Ah, so homosexuality is evil itself. And I thought they were trying not to shame us.

Very much my reaction … ‘psycho-babble mumbo jumbo’ indeed.

“In no way shape or form is our message about trying to cure or do we try to promote that type of methodology or message… Exodus believes the opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. It is holiness. We promote the belief that one can live a life that is congruent with their faith. That is our mission – period.” ~ Jeff Buchanan, Christian Post, 3/22/11

Had this come from an organisation without a long history of wilful distortion, I might have agreed with much of the rest too.

NARTH remains highly interested in conducting such research…

(Inset horse laughs)

pursuant only to the acquisition of sufficient funding.

Send money. Lots of money.

No matter. what counts is not who says something, but the extent to which it is true.

Most of the recent research on homosexual sexual orientation change has focused on religiously mediated outcomes which may differ significantly from outcomes derived through professional psychological care. It is not unreasonable to anticipate that the probability of change would be greater with informed psychotherapeutic care, although definitive answers to this question await further research.

In other words, after decades of “research”, they’ve got no hard data, other than that the Divine Intervention approach they apparently have advocated in the past doesn’t appear to be effective. “Informed psychotherapeutic care” when practised by others hasn’t worked too well either, has caused harm, but they conjecture (with no evidence) that in their hands it may be less ineffective. Or not.

In other words… “Send money to help us test our blind guesswork, even though we’ve lied through our teeth in the past, pretending to be “secular”. Ignore the obvious, that a secular group would have already been using “informed psychotherapeutic” methods, as other have, and known whether they’re effective or not, as others do.”

Send money. Lots of money.

Well said. For some of us, add to this list our church. And the rejection of our church has too easily translated to the rejection of God.

I’ll be honest and admit that it took effort to read beyond this first sentence. The implication of this statement is that NARTH is somehow acting outside of that “sociopolitical climate” and acting in terms of “nonpartisan scientific inquiry.” Recent posts on Warren’s blog demonstrate that implication to be a falsehood.

I also think they entirely missed the point when talking about “categorical change”. People do not view the outcomes of repairitve therapy in categorical terms so much as they view sexual orientation in categorical terms. Advocates on both sides look for categorical changes from repairitive therapy because they see sexual orientation as something categorical. That is to say that if you claim sexual orientation change is possible, that implies a change from one category (gay) to another (straight, or potentially bi). I don’t think that this is an unreasonable expectation. If NARTH wanted to start claiming that it really changes gay people into bi people, and then encourages them to ignore their same-sex attractions in favor or their opposite sex attractions, I’d likely be okay with that statement. But that is not what NARTH is claiming, and I doubt they ever will claim such.