Warren Throckmorton

In a comment posted here yesterday and at Towleroad, some potential new wrinkles in the Dakota Ary case were asserted. Ary is the high school Freshman, represented by Liberty Counsel, who was briefly suspended over comments made in a Fort Worth High School German class. The initial report was that Ary said he was a Christian and believed homosexuality to be wrong. However, a GLBT group is now claiming to have spoken to the teacher involved, Kristopher Franks, who paints a picture of harassment on the part of Ary and other classmates against the teacher due to their perception that the teacher is gay.
I will state the obvious: I have no idea what the real story is. I post this because the report from the teacher, if accurate, would correct the post I made last week.
Often, people look at a story like this and allow their biases influence them. If you are someone who believes religion is a victim of gay advocacy, you might side with Liberty Counsel. If you believe religion is used to harass GLBT people, then you might be inclined to believe this new report from the GLBT student group.
All I can say is that the reports we have are insufficient to be dogmatic. I have investigated many claims from advocates on both sides of the culture war and been disappointed that truth was not being told. Speaking about my community (evangelical), I can say that I have found some evangelical culture war groups engage in spin. I used to trust such groups to be honest and consider the impact of spin on public perception. As a matter of course now, I don’t accept things at face value.
For instance, recently the law firm representing Dakota Ary, Liberty Counsel, asserted that the American Association of Christian Counselors was a larger group of professionals than the American Psychological Association. This is flat out untrue. On the same day, Mat Staver told his radio audience that the AACC has produced ““the most definitive, most recent research that’s come out that says change is possible.” This is spin.
First, to my knowledge, the AACC has not paid for any research on sexual orientation change. Perhaps, they have and I am not aware of it — if so, I will correct this statement. AACC members Mark Yarhouse and Stan Jones released the first wave of their study at an AACC conference but the AACC did not produce it; Exodus International funded the research. Furthermore, the research showed that some changes took place for a minority of participants but calling the research definitive is a stretch.
Recently, the AACC journal Edification published a report from Mark Yarhouse and his students from Regent University showing that men and women in mixed orientation marriages described no change in sexual orientation. To my knowledge, the Christian culture war complex has not addressed this finding. In a journal, the AACC published research that stands in contradiction to the Liberty Counsel statement.
Some Christians take my skepticism as a character flaw or a sign that I have capitulated to the enemy (see what the culture war does to perception of out-groups?). They say that the opposition spins and manipulates data, so why shouldn’t we? I think the answer is obvious, so obvious that I will let that question sink in and not answer it.
I don’t know who is offering the most factual narrative in the Fort Worth controversy. I just know that right now, for me, the question is open.

The Golden Rule Pledge has again partnered with the Pacer Center and National Bullying Prevention Month for October’s effort to reduce school bullying. The GRP works to mobilize churches and youth groups to take a stand against bullying in school.
I started the GRP in 2008 in response to a call from some Christian groups  urging parents to keep their kids home on the Day of Silence. I also wanted to respond to the Day of Truth (now called Day of Dialogue) which in my view is not a constructive way to address the very real problem of bullying and anti-gay harassment in schools.
Students in high schools and colleges around the country have carried GRP pledge cards to school. Some have made clear statements to GLBT peers that they stand with them against bullying and harassment. Some churches (I have no way of knowing the number since the materials are free on the website) have used the bullying prevention materials designed for church youth groups. The Los Angeles School District has the GRP on the calendar for April of 2012.
I am always on the alert for volunteers nationally who desire to focus on ending bullying. If interested, email me.

Writing in the second edition of NARTH’s (National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) Journal of Human Sexuality, Neil Whitehead proposed a reanalysis (NARTH summary here) of a paper by Ariel Shidlo and Michael Shroeder on potentially harmful outcomes of sexual orientation change efforts. NARTH’s headline describing the paper is

Sexual Orientation Change Efforts Do Not Lead to Increased Suicide Attempts.

Contrast NARTH’s headline with the title of my post. After examining  Whitehead’s  article, I submit that his analysis supports my title as much or more than it does NARTH’s claim.
 Shidlo and Shroeder wrote the following about suicide attempts in their 2002 report:
 

In examining the data, we distinguished between participants who had a history of being suicidal before conversion therapy and those who did not. Twenty-five participants had a history of suicide attempts before conversion therapy, 23 during conversion therapy, and 11 after conversion therapy. We took the subgroup of participants who reported suicide attempts and looked at suicide attempts pre-intervention, during intervention, and post-intervention to see if there was any suggestive pattern. We found that 11 participants had reported suicide attempts since the end of conversion interventions. Of these, only 3 had attempted prior to conversion therapy. Of the 11 participants, 3 had attempted during conversion therapy.

In his NARTH paper, Whitehead makes a series of assumptions about the participants in the Shidlo and Schroeder study. I think these are questionable assumptions but for sake of discussion, I will play along. First, he assumes that these suicide attempts occur over a span of 25 years (13 years pre-therapy, two years in therapy and then 10 years post-therapy). He then assumes that the attempts occurred at a constant rate over that span to calculate an expected number of suicide before, during and after therapy. Whitehead then compares his expected attempts with the actual number of attempts as reported by Shidlo and Schroeder. Whitehead summarized his findings as follows:

(a) Comparing pre-therapy, therapy, and post-therapy groups, there is overall no significant increase in suicides per unit time.
(b) There is a very clear increase in attempts during therapy.
(c) There is a trend to fewer attempts after therapy.

Using his assumptions, Whitehead wrote:

Suicide attempts reported before therapy were 25, and those reported during and after therapy combined numbered 34. The expected numbers allowing for the time periods and normalized to the above total are 30.55 and 28.44. The expectation on which this is calculated is that therapy has no effect, either positive or negative.

In this analysis, no difference shows up in suicides related to therapy when suicide attempts before therapy are compared with the time period during and after therapy. However, Whitehead does not stop there. About suicide attempts during therapy, he wrote:

For attempts before and during therapy, the observed results are 25 and 23, and the calculated expected normalized figures are 42.18 and 5.82. These are very different from the observed, and the chi-square test produces a result of p < 0.001. They are not the same, and therapy has therefore been associated with a several-fold increase in attempts.

In other words, there is a very large increase in suicide attempts during therapy. The title of my post is accurate. According to this NARTH report, sexual orientation change “therapy has therefore been associated with a several-fold increase in attempts.”
Continue reading “NARTH Report: Suicide attempts increase during sexual orientation change therapy”

Wow, Hermann Cain scored a big win in the Florida straw poll today.
Beat out Perry – who was expected to win – by nearly 22 points.

Herman Cain: 37.11%
Rick Perry: 15.43%
Mitt Romney: 14.00%
Rick Santorum: 10.88%
Ron Paul: 10.39%
Newt Gingrich: 8.43%
Jon Huntsman: 2.26%
Michele Bachmann: 1.51%

Michele Bachmann had Peter Waldron deployed to FL and she still finished lower than Huntsman. Time to follow T-Paw back to MN?

Dakota Ary a Fort Worth area high school student wants an apology from the school district after he was removed from class for a negative comment about homosexuality.
The school is investigating but the media reports have the boy making an offhand comment to another student proclaiming his Christianity and saying he thought homosexuality was wrong. The classroom teacher overheard the remark and sent the boy from class.
If it turns out that the boy was expressing his views in response to a discussion about religion and homosexuality, then I suspect he will not be disciplined and may get his apology. If he was inciting an incident then the situation becomes more complex.
Addtional thoughts: I went back to the first report I could find on this story which comes from an NBC affiliate in the Fort Worth area. The discussion in class was about religions, Bibles and Germany and the discipline referral form quotes him as saying: “no gays allowed in Christianity.”
According the Fort Worth report, the form also said that “the comment was unprovoked and out of context.” The form also said, “It is wrong to make such a statement in public school.”
The school is not commenting so I do not think we can evaluate the situation at this point. According the Liberty Counsel (the same group who falsely said that the AACC is larger than the APA), another student asked how to say lesbian in German. At that point, according to Liberty Counsel, Ary told another student that homosexuality is wrong.
If that narrative is accurate, then I believe the boy’s statement would have been in relation to something else taking place and apparently intended to stay between him and the other student. A teacher should focus the conversation back to the topic. However, if the statement was brought up without provocation and seemed to the teacher to inflame, then a teacher would be correct to address it, albeit in a less dramatic manner.
The school district is not talking but they have relented on the severity of the punishment according to this report from the LA Times.