Posted on 01/31/2024 5:55:36 AM PST by Red Badger
Twenty-seven states and Washington, D.C., have banned efforts to change sexual orientation, commonly but mistakenly referred to as “conversion therapy,” for minors on the premise that therapies seeking to mitigate or resolve unwanted same-sex attraction are inherently harmful and increase the risk of suicide.
Father Paul Sullins, a Roman Catholic priest, senior research associate at The Ruth Institute, and former sociology professor at Catholic University, found that the opposite is true, however.
Not only is there no evidence that efforts to change sexual orientation, which Sullins refers to by the acronym SOCE, increase the risk of suicide among those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. There also is evidence that such efforts actually decrease the risk of suicide or thoughts of suicide among them.
“What we’re left with is a situation where we’re being fed a lie that somehow attempting to change sexual orientation is going to fail all the time and it’s going to cause harm, and the truth is just the opposite,” Sullins tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Sullins analyzed the data from a study conducted in 2020 by University of Southern California health researcher John Blosnich. The study, “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Suicide Ideation and Attempt Among Sexual Minority Adults, United States, 2016–2018,” published in the American Journal of Public Health, used data collected by the Gallup Organization.
Gallup called over 330,000 Americans to screen about 3,000 who identified as LGB and then collected 1,500 interviews on the issue, yielding what Sullins described as “very precise data on this particular question.”
“With that data, they correlated the amount of suicide ideation—thinking about suicide and other suicidal behaviors,” such as making a plan to commit suicide or suicide attempts, Sullins explains. “They correlated those with whether a person had ever been to SOCE and found that person who had been to SOCI had over twice the rate of suicidal thoughts and were 1 .7 times as likely to attempt suicide.”
“On the basis of this, calls for banning SOCE were moved forward, and we got into the situation we’re in today,” the sociologist explains.
Yet it seems the researchers made an elementary mistake in analyzing the data; Sullins caught the mistake because Blosnich and his colleagues published the interviews along with the study.
“I got the data and looked at it and I found that they had ignored one very crucial question, which was, ‘When did you think about suicide?'” Sullins recalls.
When he read the interviews, he looked to see “whether the suicide activity happened before or after the person went to SOCE, and what I found, somewhat to my surprise, was that most of the suicidal behavior happened before the person ever went to SOCE. Two-thirds of the thoughts of suicide happened before they ever went to SOCE.”
“Now, you know, it’s logical that if someone engages in a behavior and then goes through an experience, later, that that experience could not have caused that preexisting behavior,” Sullins explains. “Things don’t work backward in the space-time continuum.”
“So I published a firm rebuttal to that study finding not only that did SOCE not increase suicidal behavior, it decreased it,” he says.
Critics attempted to silence his study’s findings.
“Even if my study was true, they claimed it was unethical to publish it because it implied that somehow people needed to be fixed, and it would impede the cause of gay rights,” Sullins says.
Although Sullins is Roman Catholic and believes same-sex activity to be sinful, he says he doesn’t encourage lesbians, gays, or bisexuals to try to change their sexual orientation unless they feel uncomfortable about that orientation. He says that sexual orientation change efforts don’t always work, but his studies find that they do succeed, to some degree.
“I’ve done other studies that show that when people attempt to change sexual orientation, it is fully successful in my studies about 17 to 20% of the time,” he recalls. “Most persons who undergo it, meaning about 60 to 65%, report that they are less caught up in homosexual attractions and behaviors and activity.”
Sullins noted that about 30% of the 1,500 lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in Blosnich’s study said that they have tried to change their sexual orientation, and about 10% said, “If I could be completely heterosexual, I would want to do that.”
“So there is a minority of the gay population who wants to change, is not happy with living the way that they’re living, however you want to say that, and wants to change,” Sullins notes. “Those are the ones who ought to have the option for counseling and therapy if they want it.”
The sociologist also says that his studies show sexual attraction is variable and complex.
“If you measure those things separately, you’ll find that across the range of humans, variation, there are a number of people who have moderate to high levels of same-sex attraction and moderate to high levels of opposite-sex attraction that coexist,” he explains.
“What often happens when persons go through SOCE or attempt to what we call change their sexual orientation is that—not so much that the same sex attractions diminish, that can happen—but it’s much more common that those don’t diminish or diminish very much, but the opposite-sex attractions become more salient and a person is able then to live more out of their opposite-sex-attracted side, we might say, than the same-sex-attracted side,” Sullins says.
The sociologist goes on to describe how some in the scientific community have attempted to stifle his research.
“In a way, I find it an encouragement and a compliment when a study of mine is being suppressed,” he says. “Because if they had an argument against what I was publishing, if they found a flaw in it, they would make that note. But the fact [is] that they don’t do that, instead they want to suppress citations, as you can do in the scholarly world, or they want to make sure it doesn’t get published in journals that are read more widely.”
Sullins also describes having a venue cancel a presentation on his research.
“When they canceled like that, it says to me that they don’t really have an argument on the other side,” he says. “They want to control us by censorship and by controlling the way that we think. Well, as an American, I don’t take well to that kind of control.”
Listen to the podcast interview with Sullins below.
“ ‘So I published a firm rebuttal to that study finding not only that did SOCE not increase suicidal behavior, it decreased it,’ he says.”
In other words, repentance works.
It is well known queers have a higher suicide rate than normal people. It is obvious to me that if you do a study of Queers who want to quit you are going to get higher suicide rate than normal . The real question is did the therapy lower that background rate?
If you think about it, rehab is a form of “conversion therapy” and, come to think of it, so are the relentless attempts to brainwash White people that they are the source of all the world’s problems.
When will that be banned?
Forcing someone to go through conversion therapy would probably be counterproductive, unless he or she wants to try it. Government has no business preventing someone who wants to do so.
Okay, let me get this straight. They can cajole, influence, groom and teach kids all about their sick lifestyles, but if our side tries to tell these confused kids the truth and save them from a lifetime pain that is illegal. Again, you’re typical ratchet effect. The Left can do whatever they want, i.e., push the ratchet to their side, but the rachet is never allowed to be reversed. In geopolitics it was called the Brezhnev Doctrine. Once you went communist you could never go back. Kind of the same thing with Islam. Once you convert your only way out is death.
This is correct.
The issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the Revolution.
Once the revolution is established, these people will be summarily disposed, just like the Nazis did. The used homosexuals and other disaffected persons to begin their march to power, but once they were secure, they were executed................
This is not a surprise. Unfortunately, “science” has largely been weaponized by the political forces that endorse the rainbow people because they don’t procreate.
to screen about 3,000 who identified as LGB and then collected 1,500 interviews on the issue,
= = =
Did he visit the cemetery?
I love my friend. My friend is a girl. I am a girl. I must be a lesbian.
I am artistic. I am a boy. All artists are gay. I must be a homosexual.
When you throw in abuse, sexual or otherwise, things can get really confusing for a kid.
Mostly they need someone to talk to who will help them see that what they are is, 99% of the time, normal.
This is not helped by the tendency we have currently to define sex as "love". That is really messing kids up.
People do change. I’m not sure that they can make themselves change. It might help some people who aren’t sure about what they really are. And then there’s the senator’s son who wasn’t converted but found that it helped him lose some irritating mannerisms.
Follow the Truth.
Not lies claiming to be “science”.
Fear not Truth.
Covid and vax are perfect “science” studies. We can stop looking only at Salem Witch Trials. We now have Whan Science Trials.
The main thing is that as long as any conversion theraby process is entered into by choice, and not by force, that should be legal. Legally denying that choice is what is a denial of individual rights.
How did we get here? We got here through the false ideology that nothing about being “gay” is from choices and everything is predetermined in DNA somehow, together with the corellary false ideology that no one can chose to change their sexual orientation away from being “gay”.
Thus, with our God given free will, we each get to choose what we think and believe and our inner and outer realities will be determined accordingly..
We are created to physically be a certain way, but our wants and our desires can overrule and deviate away from what is to what our wants and desire want instead. What we choose to believe, we then try to be, reality and cognitive dissonance be damned.
But that only gets us into trouble, because we can’t change the definitions, rules, laws and principles that govern us and our world … and … determine consequences.
The best we created beings, we humans, can do is accept our place in this unchangeable world and choose to align and harmonize with these unchangeable definitions, rules, laws and principles as written by our Creator as best as we can.
If so, we will enjoy much better consequences in all areas of our lives than by going our own way and attempting to re-write the world in our own image, as we’re seeing all around us now in ever greater ways.
The late Adrian Rogers spoke about the consequences of going our own way in his The Lost World sermon as being the three steps to human destruction, detailed in Romans 1:18-31. They are:
1) Willful Self-determinationI do not believe there is a ‘gay gene’, but rather that we are mindful and decide. For most, this is an obvious choice and, there but for the Grace of God, I am happily grateful this is not one of the struggles that I have.
2) Wicked Self-deception
3) Woeful Self-destruction
But, I definitely do pray for those who do have this inner battle and I do hope and pray that they all will avoid that woeful third step.
We have free will and we are self-determined. We can choose to accept what is and live by that standard from the start and enjoy that reality or not.
But, even if we choose poorly and no matter how far off of the beaten path we might find ourselves, we can always turn back and get back to where we always belonged once again.
Here in this reality my mom called Schoolhouse earth, we can learn from others and from experience and so, our minds can be changed, even about our sexuality, and with new beliefs soon comes a new reality, good or bad.
Just choose and keep choosing wisely and make your reality a good one … before it’s too late.
It should not be terribly difficult to compare the suicide rate of queers with the suicide rate of queers who have been cured.
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