Year: 2012

Psychiatrist Bob Spitzer, author of a 2001 ex-gay study, told American Prospect journalist, Gabriel Arana, that he wants to retract his study:

Spitzer was growing tired and asked how many more questions I had. Nothing, I responded, unless you have something to add.

He did. Would I print a retraction of his 2001 study, “so I don’t have to worry about it anymore”?

Knowing this article was coming, I talked last evening with Bob and asked him what he would like to do about his study. He confirmed to me that he has regret for what he now considers to be errant interpretations of the reports of his study participants. He told me that he had “second thoughts about his study” and he now believes “his conclusions don’t hold water.” He added that he now believes that the criticisms of the study expressed in the 2003 Archives of Sexual Behavior issue are “more true to the data” than his conclusions were.

He told me that he had expressed these thoughts to Ken Zucker, editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior several months ago. He wondered aloud to Dr. Zucker if there was some obligation to say the critics were right and that the study should be withdrawn. Although Spitzer said he did not recall Zucker’s exact reply, he did not feel encouraged to withdraw the paper. The Prospect article also references the issue of a formal retraction:

I asked about the criticisms leveled at him. “In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct,” he said. “The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.” He said he spoke with the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior about writing a retraction, but the editor declined. (Repeated attempts to contact the journal went unanswered.)

However, when I asked Zucker via email about his stance, he told me that Bob had not submitted anything for review, but he is free to submit a letter to the Editor or other communication expressing regret and his current views. The ball is in Bob’s court. My guess is that Bob will take him up on that offer.

There is much else to consider in this article which I will get to later today.  The material and personal experience with Joseph Nicolosi is well worth reading.

Religion writer Ruth Ann Dailey penned a thought provoking op-ed examining the  notion of America as a Christian nation for today’s Post-Gazette. She mentions one of my heroes, Roger Williams, and then refers to my work debunking David Barton’s claims about the Founders.

Roger Williams was not mentioned as much by the Founders as John Locke but Williams preceded Locke in time. I especially like this Williams quote which Dailey worked into her piece:

Their persecution drove the great theologian and linguist Roger Williams to flee the Massachusetts Bay Colony and establish Providence Plantations — now Rhode Island — where, as he envisioned it, “the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish [Muslim] or antichristian consciences and worships” could live together in liberty.

Williams’ story is well worth examining for anyone, but is especially instructive for Baptists of today who seem to have more in common with the Congregationalists of the Colonial period than the Baptists Williams, Leland and Backus of earlier times.

These days I am working toward completion of Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. A prominent focus of the book is David Barton’s new book, The Jefferson Lies. With GJR coming out, I intend to write more about both books going forward.

I have had many headslapping moments reading The Jefferson Lies. One of them is the subject of today’s post. In TJLs, Barton includes a chapter on what is commonly called The Jefferson Bible. In our book, co-author Michael Coulter and I fully explore the development of both of Jefferson’s efforts to extract what Jefferson considered to be the gold from the dross of the Gospels for his own use. The only surviving version of those efforts was titled by Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & Latin. The term “Jefferson Bible” has become a short hand for this book completed sometime between 1820 and 1824 (we describe evidence in the book which seems to place the binding of the Life and Morals of Jesus closer to 1824).

In TJLs, Barton claims that Jefferson did not remove all of the supernatural and miraculous aspects of the Gospels. He claims this was not Jefferson’s intent. Despite the fact that Jefferson said on several occasions that such an extraction was his intent, Barton makes this claim based on passages he says Jefferson included. Most of the passages Barton offers as proof are verses about the afterlife. Truly, Jefferson did believe in an afterlife with rewards and punishments as appropriate. Jefferson did not believe in the atonement of Jesus but rather that good works in this life were necessary for a happy afterlife. In that sense, there is a supernatural element in Jefferson’s extraction. However, Barton includes as evidence of miracles, three miracles from Matthew 9 which are not in either the 1804 or 1820 version. Barton writes:

That abridgement also contained the miraculous resurrection of Jarius’s (sic) daughter (Matthew 9:1), the healing of the bleeding woman (Matthew 9:18-26), and the healing of two blind men (Matthew 9:27-34), all of which are clearly acts of a miraculous or supernatural character.

The footnote for this paragraph leads to Charles Sanford’s book on the religious views of Jefferson. Consulting that book, I find that Sanford does list those verses but when one examines the 1804 and 1820 extractions from Jefferson, Matthew 9 is not included in the 1804 version at all, and in the 1820 version, only Mt. 9:36 (where Jesus was moved with compassion on the people gathered around him) is there.

Apparently, Barton did not check the versions but rather simply accepted the erroneous citation of Sanford. And these are not only verses which Barton includes which were not included. We fully document all of this in the GJR book. There are several prominent instances like this in TJLs — where Barton cites a source but that source turns out to be in error or quite suspicious. When  we explore the source, we learn the story is not true or quite implausible.

This observation is relevant to fact checking. Barton and defenders almost always make a point to note how many footnotes he uses while criticizing books with fewer notes. However, many footnotes do not a fact make if the citation is unverified or in error. We may not get all of them in GJR, but we do get some major ones.

Stay tuned…

Color me surprised, but pleasantly so.

Mike Huckabee, former GOP Presidential candidate and now FOX News host has endorsed the movie Bully.

From the Huckabee’s column in the Daily Beast:

Remember Philip Kayser? He is the Omaha, NE pastor that endorsed Ron Paul in the Iowa GOP primary who teaches that U.S. civil law should reflect the Old Testament book of Leviticus. In December, 2011, I wrote about his views on the death penalty for adulterers, disobedient children, gays, etc., which led to at least two national stories about Kayser’s endorsement. Very soon after those stories appeared, Kayser’s endorsement was pulled from Ron Paul’s website.

In book on the death penalty, Kayser wrote:

Difficulty in implementing Biblical law does not make non-Biblical penology just. But even on Bahnsen’s strictest interpretation of the death penalties, the results would not be as dire as people often predict. For example, while many homosexuals would be executed on Bahnsen’s interpretation, it would not be nearly as many as critics try to imply, because homosexuals would likely keep silent about their lifestyle…

Other Levitical sins (adultery, idolatry, disobedient children, etc.) are addressed in his book, which I examined briefly here.

Rev. Kayser here interviews Marshall Foster, now famous as a guest and co-producer of Kirk Cameron’s movie Monumental, about the biblical foundations of liberty, something that sounds a lot like Cameron’s movie. Cameron is offering material from Foster for sale on the Monumental website.

Marshall Foster Interview from Biblical Blueprints on Vimeo.

Biblical Blueprints is the ministry of Rev. Kayser. In 2011, Marshall Foster was the special guest and keynote speaker of the Providential History Festival, held yearly in Nebraska. The Providential History Festival is underwritten by Kayser’s Dominion Covenant Church and Christian reconstruction groups like the Chalcedon Foundation.

Mr. Foster may not agree with Rev. Kayser on the death penalty (I have seen nothing on that) but he is enough in sync that he appears to support Kayser’s approach to history. Kirk Cameron said at the end of his movie that he wants monumental to be a movement. With Mr. Foster involved, I think it is fair to ask what the movement is about.