November 29, 2012, (Family Research Council)—With its credibility drying up, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is determined to cement its status as the homosexual movement’s greatest ally. Desperate to regain its status in the civil rights debate, the group is following the money to the gay community, where it hopes the partnership will help SPLC regain some of the legitimacy it lost bullying mainstream conservatives. Their latest attempt to claw their way back into the spotlight is a lawsuit aimed at destroying the ex-gay movement.
This week, SPLC announced that it is suing a Jewish organization called JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives of Healing) for consumer fraud. They allege that the therapy, which is designed to bring homosexuals out of bondage and into healthy behavior, failed.
That’s as ridiculous as suing Weight Watchers because they promised you’d lose weight and you didn’t. The only people guilty of fraud are the ones who claim people with same-sex attractions can’t change.
Like California liberals, who managed to outlaw reorientation counseling for teenagers, SPLC and friends are frantically trying to shut down therapy like this because it disproves their entire argument that homosexuality—like race—is innate and thus, healthy and normal. If men and women with same-sex attractions can be freed, it destroys the Left’s foundational concept that gay rights are civil rights. To keep that from happening, groups like the SPLC are doing everything they can to shut down any research or therapy that contradicts their case.
In its lawsuit, SPLC says that reorientation therapy “has no basis in scientific fact.” As the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg will tell you, there’s an abundance of scientific and anecdotal evidence that the therapies do work—although critics are reluctant to acknowledge it. NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) has cited “600 reports of clinicians, researchers, and former clients—primarily from professional and peer-reviewed scientific journals” which show that “reorientation treatment has been helpful to many.”
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The left-leaning American Psychological Association (APA) says there is “no sufficiently scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.”
But the APA isn’t claiming that there’s no evidence change is possible—only that the evidence out there is “not sufficiently scientifically sound.” In other words, it doesn’t meet all the criteria for “gold standard” social science research: random samples, a prospective and longitudinal design, and use of a control group.
Of course, a lot of pro-homosexual social science research doesn’t meet those standards. And even when studies do meet that criteria (like Mark Regnerus’s recent homosexual parenting study), the Left races to discredit them.
More and better research would be great—but the same people who say the research is inadequate also adamantly oppose doing more studies on the topic.
In this lawsuit, SPLC also strongly suggests that reorientation therapy is not only ineffective, but harmful. What’s their evidence for that? Well, it’s entirely anecdotal—the same kind of evidence they refuse to accept with regard to the effectiveness of the therapy.
The bottom line is that SPLC doesn’t seem interested in helping people. Their actions and bank accounts show that the organization is more interested in profiting from them. If the Left truly had homosexuals’ best interest in mind, they would recognize that for many, these attractions are unwanted. For those who struggle, hope is not in limiting avenues for change—but encouraging them.
Reprinted from the Family Research Council.