Counseling Helps People

Fr. Paul Sullins | Dr. J Show Episode 212

Get the full presentation and press questions by joining us for exclusive, uncensored content on Locals: https://theruthinstitute.locals.com

The Rev. D. Paul Sullins, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Associate of the Ruth Institute. He recently retired as Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC. Dr. Sullins is a leader in the field of research on same-sex parenting and its implications for child development. He has written four books and over 100 journal articles, research reports, and essays on issues of family, faith, and culture. His reports on clerical sexual abuse from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury data, John Jay data, LA Times, and other sources have garnered international acclaim.

Dr. Sullins continues as Research Professor and Director of the Leo Initiative for Social Research at Catholic University, as well as Director of the Summer Institute of Catholic Social Thought. He also serves on the board of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists (SCSS), the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), and the Natural Family Journal. He is a Fellow of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI), and was Ignatius Loyola Fellow for Catholic Identity at the Center for the Advancement of Catholic Higher Education.

Dr. Sullins’ latest research reveals the methodological flaws in studies which purport to show that “conversion therapy” causes an increased risk of suicide for patients with unwanted same sex attraction. Thanks to a deeper look at the data, he discovered the opposite to be true: change-allowing therapy actually reduced suicidality and helped many people who underwent this therapy.

Formerly Episcopalian, Dr. Sullins is a married Catholic priest. He earned a Ph.D. at Catholic University in 1997 and taught there from 1998 until his retirement. He and his wife, Patricia, have an inter-racial family of three children, two adopted. He serves as Associate Pastor of the Church of Saint Mark the Evangelist, Hyattsville, MD.

Ruth Institute position paper on Therapy Bans: http://ruthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ruth-Institute-Statement-on-Therapy.-Bans-2022.pdf

For a copy of Dr. Sullins’ presentation, or links to any further research, contact Fr Sullins at: psullins@RuthInstitute.org

Transcript:

Fr. Mark Hodges:

Hello, everyone. I’m Father Mark Hodges, an Orthodox priest and the Producer for The Dr. J Show, put on by The Ruth Institute. I’ll be hosting this press conference. Thank you for joining us for this very important discussion of Father Paul Sullins’ latest research on the safety and benefits of counseling to address unwanted same-sex attraction.

After Fr. Sullins’ presentation, I’ll be handling questions. I will now turn the floor over to Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of The Ruth Institute. Dr. Morse.

Dr. Morse:

Thank you, Father Mark. I’d like to welcome all of you and thank you for being here. The Ruth Institute is an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love. We’re here to challenge the attempt to ban so-called “conversion” therapy, meaning any therapy that seeks to address or lessen same-sex attraction. Increasingly, these bans include gender dysphoria as well as sexual orientation.

Just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a Washington state ban on so-called conversion therapy, which the law defined as “a regime that seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” The Australian state of Victoria also includes gender dysphoria in its therapy ban. The Australian ban even goes so far as to prohibit some forms of private prayer.

The Ruth Institute has issued a position statement on these therapy bans, which you can find in the press kit. Among the points we make are these: first, conversion therapy is a misnomer, a term invented by its opponents as a pejorative term. Better, more descriptive terms would be “change allowing therapy,” or Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, abbreviated as SOCE and pronounced “so-shee.”

Many people have equated conversion therapy with torture. Even if that were true, which we certainly dispute, a specific ban on talk therapy would be unnecessary. Physical torture is already illegal and can be prosecuted under existing law. Father Sullins will discuss the following points today: First, banning conversion therapy is unscientific. Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) are not intrinsically harmful. Secondly, banning client-chosen, client-directed talk therapy is cruel.

The people who need and want counseling the most will be denied the help they seek. We at the Ruth Institute believe that client-chosen, client-directed talk therapy should be freely available to all who seek it.

At this time, I’d like to introduce Father Paul Sullins, senior Research Associate at the Ruth Institute. Father Sullins is a Roman Catholic priest who has a Ph.D. in sociology. He taught sociology at the Catholic University of America for many years. You can find his complete bio in the press kit. Father Sullins, you have the floor.

Fr. Sullins:

Thank you very much. I want to talk to you about the fact that conversion therapy actually reduces gay suicide and correct the false idea that it harms persons who undergo it.

And I want to quote, as Jennifer alluded to, what happened yesterday, where the Supreme Court denied cert to a case to challenge conversion therapy ban in Oregon. Here’s a quote from Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Yesterday when announcing this, she said, “Every major medical and mental health association in the country has warned that conversion therapy is unnecessary, ineffective and harmful.”

Those were kind of the three, actually the last two of those would be the lynchpins of the argument against conversion therapy. And then she cites this: “In one study, more than 60% of youth subjected to conversion therapy, attempted suicide.” Now, that’s a patently false claim. It’s true that this study reported that. But the report, the result is a false, misleading, egregious kind of science.

And so what I’m going to do is to show you why that’s false. Now, it’s true, she says that nearly half the states in the United States have banned conversion therapy. Here’s the current map. It’s actually 20 states have a full ban, plus the District of Columbia, six states, a partial ban. And some states have their bans stayed by the courts.

In 2021, the American Psychological Association, came out with a resolution supporting bans of conversion therapy. The bans were based on the claim that sexual minority youth and adults who have undergone SOCE are significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression than those that haven’t done so. So there is this relation between [claimed] SOCE harm and the bans.

What changed their minds? Well, in 2009, the APA declined to ban conversion therapy because they concluded that the research was inconclusive as to whether it was actually harmful. But last year, Judith Glasgold, who chaired that review in 2009, reviewed the research since then, and it was published in a book called The Case Against Conversion Therapy, edited by Doug Haldeman.

And she cited three studies that she felt changed the state of the evidence. Most prominently was this study by Blosnich, et al, in July 2020, which she cited the findings of in detail. And she showed that it used a population data, not a recruited sample, as one of the first studies to have done that, and found that SOCE was associated with twice the odds of lifetime suicide ideation, 75% increased odds of planning to attempt suicide, and 67% increased rates of suicide attempt.

Now, remember those figures because you’re going to see them again. This is the Blosnich, et al, study that came up with these results. The same study was cited in 2020 in December by the British Review of the Research for the Government Equalities Office pursuant also to a ban on SOCE.

Now, this study came out in July 2020; by December 2020, the Brits had cited it to ban SOCE. By February 2021, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had cited it to ban SOCE. So it had a tremendous effect on moving forward the idea that SOCE should be banned. Well, in September 2022, I published this study: Sexual orientation change efforts do not increase suicide. And this was based on a re-analysis of the same data that the Blosnich, et al, study had done.

And I found that the conclusions presented by Blosnich, et al, were not only untrue, like a mistake or something, but they are emphatically the opposite of truth. I don’t want to say that their study was fraudulent, but it purposely ignored scientific standards of evidence to point to causation with regard to SOCE harm.

This study was immediately attacked. That is, my study. It led to hostile reviews, heartfelt pushback, we might call it, from the following individuals over the next six months: Ilan Meyer, the founder of the Minority Stress Theory, who now works at the Williams Institute, Douglas Haldeman, whom we saw earlier, who published the Case Against Conversion Therapy, and Judith Glassgold. They both wrote critical pushback commentaries on my study.

Lauren Beach, you may remember her as the person who organized the letter denouncing Myra McHugh’s New Atlantis article on sexuality and gender. And then Danish bioethicist Jenna Strizzi and Ezio Di Nucci, who argued, believe it or not, that my study was “nefarious” and “egregiously problematic” because it restricted the advance of gay rights, and thus it was an unethical thing even to publish it, even if it were true.

All of these are honest arguments made in the literature. You can read them for yourself. So what did my studies show? Well, I used the same data that Blosnich, et al, had used. It’s very good data. It’s one of the first sets of data that is population representative for sexual minority persons. And they got about 1500 of those and used the Gallup organization to draw a good sample.

They measured suicidality by common questions in the literature. These questions: “Did you ever in your life have thoughts of killing yourself?” This would be suicide ideation or thinking. “Did you ever think about how you might do it or work out a plan?” This is suicide planning. Suicide intention: “Did you ever make a suicide attempt?”

And so we have the four components of suicidal morbidity as set out in previous research. And for each question, they could respond, “No,” “Yes, I did it once,” or “Yes, more than once.” Now, if they said yes once or more than once, there was a follow up questions: “When did you do this? When did you think about suicide? How old were you, and how old were you when you began and when you ended?”

So good measures of suicidality and when it occurred. They also measured SOCE: “Did you ever receive treatment from someone who tried to change your sexual orientation?” If they said yes, they asked, “How old were you when that happened?”

So, Blosnich, et al, reported risk ratios and that the risk ratio for suicide ideation in this red bar is 1.93. Now, remember the summary of the findings said they had about twice the risk of suicide ideation. So that’s referring to this 1.93 figure. 75% increased risk of suicide planning. This is this 1.75 risk ratio. It’s 75% above unity.

In unity, the risk of doing something would be just the same as not doing it. So it would be like a zero effect. This is 75% higher. And then for suicide attempts, they reported 67% increase because they looked at only a portion of suicide attempts. I just lumped them all together and actually came up with a little bit stronger findings using their data, 75% increased risk.

This blue bar, which is the most significant, for some reason or other, they never looked at it. All this is suicide intention. I’m not sure why they didn’t, but I figured if I was going to reanalyze the data, I should at least include all the information. So there it is. They concluded that “SOCE has a particularly insidious associations with suicide risk and may compound or create suicide ideation or suicide attempts. Therefore, it should be restricted.”

So the problem with their study is that most of the suicide morbidity that the participants expressed happened before they went to SOCE. So someone who had gone to SOCE expressed two thirds of their suicidal ideation before the time that they went to SOCE, over half of suicide planning, almost half of suicide intention, over half of suicide attempts.

Well, what happens if you take a body of experiences and you just associated with someone’s going to SOCE and you say, well, they have over twice the risk of lifetime suicide ideation — not telling us that two thirds of that lifetime suicidal ideation that you’re talking about happened before they went to SOCE. And so they made the fundamental error of attributing an effect to a cause that occurred after the effect, something that is logically impossible.

We’ve known since Aristotle that causes have to precede effects in time. No one, not even the skeptic David Hume or anyone in that camp, ever questioned that a cause has to proceed an effect. But here you have a scientific study purporting to show us an effect that occurs before the supposed cause. So what I did was to go back and do what any good data analyst would do, and that is to control for preexisting distress in all of these measures.

And instead of these four measures, which is what they came up with, I came up with these measures. Now you can see that all of these risk ratios are below unity. That means the tendency for SOCE would be to reduce each of those. They’re not significantly reduced. There’s not enough data there, but they are all reduced. So I found that SOCE does not under any stretch of the imagination, increase any of these measures; it may in fact decrease them.

Now, that’s not all I found. I went back and looked at the most recent set of studies that were cited in the reviews of the APA and in the UK Qualities Office and looked at whether they had done the same thing. And I found that all of them, the four studies cited, had made the exact same mistake, or misbehavior, and declined to separate out SOCE before and after.

Dr. Christopher Rosik, in response to my study, went further. He reviewed all of the research on SOCE since 2009. Remember in 2009, the APA concluded it was inconclusive with regard to harm. So he looked and he found that none of the studies since 2009 had controlled for preexisting distress.

Whether these are the SOCE or GICE studies, not a single one of them had done this. There’s a major flaw in the entire body of research. Now Dr. Rosik also pointed out that very few of the studies actually sampled persons who were not currently LGBT, and that would falsify their findings in another way as well. Why? Because if you have a therapeutic effort or any kind of effort to change sexual orientation and you only sample persons who’ve been through that effort who currently identify as LGBT, you’re systematically excluding from that sample anyone for whom that therapy may have been successful.

If someone goes through therapy to change their sexual orientation or goes through any kind of life event that might change their sexual orientation, and then you sample only persons who currently identify as LGBT, you exclude those persons.

So let’s look at the statement that we started out with here. This was the statement by Minter. More than 60% of youths subjected to conversion therapy attempted suicide. Now, this is a citation of a study by Caitlin Ryan. She reported that 63% of teenagers whose parents made them go to conversion therapy had attempted suicide. It’s not a selection of all persons going to “conversion” therapy. It’s just youth who didn’t want to go, but their parents made them go.

This study participated in both of the fallacies listed by Dr. Rosik. For their suicide measure they asked, “Have you ever at any point in your life attempted taking your own life?” So they didn’t distinguish between before and after SOCE therapy. And then the sample included 245 participants, who self-identify as LGBT.

I wrote about this in my study, and I said that, despite participating in what I call this fallacy of association, they conclusively concluded that attempts to change sexual orientation during adolescence were associated with elevated suicidal behavior. So they participate in that falsehood.

Now, there’s one thing more that should be said. The primary goal of suicide intervention is not necessarily to prevent ideation, planning, or intention, but to prevent each of those from escalating to a suicide attempt. So, I went back to the data, and I looked at what was the probability of a person’s engaging in each of these behaviors, subsequently reporting having engaged in a suicide attempt.

And I found that for those who express suicide ideation, 36% went on to attempt suicide, except if they’d been to SOCE, it was only 10% who went on to attempt suicide. Suicide planning was the same thing: 43% without SOCE; if they had intervening SOCE, 10%. Suicide Intention: 57% down to 12% with SOCE. And 27% with suicide attempt versus 37% without SOCE.

So the evidence shows that SOCE is fairly effective at preventing suicide attempts. And that’s the problem with all of this research. Now imagine a study that looked at the use of antidepressant drugs and found that most people using antidepressant drugs also had suffered depression and breathlessly reported that we should ban anti-depressants because people who are exposed to them have more depression.

That kind of study would use the same backwards logic as these studies, Blosnich’s study and all of them that attempt to show us the harm of SOCE.

Thank you very much. This concludes my presentation.

Father Mark Hodges:

Thank you very much, Dr. Sullins. We appreciate all that you’ve done in this area, and your research is excellent. I have a question right off the bat for you…

THIS ENDS THE PRESENTATION. THE QUESTIONS WILL BE ON LOCALS.

Fr. Robert McTigue. He’s the host of the Catholic Current for the Station of the Cross Network. He says people pursue self-interest or benefit rather than difficult truths. And he listed some old ads, old commercials.

Nine out of ten doctors recommend Lucky Strike Cigarettes and so forth. These ads sell products. And now Father Roberts says the medical industry seems to be selling an ideology. Born that way, so to speak. Is this what we’re seeing now? Is this the latest example of medicine being paid to act in a manner contrary to the interests of patients and the truth?

Fr. Sullins:

Yeah, but I don’t know that I would point to a commercial interest, but there’s certainly a strong ideological interest there. Sometime around the turn of the century and the year 2000. The psychological literature became extremely ideological on this topic. And today, if you tried to submit an article on social media that did not support that ideology, you would have a very hard time getting it published.

I know this from experience, by the way, so the people that edit and accept the articles and the scholars that published them believe that it is unethical to try to convince someone who is same-sex attracted that that is not a beneficial thing for their lives and that they should pursue that in a full adoption of LGBT activity in life and that’s very clear in the research.

When you read the research to them, it is an effective argument to criticize the opposite opinion to that as being heteronormative and as being something that should be eradicated from society. That’s just almost a famous article of faith. I’ve even seen studies, a lot of studies, which say that persons who choose voluntarily to go to counseling to change same-sex attraction aren’t really making a free choice because society is so biased and heteronormative and there are so many social pressures out there to support the family and sexual complementarity that people can’t really make a choice freely to avoid that and go to a gay lifestyle. They’re just responding to those pressures.

If a same-sex attracted person feels that that’s not a good thing for them, and they’d like to change that. And by the way, almost a third of same-sex, almost a third of LGBT people say that they have tried to change their same-sex attraction. And many of them about 10 to 15% in various ways report that they would love to become heterosexual if they could.

They attribute those ideas to what they call internalized homophobia, where people are turning inward. The degradation of society, and they see that as a very negative kind of a thing. So even if someone says, I have this opinion or I want to go to this therapy, they discount that, so strict and steep as the ideology that’s coming forth in this body of literature.

Father Mark Hodges:

I’m sure that we can spend a great deal of time tapping your experience and wisdom, Father. But we only have about two and a half more minutes. Three and a half more minutes. And I’ve got several questions.

Dr. Morse:

Hold on, Father Mark. I’m going to use executive privilege here. Let’s go ahead and consider all the questions. When we recorded, we’ve been asked to submit a 27-minute package. We’ll edit it at that time. But let’s go ahead. Since people are here and have the questions, let’s go ahead and listen to what people want to know.

Father Mark Hodges:

Very good. Father, why did the Supreme Court reject the appeal of Washington State regarding change therapy?

Fr. Sullins:

I have no idea why they did that. There are a lot of legal arguments that I’m not privy to and most of the legal argumentation for it had to do with free speech and whether a therapist talking to a client is engaged in speech or engaged in conduct. And that’s a legal question I can’t really settle.

But there’s also the truth that neither side in that dispute really seemed to understand that the research, the claims that SOCE causes distress and harm, is really fraught, it has really been, in my opinion, rebutted. We have very strong arguments and I’ve presented a couple of them, but not all of them today. Why? That’s just not the case.

That hasn’t seemed to have caught up with the attorneys, both the ones for and ones against the certification or certiorari. I think it’s called.

Father Mark Hodges:

Father, how would you recommend that Catholics approach conversion therapy in light of this research? Conversion therapy remains controversial even among Catholic therapists, and the Catholic Church doesn’t specifically endorse conversion therapy, but rather encourages chaste living. Right. Sort of white knuckling it for speech. In your opinion, is it enough for us as Catholics to merely oppose bans on conversion therapy, or should we as Catholics, positively advocate for the expansion and implementation of conversion therapy?

Fr. Sullins:

Well, I think if you oppose a ban, you’re advocating for the freedom of persons to engage in conversion therapy if they choose to do so. And I think that’s maybe the sweet spot for Catholics and for any person of faith on this issue, because going to therapy when you don’t want to or going to therapy, that somehow you feel coerced to do, is not going to be too successful and may cause harm.

I talked about this study of children who were forced by their parents to undergo conversion therapy. And while I don’t think that the findings of that study are accurate, I do know from my look at the data that children who go to conversion therapy, that is persons who go when they’re under 18 years old, the outcomes are not as beneficial, and the harm indicators are higher than persons who go as adults who go later.

And the way I read that is that if it’s possible, a young person under 18 probably should not go to conversion therapy, especially in the case where they’re resistant, they don’t want to. I have parents that call me from time to time and ask what they should do for their children, and I never recommend that they send them to therapy against the child’s will.

A person who goes should do so voluntarily, and I would hesitate to recommend sending a child to conversion therapy for a number of reasons we could get into if you want. So the other important thing to remember is that most people who ever engage in same-sex behavior eventually desist from that.

We just finished a study of the British population. They have great data on this and the percent of the British population who report that today they are heterosexual, engage in heterosexual sex, but at some time in the past they engaged in homosexual sex. That slice of the population is larger than the proportion of persons who say they have always engaged in heterosexual sex and still do so.

So the x LGBT persons, you might say, are actually more numerous than LGBT persons. So most people who engage in that kind of lifestyle or behavior eventually desist from it, and they do so without therapy. A portion of them will engage in therapy, but a portion not a lot of people who are same-sex attracted are not necessarily psychologically conflicted in some other way such that they really need therapy.

They need to explore change and they need to look at themselves and to go through journeys like we all do to find their way to God, but not necessarily with therapy. A great book on this is the one Why I Don’t call myself Gay. Who wrote that?

Dr. Morse:

Daniel Matson.

Fr. Sullins:

Daniel Matson. He describes that wonderful spiritual journey mostly toward living apart from his same-sex attraction. But it didn’t involve going to therapy. And also, many persons who experience same-sex attraction aren’t necessarily going to be able to change. It’s disputed how many can change and how much. And in the research that I’ve reviewed and done, a majority can change.

To a certain extent, they can start to move from same-sex attraction toward opposite sex attraction. But only a minority can become fully acclimated to heterosexual sex or a marriage relationship. It’s somewhere between 17 and 20%. It generally from the five or six studies that have looked at this. So it’s not necessarily therapy may not be indicated for a lot of people.

Dr. Morse:

I may add to that, if I may add to that one resource for I don’t know who asked this question, but one resource that you may want to be aware of is that the Ruth Institute has done a series of interviews with people who have journeyed away from same-sex attraction and an LGBT self-identity. And in those stories, you’ll hear a variety of stories pretty much going along with what Father Paul just said.

But you’ll also hear how therapy played a role or did not play a role in that process. And so if you, if particularly if you have a personal concern, I would recommend that you go look at those videos. There’s a whole playlist of them that are at the bottom of this page on Counseling Freedom for All. And you’ll see just kind of how nuanced and varied these stories really can be.

And so if you’ve got a child or a loved one, I would particularly recommend that you go listen to some of those interviews with those people.

Father Mark Hodges:

Father, this latest I don’t want to say decision by the Supreme Court, but yesterday’s rejection by the Supreme Court, they did not take up the issue, but they let a lower court stand. Does that give you hope for the Supreme Court to rule on conversion therapy in the future? There are challenges in Virginia and Maryland. Mass resistance mentions this. There’s challenges in Virginia and Maryland on therapy bans, counseling. This is just talk. And do you have hope that the Supreme Court will eventually take that issue up?

Fr. Sullins:

Yes, I do. It was a split decision by the court, and we have split findings in the appellate courts, which is exactly what the Supreme Court is supposed to rule on. You know, we have one appellate court who is in Florida and those states who have prohibited conversion therapy bans. And then we have the Northwest Circuit Court that has prohibited challenges to conversion therapy bans.

Well, that’s why we go to the Supreme Court. So I do think that they will take it up eventually. This wasn’t the case for various reasons. I think that they’re going to do that. I’m kind of glad in retrospect that they didn’t because we are making great advances in the research. It’s only been in the last year, year and a half that we’ve come up with a real strong, coherent rebuttal to the flood of weak and fake so-called research that purports to show harm from conversion therapy and that it’s ineffective and lots of other issues that are related to this.

We’re beginning to find our feet to push back against those in a very strong way. So it’s good. I think if we can have this argument before the Supreme Court in a year or two, we’ll be in a much stronger place.

Father Mark Hodges:

Father Doug Mainwaring of Life Sight News asks this. He, let me get this straight. He says, those who experience same-sex attraction but who do not currently identify as LGBT. Yeah, were excluded, generally speaking, were excluded from these studies.

Fr. Sullins:

As systematically excluded from every one of them with a couple of partial exceptions. So you can look at Ross, Dr. Ross’s chart and see what those are. By the way, anyone who wants a copy of these slides in a cloud folder with full texts of all the studies that I’ve cited in the slides, you just have to send me an email. PSullins@RuthInstitute.org, and I’ll be happy to send that to you for your reading.

Father Mark Hodges:

So in other words, someone who is experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction went to SOCE, went to talk therapy. And then overcame that or how you would put it had a significant reduction of it. Right. They were not counted.

Fr. Sullins:

They are systematically excluded from the sample. And believe it or not, people have published studies arguing that SOCE is not effective, making a drawing a sample that way. So anyone for whom it could have been really effective, they just exclude altogether. They see that somehow as being objective. This body of research is so strongly subject to confirmation bias, it’s hard to imagine, but yep, that’s what they do.

You know, the whole idea of the spectrum of attractions from heterosexual to homosexual is something that has been discounted probably is not true in recent research. The genetic research found that in fact people who have very strong same-sex attractions can also have very strong opposite sex attractions. And even using the Kinsey scale, which forces a spectrum, the most common category is the category mostly heterosexual, that is, persons who have some level of same-sex attraction.

But they have mostly hetero opposite sex attraction. So it turns out that, you know, it’s something like 90% of persons who have some level of same-sex attraction also have some level of opposite sex attraction. It kind of undermines the whole idea that there are these two ways of being that you can be on one pole opposite sex attracted and on the other pole same-sex attracted.

And then you have these bisexual folk in the middle. It’s really more in line with the evidence to say that everybody has a mix of these. And some people choose to pursue one or pursue another or to enact one or enact another. And the most common set of attractions is opposite sex attraction. We heard you could easily say an opposite sex attracted species because almost everyone who reports any level of same-sex attraction reports also opposite sex attraction.

This is something that people just are blind to. I’ve studied the children of same-sex parents for years and something above 50% of children who are residing with a same-sex couple is the biological child of one of those two partners. Now, if you think about that, the majority of same-sex attracted people who have children have been able to function heterosexually to the point where they’re able to have a child.

That’s not exactly an inability to have a heterosexual attraction. So the whole notion of homosexual persons as a distinct class that are subject to certain privileges or rights is being subtly and sometimes more than totally undermined by this area of research. If people can change same-sex attractions at a high rate, and they certainly do, and when they do report same-sex attractions, they also have opposite sex attractions.

It’s hard to see how this is somehow a different separate class of persons than any of us who struggle and go through journeys with regard to sexual attractions and behavior.

Dr. Morse:

If I could go back to Doug’s original question of systematically excluding people, it would be a little bit like claiming that marriage counseling doesn’t work because by looking only at a sample of divorced people, the people for whom it helped would be excluded. Okay. And the other problem that Father Sullins looked at.

You can also look at the analogy with marriage and divorce and marriage counseling, which is the people who are in the most distress in their marriage are the ones who are going to seek counseling in the first place. Right. Well, that seems to be the case for same-sex attracted persons who are the ones who are really suicidal.

I’ve talked about this in the context of other studies that he’s done. These are people who are really in a lot of distress in the first place. That’s why they choose to go to therapy, right? Is that they’re hurting and so they’re seeking that out. And so if you don’t take account of pre therapy distress, you’re going to really misinterpret what you see.

Father Mark Hodges:

So, Father, Doug goes on and he says So there’s this you might say there’s this group of people who were helped by SOCE and yet who are not included on these studies. Is there research available that is attempted to find out how many people fit in that category? He says that is it possible to conduct that type of research, not mentions?

I have a feeling we might be legion, by our presence here.

Fr. Sullins:

Well, Doug, I encourage you to look at my reply to Stucchi and Ricci in the debate over my study, because I actually come up with an estimate of the number of persons in the United States who have been positively benefited by SOCE. And I put that together from the two or three studies that have looked at this.

And then I combine it with data from Williams Institute. So they can’t argue with it too much to come up with the number. It’s about 150,000 Americans that I estimate are SOCE alumni, which is my preferred term. They prefer SOCE survivors. I think that’s crazy. But SOCE alumni who have had a positive experience with it is probably more than that.

So that it gives it’s a conservative estimate that I put forth. So you can look at that and see what you think. What we don’t have studies of are qualitative studies of persons who have changed sexual orientation and are living happy lives about it for a number of reasons. We just don’t have that. I would love to see that.

I think I have people who could be samples for that. I’m looking for a scholar who would write such a study, and it would be good. It wouldn’t be scientifically very strong in terms of evidence, but it would get a picture of what these persons look like. Most of them, of course, are very religious. Their lives have changed in ways that they would never have expected.

And they talk about their ex, their former lifestyle, both with SOCE and of course, we’re seeing transgendered resistors who could fit that profile as well. It’d be great to get those studies into the literature, but another set of studies that would be great to do and no one’s ever done is to do an evaluation study of gender affirming therapy.

We have this this set of studies, several dozen that have looked at social science and how much people are harmed or not harmed by that. No one has ever done a single study of gender affirming therapy to find out if people are harmed or not harmed by that. So a lot of the ex certainly ex-gay folk who have been to SOCE or not report that they were not helped at all by gender affirming therapy.

In fact, it was after they kind of escaped from the clutches of gender affirming therapies that they were able to pursue greater freedom in moving beyond LGBT.

Dr. Morse:

May I just correct one thing or suggest one thing? Do you mean gay as a gay affirming therapy?

Father Mark Hodges:

I do.

Dr. Morse:

Gender affirming therapy now means trans people who are coaching you into transitioning.

Fr. Sullins:

Yes, I’m sorry. I did mean gay affirming therapy. GAT, GAT. They’re both the same acronym.

Father Mark Hodges:

Just want some clarity. When was your study released?

Fr. Sullins:

September 2022.

Father Mark Hodges:

Very good. And what is the general Catholic community’s response to Pope Francis increasing the toleration or acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism?

Fr. Sullins:

Well, I’m not in touch with the general Catholic community. I know I talk with some people and there’s a variety of responses. My own response is that, you know, Pope Francis, as you’ve said, does seem sometimes to talk in terms of a general increasing acceptance. And at other times he talks in the exact opposite way with strong denunciation of gender ideology and affirmation of the natural family.

So I think it depends on which Pope Francis you’re hearing on any particular day as to what it is that he’s going to be saying if Pope Francis is not consistent in his pronouncements on these things. So I wouldn’t get to I wouldn’t react too strongly to any particular thing that he says. And if you read Pope Francis as some of a philosophy of rhetoric or of argumentation here, he is purposely inconsistent in some ways so as not to be too cruel.

I think he wants to be pastorally open to lots of different possibilities. So I choose to focus on the good things that Pope Francis says. And he says a lot of really good things. You know, he’s very strongly against gay marriage. He says that gender ideology is a plot of the devil.

Homosexual men cannot be priests. He’s very clear about that. So I would like to take Pope Francis at his best from my point of view, and to celebrate that.

Father Mark Hodges:

Laura Brian Hanford asks this, Father, picking up on your comment that many same-sex attracted people are also can be at the same time or at various times heterosexually attracted. There’s a mix of attraction, so to speak. Laura mentioned she has heard there’s some evidence that same-sex attraction can fluctuate and wane over time. Have you seen specific studies that show this?

Fr. Sullins:

Well, it’s usually called fluidity, and persons can more or less report a greater or lesser same-sex attraction throughout their lives. The best study of this that I know is by Ruskin Diamond in 2016, where they reviewed that data for large population studies that sampled people at different points in time reporting their same-sex behavior, same-sex attraction.

And they showed that a majority of people do change over time, particularly majority of women do. I think it might be less than a majority of men, but it’s a large fraction of them. And that the vast majority of persons who do change, change in the direction of increasing heterosexual attraction. And so they argue in that study that the idea of sexual orientation immutability is false, that there’s not scientific evidence for that.

There’s strong LGBT advocates. So they advocate that the gay community move away from that argument because they feel that it’s going to be undercut eventually and it’s going to impede the advance of gay rights in the courts. Now, you might notice that the gay community has not moved away from that argument. They’ve reaffirmed that. So that may be something that is coming down the pike.

But same-sex attractions can diminish over time. They can also increase over time, but they tend almost always to diminish. I hope that answers your question.

Father Mark Hodges:

Before we come to a close, I want to give you, Father, an opportunity to make any closing remarks. I want to give Dr. Morse an opportunity to give any closing remarks. But on the side here, I just wanted to ask our members of the press if they would stay. We had the original idea of going to each person asking a question, and I don’t know if I dropped the ball or what.

But anyway, in any case, I would very much, if you can help with this after we’re done, which will just be in a couple of minutes. If you could give me a shot for when I edit this all together, I would like a shot of, you know, of Laura and of Mass Resistance and so forth. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Dr. Morse:

All right. If you’re willing to be identified as the person who asked the question.

Father Mark Hodges:

You don’t mind being just pictured there. That would be very helpful. All right, Father Sullins, we appreciate your time and your excellent research on this very important topic. And I just wanted to give you an opportunity. Do you have any closing comments?

Fr. Sullins:

Sure, I have two comments. One, I know that sometimes we bounce from topic to topic, and I can’t be so good or coherent on any topic in this setting. So if you have a question, a follow up question, or that didn’t get addressed here, if you send me an email, I’ll be happy to respond to you by email as quickly and coherently as I can.

The second thing is, I want to encourage you to write about this topic. It is not an accident that the attorneys on both sides in yesterday’s action really don’t know about this latest turn in the research. For me, it’s amazing that they don’t know. I’ve come out of a pitched battle over the past year on this topic, and I feel like we have won that battle for the most part.

We have excellent evidence that is going to associate participating in therapy to persons who struggle with same-sex attraction does not cause psychological harm. It does not lead them to greater suicidality and that it sometimes works. So I wouldn’t say it works most of the time or all the time, but sometimes it does. And the reason people don’t know that is because the media in this country is largely biased and doesn’t want to publish that.

So I would encourage you, if you have your platforms and space to do that, to make that known. If enough people talk about that, we may be able to change the conversation and at least alert people who don’t know. It’s like the fact that sexual orientation is immutable, that people are born that way. Well, that’s demonstrably untrue, has been for a long time, but a lot of people still believe it just because it keeps getting repeated again and again.

So I encourage you to repeat something that’s more true and maybe that’ll become better known. Thank you for your participation today.

Father Mark Hodges:

And thank you very much, Father Sullins, for your research and your leadership in this area. Very much needed. Dr. Morse, do you have closing comments?

Dr. Morse:

Yes, I do. I want to reiterate what Father Sullins just said, that I really hope that those of you who have journalistic platforms will spread the word about this important research. I’d like to take this moment to thank the board and the supporters. We have thousands of small supporters here at the Ruth Institute. We don’t get any money from George Soros or the government or anything.

And I’d like to thank all those people who have made this research possible, because as you can see, it’s a pitched battle between David and Goliath here you could say. And so I’m very pleased that we have been able to support Father Sullins and his work. And I want you to just think about the people who are struggling with some form of same-sex attraction and some form of gender identity issues and the idea of banning therapy for them and what that’s going to mean for their lives, just to try to make that as real in your mind as you can.

And as you’re writing about this topic, I would ask you to consider your terminology very carefully. As I mentioned, conversion therapy is a pejorative term invented by the opponents of this therapy. And so I would ask you to consider that as you’re writing.

And also, I would ask you to be alert to the following trick. All of the evidence that we have discussed here today has to do with same-sex attraction, unwanted same-sex attraction, sexual orientation. We haven’t even touched the evidence around gender identity, attempts to change gender identity. And yet these therapy bans, originally they were bans on same-sex attraction, any sexual orientation change therapy. But increasingly they are just taking all of that rhetoric sliding in gender identity as if it were exactly the same thing and had all the same considerations and so on and so forth.

And that is completely untrue. So when you are reporting on this, it would be useful, I think, for you to be alert to what is actually being discussed, what is actually being promoted and what’s being slipped in and hoping no one will notice that you’ve confounded two very different things. So once again, on behalf of the staff and board and supporters of the Ruth Institute, I would like to thank all of you for being here today.

We appreciate your interest in this important topic. It’s our intention to have a recording of at least some part of this available afterwards that you can use if you are a blogger or radio person that you can broadcast it if you want to go back and refer to it. And also all of the information that we’ve been talking about is housed on the Counseling Freedom for All web page of the Ruth Institute.

As you scroll down it, you’ll see answers to your many questions and you’ll see links to all of the important research that Father Sullins talked about today as well as all the video interviews. So once again, thank you very much.

Father Mark Hodges:

Thank you, Dr. Morse. And thank you, Father Sullins. And thank you to all our participants. If we might just get a moment of our guests here. Matt, you’re asking for like letting them giving us an opportunity to see their faces. Laura, what outlet do you represent?

Laura:

So I’m listening today, just more in my general learning capacity. I’ve written for The Federalist and the Christian Post, but I’m not specifically representing either one of those, so I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that I was attending on their behalf. But this is very helpful and I would love to get the studies from you because I do like to reference.

The framing is very helpful. And you brought up some points that I hadn’t thought about. So I will be continuing to write and I would like to bear this in mind and be able to say, you know, some of your research.

Art:

My name is Arthur Shaper. I’m the field director for Mass Resistance, but Brian is doing very well. We have our organization where we’re the international pro-family group that makes the difference. We’re an activist organization. I’m sure all of you know us very well. We’ve had considerable success stopping reparative or restorative or change therapy bans.

Our latest victory was working with United Kingdom activists. This was a stunning victory, right? I had been raising great alarm about this as early as 2020. It was so shameful, so-called conservative governments. The first thing they want to do is show how liberal they are. It’s just stunning and disturbing. And yet, for all of the vehemence to try to push this perverse policy through, it failed.

And there is some hope, even with the more left wing party, they they’re actually speaking out against allowing men into women’s facilities. I mean, even the Labor Party is starting to abandon this absolute moral. But that’s never enough. And we have to stand for truth. That’s something that we’ve been very keen on at mass resistance and we’re building across the country, around the world.

We’ve even had people in Barbados as well as Canada, the United Kingdom, I already mentioned, and even Ghana have now reached out to us. Sub-Saharan Africa is way ahead of us in fighting this perversion. Right. Well, thank you.

About the Ruth Institute

The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

To schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.

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