It appears that Mark is a very nice guy who as a professional psychologist respects different experiences of different people in terms of what they consider as a change in their sexual identity. While discussing Spitzer’s study, it comes across to me that Mark has a very abstract view to a question asked by this study whether people can change their sexual orientation. This is just my observation of the video, since I don’t know Mark personally, and I could be wrong about him. Spitzer and even Warren, especially after learning that 4 or 5 people from I Do Exist resumed their gay identities, appeared to embrace a more definite position that gays can never change. Even if this is the case, I don’t see a problem for people to learn good heterosexual functioning if such people want to have a traditional marriage with biological children according to their beliefs. I wonder why Warren and Mark never mentioned what triggered Spitzer to make his study disappear, which was his encounter with a man named Gabriel Arana, who claimed that he was a patient of a conversion therapy but felt harmed by it. Yet, they do mention the people of I Do Exist, one of whom was Noah Gutierez. Still, their experiences resonate with one another.

I don’t understand why should we consider someone like Noah as speaking with authority on whether people can change. To me, it’s just his experience. I am not an expert in psychology thus I cannot speak professionally about this, but as someone who reads the Bible, I can tell that there is a lot of temptation in this world to commit various sins, including the practice of homosexuality, and we as humans can so easily yield to such temptations, unlike Jesus. I read how Noah was blaming exgay ministries for his failure to be obedient to God. It tells me that we are all fragile souls who are constantly failing to live to God’s expectations, thus the failure (if we can call it a failure) of I Do Exist can teach us that we need Jesus in our life more than ever.

I also don’t understand why after learning that people from I Do Exist turned out not what Warren expected them to be, he started blaming not only particular people in the exgay industry but all social conservative pastors and thinkers and even Republican politicians. It appears that Warren’s disillusionment with I Do Exist, which is not his fault, became a catalyst to this everlasting irrational online tirade against everything and everybody that is conservative.

I find this to be very strange.

1) in the interview he mentions studies he has done on celibacy. Was any of that published? if so do you have any cites?

2) Warren, where you the person who coined the phrase: “spouso-sexual”?

I wanted to start with the Spitzer study. I agree Spitzer didn’t need to “recall” the study, it wasn’t flawed in a way that would require that. He was very clear on what he did and his results. However, his clarification as to how he misunderstood the extent to which “ex-gays” could fool themselves and others as to the changes in their orientation was important.

Both sides of the argument misused his study. One side claimed “Spitzer says our therapy works!” (not what he said). The other “Spitzer shows change almost never happens” (again not what he said). And ignored what he really said which was it may be possible, however, we need more research. His study was a lot like Hooker’s original study, in that both were simply attempting to disprove a rule about gays. “If you are gay you are mentally disordered”, “If you are gay you can’t ever become straight.”

While Hooker’s work spawned a lot of other research, Mark Yarhouse and Stanton Jones were the only 2 researchers I know of who actually did any sort of follow up to the Spitzer study.