied about research regarding sexual orientation.

Earlier today, Truth Wins Out reported that Francis Collins, Ph.D, of the Human Genome Project has again repudiated falsehoods being spread about his research by ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan and the American Family Association. We also pointed out that a recent article by Kathleen Gilbert, published by the American Family Association and LifeSiteNews, appeared to have falsely reported the results of a British paper by professor Michael King.

In a followup story, Box Turtle Bulletin today said it checked the original British paper and found little resemblance between it and the claims of AFA and LSN. The Bulletin asked King for his reaction. King replied:

LifeSiteNews and OneNewsNow have misinterpreted our review.  Evidence from around the world identifies the main stressors leading to mental distress in gay and lesbian people as discrimination, prejudice, bullying in schools and colleges, and the consequent need for many LGB people to keep their homosexual identity secret, even from their families.

Our review did not examine links between mental disorder and homosexual “behaviour” or “lifestyle”.  Our work reviewed studies of the mental health of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and sadly, those studies showed that it is people (not behaviour) that are discriminated against, and not least by religious groups and organisations.

Discrimination on the grounds of sexuality is even more devastating than other forms of discrimination such as racism, as it reaches right into families and leaves no refuge for its victims.

Box Turtle Bulletin adds:

To throw more confusion into the mix, Gilbert tossed in a discredited 2007 study by Nazi-apologist Paul Cameron which supposedly demonstrated that “that the lifespan of a homosexual is on average 24 years shorter than that of a heterosexual.” She also used Cameron’s study to claim that discrimination hat nothing to do with it, saying that, “Homosexuals in the United States and Denmark – the latter of which is acknowledged to be highly tolerant of homosexuality – both die on average in their early 50’s, or in their 40’s if AIDS is the cause of death.”

We have already examined glaring flaws in Cameron’s study, as has Danish epidemiologist Morton Frisch who described his study as “humorous example of agenda-driven, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook.” Cameron’s false claims of presenting this “study” before the Eastern Psychological Association earned him an official condemnation from EPA president Phile Hineline in April 2007.

Exodus International seems eager for such misinformation to continue to confuse the ex-gay movement and its allied churches and political groups: Since April 2007, the organization has declined to publicly warn the antigay and ex-gay movements about the lies, nor has the organization challenged AFA, LSN, NARTH, or Quinlan to correct themselves.