The good folks over at Queerty are mad at the Human Rights Campaign for opposing the inclusion of “ex-gays” as a distinct sexual orientation subject to protection under Disney’s non-discrimination policies.
Um. Okay. First let’s read what they had to say on the subject. They start off so good:
In October we learned about the effort from Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, the organization for those cured of The Gay, to get Disney to ban discrimination against ex-gays, the semi-legally protected sexual orientation class. It didn’t go so well.
A shareholder meeting this week saw the proposal get shot down, which Disney’s board recommended, and because there weren’t enough votes to reach a 3 percent threshold the matter cannot be brought up again for another four years.
Good work, shareholders!
The idea of “ex-gays” as a sexual orientation is a little bit silly for a few reasons. First, it suggests that sexual orientation can be changed, which is a farce. Second, if somebody was gay, but is now straight, that person is in theory a heterosexual, and would fall under any existing sexual orientation protections, because one’s sexuality cannot be a reason for termination.
Correct! If ex-gays exist, they’re now heterosexuals, and thus already protected under sexual orientation protections! I can only guess that the original writer of the piece was at this point incapacitated in some way (get well soon?), because the person who completed the piece went completely off the rails:
In a blog post, the Human Rights Campaign calls the shareholder vote a “victory.” Which is a little funny, because isn’t the Human Rights Campaign in favor of prohibiting all types of discrimination?
Us? We support banning workplace discrimination based on any sexuality. And that includes someone who believes he is ex-gay. We don’t want anyone forcing us to fit into the boxes they created, and we refuse to do the same to anyone else. If ex-gays want to be protected, great! We’ll support it! We don’t really believe anyone can ditch homosexuality, but if deep down you think you did, you shouldn’t be targeted in the workplace for identifying as a former ‘mo. Even if PFOX is a laughable institution, there are people out there who believe they are ex-gay, and they should not suffer the torment of workplace harassment for the same reasons gays, bisexuals, and transgender employees should not: because it isn’t right.
GUYS. You won the argument against yourselves in the first paragraphs of your piece. The Human Rights Campaign is indeed against all kinds of discrimination based on sexual orientation, but you just conceded that “ex-gays,” if they exist (!), are heterosexuals! There is no room in the current policies for discrimination against people who say they’re not gay anymore! They’re already covered! To give an inch on this merely (and quite naïvely) plays into Regina Griggs’ and PFOX’s inane strategy to create some phantasmagorical parallel reality where people who identify as HETEROSEXUALS are the real victims of discrimination.
Think this through, because the argument you’ve put forth is just as inane as when Tony Perkins flagellates around the television screen complaining about hate crimes laws being used to punish Christians, since religion is protected under hate crimes laws as well.
The Human Rights Campaign (and we at Truth Wins Out) are solidly against discrimination of any sort based on sexual orientation. ”Ex-gay” is not a sexual orientation. Even if we were to pretend for a second that “ex-gays” were a real and lasting phenomenon, and even if we were to pretend for a second that there was a shred of truth to anything that comes out of the maws of Regina Griggs and PFOX, then “ex-gays” would be, by definition, HETEROSEXUAL, and again, protected.
Put another way: What the hell kind of discrimination would Richard Cohen and his wife be subjected to if he decided to somehow parlay his pillow tennis racket beat-off extravaganza into a career dressing up as Cinderella during the nightly parade/fireworks show? The wife would get benefits under their family plan, he couldn’t be fired for being married to a woman, etc.
Queerty people: this entire thing from PFOX is a publicity stunt, and you fell for it. I don’t know if this is what you all think of as “encouraging conversation” or being a “dissenting voice,” but there are ways to do that without embarrassing yourselves.
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.
A new article in Scientific American explores issues of sex behavior-role labeling among men who have sex with men (a category that includes ex-gays). The article, written by Jesse Bering, refutes some assumptions among heterosexuals about what men do behind closed doors, and how they label themselves:
…Survey studies have found that many gay men actually self-identify as “versatile,” which means that they have no strong preference for either the insertive or the receptive role. For a small minority, the distinction doesn’t even apply, since some gay men lack any interest in anal sex and instead prefer different sexual activities. Still other men refuse to self-label as tops, bottoms, versatiles or even “gay” at all, despite their having frequent anal sex with gay men. These are the so-called “Men Who Have Sex With Men” (or MSM) who are often in heterosexual relations as well.
The article observes that predominantly insertive and predominantly passive partners tend to be honest in labeling their role — but not necessarily their sexual orientation.
Tops were more likely than both bottoms and versatiles to reject a gay self-identity and to have had sex with a woman in the past three months. They also manifested higher internalized homophobia—essentially the degree of self-loathing linked to their homosexual desires.
Attitudes among predominantly insertive partners appear to differ substantially from those who identify as “versatile”:
Versatiles seem to enjoy better psychological health. Hart and his coauthors speculate that this may be due to their greater sexual sensation seeking, lower erotophobia (fear of sex), and greater comfort with a variety of roles and activities.
The article cites one 2003 Centers for Disease Control study, published in the Journal of Sex Research, which observed that while labels do not directly correlate to unsafe sexual behaviors, they do reflect upon individuals’ likely awareness of safer-sex protocols:
Although self-labels were not associated with unprotected intercourse, tops, who engaged in a greater proportion of insertive anal sex than other groups, were also less likely to identify as gay. Non-gay-identified MSM [again, “Men Who Have Sex With Men”] may have less contact with HIV prevention messages and may be less likely to be reached by HIV-prevention programs than are gay-identified men. Tops may be less likely to be recruited in venues frequented by gay men, and their greater internalized homophobia may result in greater denial of ever engaging in sex with other men. Tops also may be more likely to transmit HIV to women because of their greater likelihood of being behaviorally bisexual.
Another study, published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy in 2008, warns that gay male couples “might want to weigh this issue of sex role preferences seriously before committing to anything longterm. From a sexual point of view, there are obvious logistical problems of two tops or two bottoms being in a monogamous relationship. But since these sexual role preferences tend to reflect other behavioral traits (such as tops being more aggressive and assertive than bottoms), ’such relationships also might be more likely to encounter conflict quicker than relationships between complementary self-labels.’”
Hypersync wonders why ex-gay activists are conning Christian conservatives into yet another round of false labeling. Instead of acknowledging that persons’ sexual and romantic attractions are real, ex-gay talking heads at Exodus and Focus on the Family want gullible churchgoers to think attractions and basic personality traits are as changeable as one’s label, hence all same-sex-attracted people are no longer same-sex-attracted, they are now “gay-identified.”
Hypersync says: “I’m curious of the round-table conversation that drove them to this most recent change in terminology. What went on, what argument was made, what are the reasons why? I suspect that once again, they determined that their arguments are not winning the day, so they have to mix up things a bit.”
The antigay parents group PFOX claimed today that it has won recognition of “former homosexuals” as a protected sexual orientation in a D.C. Superior Court ruling. PFOX said:
“We are gratified that the ex-gay community in Washington D.C. now has the same civil rights that gays enjoy,” said Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX), which had filed the lawsuit against the District of Columbia government for failing to protect former homosexuals in the Nation’s Capital.
In a discrimination complaint filed by PFOX against the National Education Association (NEA) for refusing to provide public accommodations to ex-gays, the D.C. Office of Human Rights (OHR) had agreed with the NEA that sexual orientation protection did not extend to former homosexuals. “By failing to protect former homosexuals, the sexual orientation laws gave more rights to homosexuals than heterosexuals who were once gay,” said Griggs. “So PFOX asked the Court to reverse OHR’s decision, which it did. The Court held that ex-gays are a protected class under ’sexual orientation.’”
“All sexual orientation laws and programs nationwide should now provide true diversity and equality by including former homosexuals,” said Greg Quinlan, a director of PFOX. “I have experienced more personal assaults as a former homosexual than I ever did as a gay man.”
Not so fast, Greg. The court did not reverse OHR’s decision; it ruled in June 2009 that the NEA was justified in excluding PFOX for its stridently discriminatory, antigay literature, and it chose not to reverse the decision. According to Washington City Paper:
While [Judge Maurice] Ross decided in the NEA’s favor, he also held that ex-gays do, in fact, constitute a protected group under the D.C. Human Rights Act. Judging from PFOX’s eerily celebratory press release, this is kind of a big deal for them.
According to Ross’s decision, the Human Rights Act doesn’t only protect groups defined by “immutable characteristics,” as the Office of Human Rights’ decision claimed. The Act also protects groups defined by “preference or practice” —like people who previously “practiced” gayness, and now “prefer” to practice heterosexuality:
OHR’s determination that a characteristic must be immutable to be protected under the HRA is clearly erroneous as a matter of law. . . . Indeed, the HRA lists numerous protected categories such as religion, personal appearance, familial status, and source of income, which are subject to change. . . . Pertaining to sexual orientation, moreover, the HRA in §2-1401.02(28) defines sexual orientation as “male or female homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality, by preference or practice.” Thus, the HRA’s intent and plain language eschews narrow interpretation.
But while the NEA can’t discriminate against “ex-gays,” it may legally discriminate against exhibits that are explicitly anti-gay:
The Court affirms OHR’s ultimate determination that PFOX’s application was denied legally. In NEA’s judgment, PFOX is a conversion group hostile toward gays and lesbians. Thus, even though PFOX vehemently disagrees with NEA’s characterization, it is within NEA’s right to exclude PFOX’s presence at NEA’s conventions. . . . Indeed, the HRA would not require NEA to accept an application from the Ku Klux Klan or a group viewed by the NEA as anti-labor union or racist. . . . Similarly, military organizations and the Boy Scotts of America are excluded from renting exhibit space at the NEA Annual Meetings because of the positions those organizations take with regard to gay and lesbian rights.
. . . Thus, PFOX’s arguments miss the point. The NEA did not reject its application because PFOX’s members include exgays, homosexuals, heterosexuals, or members of any other sexual orientation. Rather, NEA rejected PFOX’s application because PFOX’s message and policies were, in NEA’s opinion, contrary to NEA’s policies regarding sexual orientation.
In other words, the D.C. Human Rights Act may protect groups who identify as “ex-gay” based on their mutable, previous and current sexual “practices” but does not — contrary to PFOX’s wishes — protect ex-gay activist groups such as PFOX that seek to use other organizations as soapboxes to spread political opinions and policies that are contrary to those of the host organization.
Unfortunately, the D.C. court has also legitimized a ludicrous claim that sexual orientation can be defined by what one isn’t, rather than what one demonstrably is.
Addendum: Given a great deal of misreporting by various blogs, I wish to reiterate:
Blame for the court’s logic regarding sexual orientation lies with the D.C. Human Rights Act (HRA), which broadly defines orientation as a matter of either “preference” or “practice.” The court observed:
While [Office of Human Rights'] analysis and the Title VII cases cited by OHR speak in terms of immutable characteristics, the HRA clearly does not limit itself only to immutable characteristics. The premise of the HRA is simple: to end all discrimination based on anything other than individual merit. Numerous protected classes listed in the HRA include mutable traits. Furthermore, the definition of sexual orientation defines an individual’s sexuality as a “preference” or “practice.” D.C. Code §2-1401.01. OHR’s analysis posits that the immutability of a person’s preferred sexual orientation categorizes them as a member of a protected class. In focusing on federal discrimination cases, however, the OHR misses the broad scope of the HRA and the explicit inclusion of the term “practice” in the HRA’s definition of sexual orientation.
If PFOX truly affirms D.C.’s Human Rights Act, then it will not only respect the NEA’s right not to host hostile and discriminatory organizations such as PFOX, but also move to hire “practicing” gay people in accord with PFOX’s claim to represent both “ex-gays” and those who “practice” homosexuality.
It remains the responsibility of the D.C. Council and mayor to reconsider language in the Human Rights Act which misdefines sexual orientation as a matter of “practice” or lack thereof.
There is “no evidence that sexual orientation change efforts work.” This was the American Psychological Association’s verdict on “ex-gay” therapy after an appointed task force of experts studied the issue for two years.
The conclusion did not surprise those of us who work with people who have been harmed by such programs. For example, I just interviewed Patrick McAlvey, who entered therapy to change his sexual orientation at the age of 19. His counselor, Mike Jones, is the director of Corduroy Stone, an affiliate of Exodus International.
McAlvey says that his sessions included prolonged hugs, the suggestion that he use handyman tools to increase his masculinity and questions about the size of his genitalia. There was also an episode of “holding therapy” where he reclined into the lap of his supposedly “ex-gay” counselor for an hour. The goal, according to McAlvey, was to get comfortable with his own manliness by “feeling the strength” and “smelling the smell” of another man.
What Jones and other ex-gay counselors routinely call “therapy” can seem a great deal like foreplay to the rest of us.
“I think it does a lot of damage to peoples’ mental health,” said McAlvey. “If I had had a fair representation (of gay life) I could have avoided a lot of suffering.”
Of course, such therapy and ministry programs can only exist by grossly distorting the lives of gay people. For example, in a recent radio interview, ex-gay activist Charlene Cothran claimed that gay people do not want legal equality and are really only interested in the “freedom to be a homosexual in a park with no clothes on.”
The APA deserves credit for taking ex-gay therapists to task for twisting the truth and holding them accountable for their scare tactics, such as claiming that there are no happy gay people. (Read More)
In recent weeks, Exodus International and Focus on the Family have promoted a report by Focus on the Family activist Jeff Johnston which claims that research supports the ex-gay contention that homosexuality is caused by childhood sexual abuse.
Nearly all the Focus report’s sources are antigay religious conservatives, including A. Dean Byrd, Mormon leader of the ex-gay therapy lobby NARTH.
On June 4 and again today, Exodus International cited Focus’ report as justification for antigay parents, pastors, and media to contact Exodus’ so-called “Professional Counselor Network” for advice to cure homosexuality. In fact, the counselor’s network is nothing more than Exodus’ member network of ex-gay activists — few of whom have any professional mental-health credentials.
The editors of the book have released the following statement to Truth Wins Out regarding Focus’ portrayal of their publication’s research.
We want to respond to a recent Focus on the Family characterization of scientific findings reported in our book, Unequal Opportunity: Health Disparities Affecting Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States (Oxford University Press) that misrepresented findings in the book to suggest that childhood sexual abuse causes male homosexuality. The Focus on the Family description of the findings reported in Unequal Opportunity is inaccurate and, in our opinion, a distortion of the scientific literature.
Most basically, the Focus on the Family characterization of the literature on childhood sexual abuse among gay men represents a misunderstanding of scientific approaches to distinguishing between correlation and causation. The book chapter in question reports that gay men are more likely to report childhood sexual abuse by men than are heterosexual men. This correlation does not mean that the reported abuse caused the adult sexual orientation. If that were the case, then the fact that some heterosexual men report sexual abuse by women means that sexual abuse by women “causes” heterosexuality in men. It is also worth noting that the argument that childhood sexual abuse causes homosexuality in gay men is undermined by the fact that the vast majority of gay men are not sexually abused as children.
One potential partial explanation for this correlation, and one that makes the most sense when you consider people of all orientations, is that some youth, particularly post-pubertal youth (who still cannot legally consent to sexual activity) have sexual experiences with males or females, depending on their pre-existing orientation. Let’s be very clear that this does not mean that these experiences are appropriate or healthy. However, it also does not mean that these experiences caused the sexual orientation of the youth. The development of a person’s sexual orientation is a complex and multifaceted process. The research into these processes has barely begun, and the development of sexuality is very difficult to study. Mischaracterizations of the scientific literature on the development of sexual orientation is not helpful to science.
Rather than mischaracterize these findings, we would like to point out the harm to health that can be caused by childhood sexual abuse among boys and girls of all sexual orientations. Childhood sexual abuse occurs to far too many young Americans and a large and growing literature supports that this abuse can cause lifelong damage to the physical and mental health and well-being of men and women of all sexual orientations. We suggest that Focus on the Family and other concerned organizations focus on how to work to ensure that all of our children remain safe from unwanted sexual experiences– whether heterosexual or homosexual.
That said, we want to state clearly that the published research does not support the claim that the development of a homosexual orientation is caused by childhood sexual abuse. Furthermore, adult homosexual orientation is no longer considered a pathology or a maladjustment. We urge those who are interested in trying to better understand some of these complex issues from a scientific perspective to read the discussions in our book, as well as the scientific literature on childhood sexual abuse, and not rely on second-hand interpretations.
As reported yesterday, several religious-right organizations have falsely claimed this week that the American Psychological Association has changed its position regarding the factors that influence or determine sexual orientation.
The reason for the false claim became apparent today when antigay activists Peter LaBarbera and Matt Barber cited the false claim as a reason for antigay bigots to call their senators and oppose the inclusion of sexual orientation in existing federal laws that punish felony violence against targeted groups of people.
LaBarbera’s reasoning — and perhaps that of his source, NARTH former president A. Dean Byrd — was simple: If Americans can be misled into believing that sexual orientation is readily changeable, then (they contend) there’s no reason for U.S. lawmakers to provide gay people with the same protection from felony violence that other groups already enjoy.
Instead of aiding their readers with a link to the actual federal antiviolence legislation, Senate Bill 909, LaBarbera, Barber, and the American Family Association directed readers to far-right web sites which claim that punishing antigay felony violence punishes free speech and protects pedophiles.
The notion that a single gene might determine sexual orientation was briefly proposed and swiftly rejected in the early 1990s.
That hasn’t stopped antigay activists from circulating the myth that, because numerous researchers in the past decade have found a mix of biological factors and possibly other unknown factors in the formation of sexual orientation, therefore these experts must believe in the existence of a single “gay gene.”
After spending more than a decade hearing and repeating their self-generated lies about a “gay gene,” this week several evolution-denying religious-right groups are crowing over a year-old reiteration of well-known facts by the American Psychological Association.
WorldNetDaily, LifeSiteNews, Virtue Online, and Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth all parroted A. Dean Byrd of NARTH, who repeated his previous false assertions that “activist researchers” have contended anytime in the past decade that there is a gay gene.
The antigay activists (Byrd included) illogically contend that, because there is no single gene that determines sexual orientation, therefore sexual orientation is caused entirely by the environment — lousy parents, in particular — and therefore, they insist, anyone can “change” their sexual orientation with sufficient right-wing Christian brainwashing.
Many [researchers] think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.
Byrd falsely cites three limited studies as proof that anyone can change and that ex-gay therapy causes no harm, even though at least two of the cited studies — by Dr. Robert Spitzer and Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse — excluded potential subjects who reported being harmed or who reported that the ex-gay program failed to change them.
Spitzer, in particular, has repudiated the mischaracterization of his study by NARTH and other ex-gay activist groups, saying that he believes change of attraction and orientation are exceedingly rare and that most people cannot “change” their orientation.
At least, Exodus did redefine sexual orientation until Ex-Gay Watch caught them in the act. In the past two days, Exodus silently covered up its fraud.
Here are Exodus’ definitions of sexual orientation, before and after Exodus’ misconduct was exposed:
Until this week, Exodus fraudulently equated sexual orientation with what the American Psychological Association has long called “paraphilias” — not orientations.
Thirty-three years after its creation, Exodus silently changes its definition of sexual orientation. Readers of the corrected definition might mistakenly think Exodus had understood sexual orientation all along.
How is it that an organization of Exodus’ longevity, which claims to teach churches the “Truth” about sexuality, could not tell the difference between orientation — an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others — and what the APA calls “recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”?
Why has Exodus refused to tell its churches and supporters that the organization has been lying about such basic information?
Why did Exodus omit the fact that APA policy “opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as ‘reparative’ or ‘conversion’ therapy which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon a prior assumption that the patient should change his/her homosexual orientation.”
And why has Exodus taken no action to correct its allies’ ongoing disinformation regarding sexual orientation?
Specifically, Jones and Yarhouse’s work suffered from the following flaws:
A new article in 
The report’s only recent mainstream professional source is a 2008 book titled 
Until this week, Exodus fraudulently equated sexual orientation with what the American Psychological Association has long called “paraphilias” — not orientations. 
Thirty-three years after its creation, Exodus silently changes its definition of sexual orientation. Readers of the corrected definition might mistakenly think Exodus had understood sexual orientation all along.
