Who Should Study Ex-Gay Success
Ok guys, I promise wedding pictures and a rundown are coming soon.For now though, I was reading over at Randy's blog about his participation in Exodus' protest of the APA convention. Exodus was protesting the APA's stance on ex-gay therapy.
At the end of his post under the update section, Randy says that the APA should "not waste psychologist's time drafting political resolutions and activist mantras when they could actually [be] creating comprehensive studies to get to the truth [about the success of ex-gay therapy].
My thought, though, is that if Exodus, NARTH, PFOX and so many other groups want every major medical, psychological, etc. group in the nation to acknowledge the success of ex-gay therapy, then maybe THEY should actually do a study themselves. After all, they are the ones that have access to "hundreds of thousands" of ex-gays and the ones that want to be acknowledged as legitimate.
It sounds pretty easy to me--the APA doesn't believe ex-gay therapy should be encouraged for gay patients and they have never seen any scientific proof that it works. If Exodus has been doing this for two decades with hundreds of thousands of people and are so sure it works, they should be able to put together some sort of study to prove their claims. In fact, I think it is their responsibility to do so.
posted by Brady @ 12:37 PM
2 Comments:
My sense is pretty close to yours, Brady, with this distinction: Exodus, NARTH, PFOX, et al don't have the ability to be perceived as credible in the design, execution, and analysis of effective studies. What they could do, though, is rally their supporters to fund such studies, conducted by credible social scientists, subjected to peer review.
Not only could they do that, if such studies produced the results that ex-gay leaders insist they would, anti-gay groups would have a hugely effective tool for winning over academics, agnostics, atheists, and perhaps even some courts.
Against that backdrop, now aggregate the last 10-20 years' budgets of the AFA, Focus, FRC, Exodus, NARTH, PFOX, and anyone else you can think of. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. With resources like that, and a vested interest in having the social science of sexual orientation turn in their direction, I suspect that significant funding has been devoted to the cause, but when it produced results which were unhelpful to ex-gays, they wer shelved.
So, we've got folks with hundreds of millions of dollars passing through their hands, with a vested interest in seeing specific options regarding homosexuality promoted and championed... and they have produced nothing credible!
That's a good point, Steve about their credibility to run their own studies, but at the very least it would show good faith that they were interested in verifying their claims and backing up their organizations.
And, I agree, if the studies proved what they want them to prove, it would be HUGE tool for their cause.
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