Rev. Father Paul Sullins | The Dr. J Show
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse and Father Paul Sullins unpack the myths and political narratives surrounding “conversion therapy,” sharing insights from their amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. They challenge the American Psychological Association’s portrayal of sexual orientation change efforts, expose the lack of rigorous evidence behind mainstream claims, and highlight how research on contributing factors—like childhood trauma—has been sidelined. The conversation also examines historical shifts in psychiatric policy, the suppression of certain kinds of research, and key studies showing that ethical, client-led therapy can yield psychological benefits without the coercive practices often cited by opponents.
Relevant source documents:
APA 2009 Task Force Report (140 pages) “Appropriate Therapeutic Responses
to Sexual Orientation.”
Bailey et.al. 2016 “Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science,” Psychological
Science in the Public Interest 2016, Vol. 17(2) 45–10.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/1529100616637616
APA Resolution on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, February 2021.
https://www.apa.org/about/policy/resolution-sexual-orientation-change-efforts.pdf
Books referenced during the show:
The Case Against Conversion Therapy, Douglas C. Haldeman, editor, American Psychological Association, 2022.
Lauman et.al. The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States. 1994
Alan Bell, Martin Weinberg and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women. (1981)
Father Sullins’ Reports on Clergy Sexual Abuse: https://ruthinstitute.org/resource-centers/father-sullins-research/
Father Sullins’ Reports on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts:
https://ruthinstitute.org/sexual-orientation-change-efforts-arent-harmful/
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Transcript
(Please note the transcript is auto-generated and likely contains errors)
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:32:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
For decades we’ve been told that people are born gay. Being gay is an innate, immutable trait comparable to being black or left handed. Early childhood experiences even childhood sexual abuse completely unrelated to sexual orientation. Family dynamics. Abusive or absent father. Oh my goodness no, that could not possibly have anything to do with a child sexual development. And of course, it goes without saying no one can change their sexual orientation.
00:00:32:11 – 00:01:02:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
In fact, it’s dangerous to even try. But what if everything you think you know about gay is actually incorrect? Hi everyone. I’m Doctor Jennifer Roback Morris, founder and president of the Ruth Institute, an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love. The Ruth Institute submitted a friend of the court brief to the United States Supreme Court, supporting a case that challenges a ban on so-called conversion therapy.
00:01:02:02 – 00:01:25:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
In the course of preparing that brief. My colleague Father Paul Sullins and I read numerous documents prepared by the American Psychological Association. We reviewed many of the studies that claim to support the commonly held views about homosexuality that I just mentioned. We were shocked to find how flimsy the evidence really is. In today’s episode of The Doctor J.
00:01:25:04 – 00:01:44:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Show. Father Polen, I will walk you through some of this evidence. You’ll hear Father Solan say, it’s a house of cards, and by the end of the show, you’ll see why you don’t want to miss this important conversation. You may want to bookmark the segments that interest you, so you can refer back to them and share them with friends.
00:01:44:06 – 00:01:47:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You can find the books and articles we refer to in the show notes.
00:01:47:20 – 00:01:51:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So welcome, everyone, to today’s episode of The Doctor J.
00:01:51:15 – 00:01:55:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Show with me and my colleague, Father Paul Sullins.
00:01:55:12 – 00:02:17:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
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00:02:18:01 – 00:02:24:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s the most pro-life, pro-family way to buy or sell a home. Go to real estate for life, dawg.
00:02:24:15 – 00:02:30:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Father, Paul Sullins, welcome back to the doctor J show. It’s going to be great to talk with you about this material.
00:02:30:20 – 00:02:36:09
Father Paul Sullins
I’m really, really pleased to be here. And we’re talking about some very important things today, I think.
00:02:36:11 – 00:03:03:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes. And I want to just give the viewers a little bit of a insight into why we’re even doing this. You and I participated in creating an amicus brief for a U.S. Supreme Court case that’s coming up. And in the course of doing that, we had to read quite a bit of material, related to what the psychology profession believes to be true about same sex attraction, conversion therapy and a whole lot of other topics.
00:03:03:23 – 00:03:33:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And to me, Paul, I was shocked, honestly, by how bad their stuff is. I was just blown away, by the what they consider acceptable for themselves versus what they demand of us. You know, that we we prove this or disprove that and so on and so forth. Why don’t we start with just a few basic questions about the conversion therapy debate and get you started there, and then we’ll come in with some of the other material about the documents.
00:03:33:04 – 00:03:34:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
What do you think about that plan?
00:03:34:18 – 00:03:37:10
Father Paul Sullins
Sounds like a great plan. Let’s do it. Yeah.
00:03:37:12 – 00:03:54:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay. Let’s do it. So, so let’s just start, that the opponents of conversion therapy claim that conversion therapists, have their goal to change people’s sexual orientation. Is that, in fact, the case now?
00:03:54:19 – 00:04:22:10
Father Paul Sullins
It’s not the case. And they do claim that, in fact, they claim that the hidden goal of conversion therapy is to eliminate homosexuality from society, that there’s this, conspiracy, to do that. And none of that, those even close to the truth, most persons now, I say most because I don’t know, 100%, of everyone who does these things.
00:04:22:10 – 00:04:54:02
Father Paul Sullins
And there’s always, a few people that are going to be off the extreme end in some form of fashion. But at every conversion therapist that I know and every licensed conversion therapist, it does not set a goal to change someone’s sexual orientation. They do set a goal to listen to a person’s own goals that they set for themselves, and to try to help and facilitate them as best they can.
00:04:54:07 – 00:05:20:09
Father Paul Sullins
That’s the general goal of any ethical therapist to hear what your concerns are, what’s troubling you, and to see if I, as a therapist, can support, you in working through that or, and coming to some sort of change or decision or resolution. Right. Greater integration or authenticity in some form. That’s the goal of all therapy. And that’s what conversion therapists do.
00:05:20:09 – 00:06:06:05
Father Paul Sullins
But the distinction is that a conversion therapist is willing to listen to someone say that they are troubled, by having same sex attraction, and that they may believe that that violates, religious moral norms, and they don’t want to live on the basis of those same sex attraction. And so they’re willing to help people to, adapt to living what religious people would like us would call a holy, faithful life, even if they have the experience of same sex attraction, a, so-called gay affirmative therapist is not willing to do that.
00:06:06:07 – 00:06:39:23
Father Paul Sullins
Because they see that same sex attraction is is a good thing. And should be encouraged. And, people should help to adapt their lives to those same contractions and not the other way around. So, so that’s really the distinction. There are even, because this this charge is leveled at conversion therapists. There are conversion therapists today that will not even let the client set the goal of changing sexual orientation.
00:06:40:01 – 00:07:16:22
Father Paul Sullins
But instead they will work on, lessening trauma or, resolving, issues in the imbalance of parenting, growing up and other, elements of a person’s early life that are known to be associated with developing same sex attractions. And so they realize that the same sex attractions may diminish, they may, lose their, their salience, that is, they’ll still be there, but they won’t be controlling or dominating a person’s life.
00:07:17:00 – 00:07:39:10
Father Paul Sullins
Or they may disappear. But that’s not really the goal therapy. The goal therapy is to help a person, work through and find peace with regard to being, let’s say, sexually abused when they were eight years old or or being neglected by one or both of their parents. 2 to 2 greater extent or something like that.
00:07:39:12 – 00:07:44:10
Father Paul Sullins
So it it’s a false charge. They make other false charges to the.
00:07:44:10 – 00:08:01:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Well, let’s but let’s, let’s, let’s stick with this one. Let’s stick with this one first because this is a this is foundational. I think, in point of fact, I don’t know anybody who calls himself a conversion therapist. I mean, I think we should get that on the table as well. I mean, you and I are acquainted with quite a few people who do this kind of work.
00:08:01:10 – 00:08:24:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
None of them use this term with respect to themselves. Right. And as you say, some of them even resist saying. It’s great that you have this goal, but I can’t promise you that. By no means can I promise you that. So let’s deal with some of the underlying issues and stuff like that. How do therapists who do this kind of work, how do they describe themselves?
00:08:24:23 – 00:08:26:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
What’s their self understanding?
00:08:26:20 – 00:09:05:01
Father Paul Sullins
Therapists? The therapists almost no one does what we would call conversion therapy for the sake of convenience. Right now, almost all of that full time, it says, or hangs out their shingle and says, I’m doing conversion therapy. Y’all come, instead, people engage in, therapy to help persons with a range of life difficulties. And, some of those would also help persons with same sex attraction or problems with sexuality, or managing their sexuality and religion.
00:09:05:03 – 00:09:33:21
Father Paul Sullins
So they don’t set out to do it full time. Now, when I say therapists, I’m not being facetious. There was a survey done of, general clinical therapists in England. I it was about, ten years ago, maybe, maybe 13, 14 years ago. And it asked them, have you ever helped someone to, change their sexual orientation or to resolve, homosexual orientation in some way?
00:09:34:00 – 00:10:03:20
Father Paul Sullins
17% of them said, yes, I have, these were not conversion therapists. These were just ordinary run of the mill therapist. And and yet, they said that, because they have the ethical obligation to support the goals of the client, that if someone comes to them and says, I’m troubled being same sex attracted, and I want to try to change, they have an obligation to try to help that person.
00:10:03:21 – 00:10:22:23
Father Paul Sullins
And many of them also reported they had some degree of success doing that. So these are it’s just ordinary therapy. But it’s applied to this particular, population or set of problems. Right, right. I would say.
00:10:23:01 – 00:10:23:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Go ahead, go ahead.
00:10:23:21 – 00:10:52:22
Father Paul Sullins
Same thing is true about what we call gay affirmative therapy. It’s just ordinary therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy, for the most part, that accepts and affirms someone’s gay identity and then helps them to work through whatever problems they want to work through. Now, someone with a gay identity generally doesn’t want to change their sexuality, but they might want to deal with, having too much, anonymous sex.
00:10:52:22 – 00:11:26:01
Father Paul Sullins
They want to they want to, diminish that or do away with that. They might want to, reduce the rate of substance abuse. They might want to, not be so depressed. And so gay affirmative therapy would say, great, let’s do that. Within the perimeter of you being a committed gay individual. Conversion therapy or what’s better, they would call themselves maybe reparative therapy.
00:11:26:02 – 00:11:43:14
Father Paul Sullins
Would say, okay, let’s do that. But let’s realize that your sexual orientation may be an issue and may change, particularly if you have strong religious commitments. That may preclude pursuing the depths of an LGBT lifestyle.
00:11:43:16 – 00:12:06:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, one thing that struck me, one of the things that I read for this is a, an official document, really, of the American Psychological Association was published in 2022, and it’s called the case, The Case Against Conversion Therapy. And both of us have read this. We have it on our Kindle, and I was struck by how dishonest the use of the term was in that, in that volume.
00:12:06:18 – 00:12:39:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So I have one right here in the in the very, introduction to the book, the editor, Douglas, Douglas Halderman says in the mental health literature, these terms, quote, conversion therapy or, quote, reparative therapy are being replaced by the less familiar but more accurate as the acronym Sexual Orientation Change Efforts or Social Associ, because these methods do not constitute a legitimate and accepted form of therapy, there is no empirical basis for the theories of associate and no evidence of of its success.
00:12:39:19 – 00:13:13:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Close quote. So they’ve judged it already. They’ve on page three, the introduction. They told you the denounced the conclusion. Then later in the book, later in the book, somebody says conversion therapy, sometimes referred to as reparative therapy, reintegrate therapy. Reorientation theory refers to delve into this, a set of pseudoscientific, discredited practices that aim to deny and suppress the sexual orientation, gender identities, and or gender expressions of sexual and gender minorities.
00:13:13:00 – 00:13:18:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay, so that that’s not a scientific definition, that that’s already a.
00:13:18:14 – 00:13:23:01
Father Paul Sullins
That’s an activist activist propaganda is what that is.
00:13:23:03 – 00:13:47:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes, yes. Now and then and then here’s the next thing that I really want to call attention. Everybody. Because you see this just just this week I was asked to comment on something. And, you know, I sent in a comment to the reporter again, oh, I forget what the issue was, but I pointed out the way in which the mainstream psychological professions describes sexual orientation change efforts and conversion therapy.
00:13:47:03 – 00:14:10:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
They always prejudice it by parking it next to a bunch of things that really are discredited. So let me read. And this comes out again out of this official document of the American Psychological Association. Let’s get this. Here we go. They, they list some techniques that they categorize as gender identity change effort. So we’re going to talk about this in a minute as well.
00:14:10:14 – 00:14:45:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Examples of gender identity change efforts include the use of aversive operant conditioning techniques, i.e. pairing a homo erotic image with an electric shock, cognitive restructuring, and psychoanalytic processing of formative experiences. Gacy gender identity change efforts may also include more subtle talk therapies that encourage for simple, for example, trans women or more feminine feminine identified persons who are assigned male at birth to override any feelings of having a more feminine or effeminate gender identity or expression.
00:14:45:21 – 00:15:07:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
To take on identities that are more aligned with their gender assigned at birth, that is, to take on identities as more masculine men. So they’re already prejudging it by the by the by what they put it next to. It’s a little bit like discrediting the Ruth Institute by putting it on a list that has the Ku Klux Klan on it.
00:15:07:13 – 00:15:28:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know that without saying anything about what we actually do or don’t do, you know, it’s like it’s changing the subject and kind of smearing dirt on the thing, you know, to make it look better and that people should be aware that that that is a deliberate tactic that has nothing to do with, with what’s going on.
00:15:28:08 – 00:15:51:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So anyway, I thought that was a good time to to mention that little fact, you know, that that, that that’s part of the whole descriptive process. So, so that’s one of the things that we wanted to talk to. So let me ask you this, father, solid in your experience, do you know, do conversion therapists in fact use electric shock, nausea inducing drugs or, torturous kinds of methods?
00:15:51:07 – 00:15:57:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Have you encountered people like this, doing this kind of work in the United States?
00:15:57:04 – 00:16:27:23
Father Paul Sullins
No. Not since probably 1980. Has anyone used those kind of techniques for homosexuality now, prior to 1980, it was common, to use electric shock or nausea inducing methods to help people deal with homosexuality. And that’s because the major field, the dominant field of, psychology was something we all learned as behaviorism.
00:16:28:00 – 00:17:00:19
Father Paul Sullins
Behaviorism says that you control someone’s behavior by operant conditioning. You provide pleasure and pain, and you can help someone to modify their behavior. And that was used to treat a lot of things, over drinking, smoking, pornography. You name it, there were, there were hundreds of studies, of the use of the, those kind of techniques in the 1960s and the 1970s.
00:17:00:21 – 00:17:34:17
Father Paul Sullins
But behaviorism, people found was ineffective, that people would have change what they recorded as change, but it wouldn’t last. It would last for a couple, three weeks. But once they got out of the environment, the operant conditioning, it went away. So. So those, techniques fell away. Behaviorism in general has been itself is credited as a scientific theory, and is not used today, although for a few things they still use electric shock.
00:17:34:19 – 00:17:57:14
Father Paul Sullins
It helps with certain forms of depression and other things. Oh, like it’s a mild form of electric shock. That is not painful, but, helps to rewire certain parts of the brain. I don’t know the specifics of it, but you can look it up and read about it. So they still use some of those techniques, in a mild way for other things.
00:17:57:14 – 00:18:18:23
Father Paul Sullins
But no one has used it for something as general as sexual orientation or sexual behavior or other other techniques like that. Now, it is true. I read something, about, therapists, telling people to put a rubber band around their wrist and snap their wrist, like if they have certain thoughts or something. I have heard of that.
00:18:18:23 – 00:18:43:09
Father Paul Sullins
Done. And, I don’t know what I would call that. I certainly wouldn’t call it torture. Person, chooses to kind of remind themselves that they shouldn’t be doing something. And I’ve heard of it used mostly with regard to, pornography helping young men go to when they have a lustful thought or a desire to do pornography, they snap their wrists.
00:18:43:09 – 00:19:07:04
Father Paul Sullins
It kind of reminds them of what they’re doing. It’s kind of an objectivity. I’m not a therapist. I can’t judge how effective that is, but I wouldn’t see that as some sort of, harmful, abusive, kind of, treatment. So that would be the most that I’ve, that I’m aware of, with regard to sexuality or, sexual related difficulties.
00:19:07:06 – 00:19:42:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And, you know, if I may, if I may say the one of the big surveys that questions people about and this, I think was done, I can’t remember if this is done by the Trevor Project or the Williams Institute, but a couple of these organizations have quizzed people on how many have received some form of conversion therapy. It seems to me that if anybody in the United States of America was being beaten with brooms or electrodes receiving electroshock, those guys would have found it and they would have been they would have told us all about it, you know, and so and so that it and those things are already illegal.
00:19:42:08 – 00:19:54:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
If I could just point that out, those things could already be prosecuted within the United States. So the real target here is talk therapy, right? You know, as a practical matter, the whole that’s that’s what this is about.
00:19:54:16 – 00:20:25:02
Father Paul Sullins
Now, you there are some older persons, if they interview them might describe, aversion therapy techniques that they received decades ago. So there are still people who may remember those kinds of treatments. And we know that there are some persons who, falsify their reports. They say, oh, I was tortured or whatever. And when you investigate, well, who actually did this and when did it happen?
00:20:25:02 – 00:20:52:04
Father Paul Sullins
And you start to apply a little bit of investigation, those, those, reports kind of evaporate. We had a couple of famous instances of fabulous, people who who famously were found to be making it all up. So there is a, a, lack of objectivity, on all of these things. But one point that I’d like to make, and I, I believe that it’s true.
00:20:52:06 – 00:21:16:14
Father Paul Sullins
But I throw it out there, I’ve never been contradicted. And that is, it is, to my knowledge, not a single therapist in the United States has been prosecuted for abuse or any kind of misconduct related to sexual orientation therapy. We have some, you know, claims of fraud, and they’ve been sued for that.
00:21:16:16 – 00:21:42:06
Father Paul Sullins
But even when their claim for fraud, there was no allegation that somehow they were abusing people or, you know, making them throw up or, have corrective rape or these all these other kind of, heinous kind of things that are just thrown out there, that to my knowledge, that doesn’t occur. And if someone claims that it does occur, I would like to ask them for the proof.
00:21:42:06 – 00:21:46:15
Father Paul Sullins
Who did it to whom? Where? Let’s let’s, you know, prosecute it.
00:21:46:15 – 00:21:50:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Is it let’s deal with it. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s deal with that as a so.
00:21:50:20 – 00:21:53:22
Father Paul Sullins
If you’re not going to prosecute it and stop talking about it.
00:21:54:00 – 00:22:15:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Well and and redefining conversion therapy as consumer fraud is one of the plays that’s in play right now. So so tell us, does undergoing conversion therapy make people more suicidal in your, in your essay to just explain a little bit about that, that claim was often made.
00:22:15:21 – 00:22:52:20
Father Paul Sullins
I know we have half a dozen studies that, take person’s, self-reports of their experience with conversion therapy. And whatever you think about the, generalizability of those findings, these are groups of persons, clinical samples that are reporting on their own clinical experience. And they tell us, across the board that conversion therapy made them, on average, less suicidal, and less depressed, than they were before they underwent it.
00:22:52:22 – 00:23:19:07
Father Paul Sullins
Now, not everybody comes out less suicidal from any form of therapy. So if you, you know, come out worse, in fact, a few persons undergo conversion therapy and come out more same sex attracted than they were when they started. And they come out more committed, to an LGBT lifestyle. A few people, maybe 3%.
00:23:19:09 – 00:23:47:23
Father Paul Sullins
But most people, upwards of 65 to 70%, come out with reduced same sex attraction and with net psychological benefits. In the study that I did, with Christopher Razzaq, we, we measured six areas of psychosocial function. I don’t know if I can list them all off, top of my head, but it was so.
00:23:48:02 – 00:24:32:14
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah. Self-esteem, depression, suicidality, substance abuse. And a couple of others, and found that, a few people, a small percentage reported, something worse coming out worse on those, measures, but the vast majority reported coming out better. There was net know, improved psychological benefit. Now, those six areas of psychosocial function, we took from a study in 2002, by, gay, advocate scholars, doing a study to find out, how, people were affected by undergoing conversion therapy.
00:24:32:16 – 00:25:03:09
Father Paul Sullins
We didn’t make it up. We we copied their measures, and they didn’t report, the results in the same way we did. But that those measures were picked up by a study in 2003 by Doctor Robert Spitzer that looked at persons who had undergone conversion therapy. And he found net psychological benefit in all six areas. Ellen Carton and Jay Wade in 2010 published a study using the exact same measures they found.
00:25:03:09 – 00:25:33:17
Father Paul Sullins
Net psychological benefit, minimal harm and and maximal benefit. On all of those six areas, we measured the same six areas, we found the same thing. So we have three studies now in dependently that have found net psychological benefit, self-reported by persons who have undergone conversion therapy. The other side, the gay advocate side, dismisses those findings.
00:25:33:19 – 00:26:03:05
Father Paul Sullins
The reason is you ready for this? They say they’re all making it up. They’re lying. They’re telling us that they have a net psychological benefit, but they didn’t really. Now, that claim has never been made about any other self-reported study. We know that, there are, inaccuracies in self-reports, that the data is blurred a little bit and has certain biases like social acceptability bias.
00:26:03:07 – 00:26:03:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right.
00:26:03:23 – 00:26:28:11
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah. But no one has ever said, well, it’s all wrong. It’s the complete opposite. Must be true. That’s a sign of, extreme bias. Of. Yeah, I would say ideological bigotry to just not accept what the data are putting out right in front of you. Now, you might discount that. You may say, well, I’m going to do another study and ask a question differently and it’ll come up.
00:26:28:15 – 00:26:51:10
Father Paul Sullins
That’s fine. That that’s past normal back and forth of scientific effort. But just to say of three independent studies, four if you count the pro-gay study that used the same measures and say, well, people are just making it up, well, that’s that’s just not the that’s, that’s beyond the realm of scientific objectivity.
00:26:51:12 – 00:27:12:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And you know, that that that’s how they dealt with the study that, that showed people deserting from a homosexual identity, the teenagers that that was, was that they ad health survey that was following the the young people through their adolescence. And they it was all jokesters. They, they were all pranksters kind of thing. But you mentioned the name Robert Spitzer.
00:27:12:08 – 00:27:38:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And I wanted to just mention this is not any relation to the Robert Spitzer, the Jesuit, who this is a different, very different Doctor Spitzer, his study is is pretty important for a number of reasons. I’d like just to take just a moment and talk about, Doctor Spitzer, because he was one of the people who was instrumental in, in De-Listing homosexuality as a, as a disorder.
00:27:38:07 – 00:27:55:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So he was you couldn’t say he was anti-gay. But he did this study in 2003. He found these results, as you mentioned. And then what happened there? Because there’s a further part to this story, and I think people need to hear the next part of the story.
00:27:55:06 – 00:28:33:04
Father Paul Sullins
Right. Well, in 2000 and, 1973, Spitzer, supported, the removing of homosexuality from the DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association. At that time, I think it was DSM three or DSM two. But, he was, the, premier, measurement expert in the field of psychology. He’s, been honored, as one of the most eminent psychologists of his day.
00:28:33:06 – 00:29:07:10
Father Paul Sullins
And he supported removing it so long as people were not disturbed by being homosexual. Excuse me. So he invented kind of a new category called the ego dis tonic homosexuality. And it was a compromise position. He had the gay activists who were rioting, basically, calling for the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder. And you had the vast majority of the field of psychology saying that makes no sense.
00:29:07:10 – 00:29:38:02
Father Paul Sullins
We shouldn’t do that. They were operating under a Freudian psychodynamic theory that says homosexuality is an arrest, being arrested in psychosexual development. And, so Spitzer forged a compromise, and he said, well, we’ll remove homosexuality if the person is comfortable. They have accommodated their life to a homosexual identity, but if they’re not comfortable, then that’s still a difficulty for that person, and we should provide treatment for that.
00:29:38:04 – 00:30:27:01
Father Paul Sullins
So that’s important to note, because then in 2002, he was confronted by a group of ex gays who said, we are uncomfortable being homosexual and we want to change and we’re going through therapy to change. Can you study us and show whether or not we were able to change? And he agreed to do that. So he I mean, actually he was confronted, I think, in 1999 and the study took several years, but it in 2003 they published it and he reported, that about two thirds of them were able to change to some extent, I think it was 17% or thereabout were able to change, to complete heterosexual function, as he defined
00:30:27:01 – 00:30:56:19
Father Paul Sullins
it. And and so his answer to the question and the question was right in the title of his study said, can some persons change sexual orientation? And the answer was yes, some some can. Well, that study generated a firestorm of, pushback. Lots of, critiques written that the study, should be retracted.
00:30:56:21 – 00:31:21:06
Father Paul Sullins
It should never have been published. And the main critique was you ready for this? They were all making it up. They were all lying. Nothing changes. And so Spitzer had to address that problem, and he said, how could they all be lying there? And he pointed out lots of features in the data that make no sense if people were just making it all up.
00:31:21:08 – 00:31:43:21
Father Paul Sullins
So, but that didn’t satisfy. There was a lot of, back and forth, so much so that the editor of the journal in which it was published published a book, something like a 250 page book of all the critiques, pro and con, about this particular study, Spitzer defended the study, the journal defended the study, and everybody kind of moved on.
00:31:43:22 – 00:32:11:15
Father Paul Sullins
So, what I think you’re referring to is in, 2012. So this is nine years after the original study, a, gay activist, who had undergone conversion therapy and tried to change and had failed. And, went to visit Doctor Spitzer in his home. Spitzer is now, 80 plus years old. He has Parkinson’s disease.
00:32:11:16 – 00:32:43:10
Father Paul Sullins
He is, his cognitive ability is somewhat diminished. And this gay activist, convinced him that he had done great harm to the homosexual community. And, it is his study was a, hurtful, well, so Spitzer wrote an apology for the study, and he said, I’m sorry. Says I, I, I wish to study, what would be retracted?
00:32:43:12 – 00:33:19:10
Father Paul Sullins
The editor of the journal, said so was happy to publish the letter. But he said, I’m not going to retract this study. None of the evidence has changed. And the fact that you feel differently about it doesn’t really affect the scientific truth of this particular study. And then some of the members of the sample that Spitzer interviewed published, a critique are complaining that their integrity and veracity had had been impugned.
00:33:19:12 – 00:33:24:22
Father Paul Sullins
By Doctor Spitzer and by others. So that’s how that story. Yeah.
00:33:24:22 – 00:33:33:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So so what the complaint was the the people who said you guys are all lying is just that what they were. That’s what they were complaining about. Yeah. Okay.
00:33:34:00 – 00:33:44:11
Father Paul Sullins
They complained that they’re, truthfulness was being dismissed and it was being questioned, on no basis. Whatever.
00:33:44:13 – 00:33:46:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right. Right, right.
00:33:46:03 – 00:34:22:17
Father Paul Sullins
But that’s, you know, so the gay activists, say to this day that that study has been, retracted or that has it has been disproven, discredited, and that you can’t use it. It’s not, usable data, but, I have to tell you that the the editor of the journal, who is certainly, no, no person in favor of conversion therapy, he’s a, liberal, pro-gay activist.
00:34:22:19 – 00:34:46:02
Father Paul Sullins
He defends the study. He says this is a legitimate study. I don’t agree with the findings, necessarily, but this is a legitimate scientific study, and the evidence deserves to be out there and for people to have to deal with it. And I know that’s true, because when I wrote my rebuttal, of another study that had claimed that go into conversion therapy made people suicidal, you know, about that?
00:34:46:04 – 00:35:08:04
Father Paul Sullins
That editor, made me put in a couple of paragraphs about Spitzer’s study. I hadn’t included it in at first because it’s controversial, because it wasn’t directly relevant. But he said this is in the same line of research as Spitzer’s study. I want you to deal with, you know, talk about it in a couple of paragraphs.
00:35:08:05 – 00:35:19:01
Father Paul Sullins
I don’t care what you say, but you need to acknowledge it and deal with it. So I did, so he thinks it’s important and relevant information and I do to you.
00:35:19:01 – 00:35:36:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right? Right. So, it is this the American Psychiatric Association or the American Psychological Association that in 1973 that delisted, wasn’t it the psychiatrist?
00:35:36:15 – 00:35:42:23
Father Paul Sullins
I think it was the psychological association, but I am not sure. Okay. I could get them. We better.
00:35:42:23 – 00:36:10:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Check that. You better check that. Yeah. Yeah, they’re both the APA. Yeah. That’s right, that’s right. No, no. You know one thing, Father Saul. And you told us in a in a. You and I attended a meeting not long ago. And you delivered a paper describing a lot of this material. And you told me one thing that I was not aware of, and that is that the American Psychological Association, some time ago, put limitations on questions that could actually be studied.
00:36:10:11 – 00:36:24:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
They basically said certain kind of research is not legitimate, and we’re not going to publish it. And it’s not even ethical to do it. Would you tell us about that? What did they rule out of bounds, and when did they do it and what was their rationale for that?
00:36:24:08 – 00:36:58:12
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah. Well, they made a definitive decision to preclude such research. In 1991. There was a run up, to it of other decisions that had been made and committees and so on. But in 1991, they published a set of norms for, psychological research. And, it was published in The American Psychologist. The authors were, Gregory Herrick Douglas Kimmel, Hortensia Amaro and Gary Melton.
00:36:58:14 – 00:37:06:19
Father Paul Sullins
And the title is Avoiding Hetero Sexist Bias in Psychological Research.
00:37:06:21 – 00:37:40:02
Father Paul Sullins
And that paper, if you just Google the title of it, you can find it posters on the website of the APA as their norms for avoiding heterosexual bias in research because that was actually is published, as is the academic paper. But it’s really the report of the committee of the APA, to, dealing with LGB concerns, as it was called at that time.
00:37:40:04 – 00:38:24:20
Father Paul Sullins
That committee in its various incarnations has, scrutinized research since then and made sure that it complies with, these particular norms. And, so if if you’re publishing something in an APA, journal and you want to write about how the, natural, family of men and woman is a better context for child rearing than some other family arrangement that doesn’t involve a man and a woman that is, by definition, hetero sexist.
00:38:24:22 – 00:38:33:04
Father Paul Sullins
It’s a heteronormative, hypothesis that you’re pursuing. And so you’re not allowed to do that.
00:38:33:06 – 00:38:38:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so in their journal, their flagship journal, you would not find any, any of that type of research.
00:38:38:18 – 00:39:04:14
Father Paul Sullins
In Napa Journal. There’s, there’s, several dozen APA journals, and all of them have to conform to this standard. And, if they if it gets past the editor, which is rare, then the LGBT concerns committee would, would find it out and, and would make sure that it’s not published, because it would be seen as degrading.
00:39:04:16 – 00:39:40:12
Father Paul Sullins
LGB person. Now, in that document, in that paper, avoiding heterosexism, bias and psychological research sites conversion therapy as a dramatic example of heterosexism bias. Right. Of course, we cannot publish anything, about conversion therapy or at least anything positive about conversion therapy. And so you if you look in APA journals, there’s nothing there. They they don’t have any research about them.
00:39:40:14 – 00:40:10:14
Father Paul Sullins
And for me, this is an issue when in 2009, they have a task force that’s looking at all the research, on conversion therapy. And the task force says, well, there’s not enough evidence to show whether conversion therapy is harmful or not or effective or not. And my complaint is if they didn’t know if it was harmful or effective in 2009, then they certainly didn’t know in 1991.
00:40:10:18 – 00:40:34:12
Father Paul Sullins
And yet they publish that it is harmful and they excluded, research on it. So of course, there’s not going to be research in 2009, at least from the APA. And so the, the task force in 2009 that looked at the question whether conversion therapy was acceptable or not, said, well, there’s there’s no real recent research on.
00:40:34:13 – 00:41:08:13
Father Paul Sullins
So we had to look at all the old research and what they did was look at all the aversion therapy research from the 1960s, in the 1970s, using all the behaviorist techniques that we all know didn’t work well, they were ineffective. The whole field of behaviorism stopped after that. And so they said, look, conversion therapy doesn’t work because all the good evidence we have shows that it doesn’t work and we don’t have any evidence past that, or we don’t have any evidence past that, because you guys talking to the same APA wouldn’t allow anything to be published.
00:41:08:13 – 00:41:10:02
Father Paul Sullins
So of course you refused.
00:41:10:07 – 00:41:27:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. You refused to study the question. It’s kind of rich for you to turn around, say there’s no evidence. You know, I was looking at a book by, a guy called Jeffrey Satin over, who was a psychiatrist, and he wrote a book in 1996. I didn’t even know about this book. It’s called homosexuality and the Politics of Truth.
00:41:27:02 – 00:41:58:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Oh, yeah. It’s a very it’s a very nice book. It’s a very it’s very compelling book. But he has a whole chapter on the subject of, of people doing research and, and what he says is, for the years 1992, 93, 94, well, after the APA decision to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders, the Medline database has only two articles on the treatment of homosexuality, whereas in previous years there were there were many more.
00:41:58:09 – 00:42:23:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Like in the 70s, he found 42 articles, and so his, his point is that they’re systematically ignoring the evidence that they do have. That’s right. Not all of it’s behaviorist stuff. It’s not all behavior is right. Right. And so if you’re not allowed to study the question, of course you’re going to turn around and say there’s no evidence, but then how can you turn around to the evidence says that it’s no good, right.
00:42:23:01 – 00:42:28:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It doesn’t. It’s it’s right. It’s it’s circular. Right? In the extreme, in my opinion.
00:42:28:23 – 00:43:02:04
Father Paul Sullins
There are some, studies, of conversion therapy. They’re actually studies of gay persons and then looks at ones who had been to therapy and not that document, positive change. In the early 1980s. But those are ignored. They’re ignored by the APA. They’re, ignored. Today, that’s the only sort of window in which you’ll find, a few of these studies, and, but otherwise, yeah.
00:43:02:04 – 00:43:11:07
Father Paul Sullins
And, you know, Saturn over found that from 1991 on, there were no studies, real studies.
00:43:11:07 – 00:43:13:21
Father Paul Sullins
Well, that’s by design.
00:43:13:22 – 00:43:17:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That’s your that fits your window. Yes, exactly.
00:43:17:00 – 00:43:26:11
Father Paul Sullins
The screen had been imposed, and they were, making sure that none got through or not many got through, so. So that,
00:43:26:11 – 00:43:38:05
Father Paul Sullins
it’s not an accident. It’s not that the field is moved away and somehow arguments, have displaced it or it’s, you know, it’s just that they decided they didn’t want to go there.
00:43:38:07 – 00:44:05:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. Now, you you’ve mentioned this APA, 2009 document, which is, it’s, premiere’s thorough report on the subject. And you already alluded to the fact that it said something that’s kind of nonsensical. You’ve got a couple of other statements that you’ve highlighted for me, that, given the a limited amount of methodology, sound research claims that recent sources is effective, are not supported.
00:44:05:07 – 00:44:18:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So that’s what you’re referring to. And then you’ve got there are no scientifically rigorous studies of recent. So see what that would allow us to make a definitive statement about whether recent Soucy is safe or harmful or for
00:44:18:10 – 00:44:22:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
whom. Right. Same same problem. Well.
00:44:22:05 – 00:44:23:06
Father Paul Sullins
That’s that’s a
00:44:23:06 – 00:44:31:05
Father Paul Sullins
very, deceptive kind of statement for a couple of reasons. One, the reason,
00:44:31:05 – 00:44:32:03
Father Paul Sullins
as we’ve already
00:44:32:03 – 00:44:56:21
Father Paul Sullins
said, the reason there are not these studies is because they decided not to do them. They decided to exclude those kind of studies, 18 years earlier. The second thing that’s deceptive about those that study that sentence is often misquoted in legal settings or in advocacy settings to say, well, the APA has concluded that Soucy never works, and that it’s harmful.
00:44:56:23 – 00:45:28:03
Father Paul Sullins
And they cite this document and that statement. But that statement doesn’t say that it never works or that it’s harmful. It just says, we can’t find enough evidence to conclude one way or the other whether it’s harmful or not. Now that that’s not a really proper scientific statement, but nonetheless, it’s misguided because if you say, well, I, I don’t have evidence that it’s effective, that’s not evidence that it’s not effective.
00:45:28:08 – 00:45:39:17
Father Paul Sullins
It’s just an absence of evidence that it’s effective. You know, we say the the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And so they’re they’re mis applying it logically
00:45:39:17 – 00:45:44:22
Father Paul Sullins
in that way. So there’s there’s a number of, you know, difficulty with that particular state.
00:45:45:00 – 00:45:56:14
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s not logical. It’s not logical. It’s taken and it’s just sort of twisted. So father saw in somebody that you want to or have some acquaintance with is Joseph Nicholas,
00:45:56:14 – 00:46:02:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Joseph Nicholas Senior and Joseph Nicholas Junior, who are, who have worked in this area.
00:46:02:17 – 00:46:09:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You have some concerns about some of his research that you want to share with us, or the way his research is being interpreted.
00:46:09:11 – 00:46:10:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Tell us about.
00:46:10:02 – 00:46:41:02
Father Paul Sullins
That. Well, we’ve been talking about the APA, report in 2009 and how it says that there’s no, credible research showing that Soucy has been effective or has not been harmful. And in that same document, they dismissed a very strong study by Joseph Nicholas Senior, that was done in the year 2000. Nicholas and Byrd, for very flimsy reasons.
00:46:41:02 – 00:47:09:03
Father Paul Sullins
They and they, they dismiss it in a footnote in that footnote, they say that this study, isn’t credible because it used the chi square statistic to measure change in the categories of sexual orientation. And therefore it’s it doesn’t meet credible scientific standards for research. Well, there’s a lot of reasons, why that statement is just off the wall.
00:47:09:03 – 00:47:39:15
Father Paul Sullins
It makes little sense what to get all together. Now, it is true that a chi square statistic it should be, should not be used for, continuous data. It should be used for categorical data. So if you’re if you want to know the mean of something and you want to compare, means you should use a t-test, but if you want to compare changes in categories, or things that you’re counting, you should use a chi square.
00:47:39:17 – 00:48:17:12
Father Paul Sullins
But that’s not that doesn’t mean that the chi square is a, less important or less strict statistic. It just means that you have fewer assumptions to make about your data before you use the chi square. Arguably, it is a, a more widely used, and a stronger statistic to use. But so what they’re doing, they’re looking at, Nicholas’s table in which he reports the person’s, sexual orientation categories on the Kinsey scale before and after.
00:48:17:13 – 00:48:37:12
Father Paul Sullins
So, see, but he compares each category with each other category. He’s not comparing the whole range. They think, well, this is the Kinsey scale. I mean, they meaning the APA is thinking this is the Kinsey scale. These are, means on a scale. So they if we’re comparing them before and after, he should be using a test.
00:48:37:14 – 00:49:09:09
Father Paul Sullins
But as Nicholas, he presents it, he says, well, this this percentage of persons were in, extreme homosexuality before this percent were extreme homosexuality after he’s comparing each category. So he’s I think he’s using the chi square test appropriately. But in addition to this, there are two other, incredible things that are wrong with the APA’s treatment.
00:49:09:11 – 00:49:28:18
Father Paul Sullins
The first is that Nicholas C gives the standard deviations of each of these changes. So it’s a very easy thing for someone else to come and to measure it using a t-test instead of tri square. Right, right from the information in his table. And if you do that, as I have done,
00:49:28:18 – 00:49:35:02
Father Paul Sullins
you can find that the findings are just as strong as they are using the chi square.
00:49:35:02 – 00:49:43:10
Father Paul Sullins
It’s not a real difficult thing to do. I mean, if I can do it, you know, it’s not a real thing to do. So, it’s just.
00:49:43:10 – 00:49:50:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
A simple division. It’s a simple division. You don’t you don’t have to have a big computer to get that done, right? I mean, so it’s.
00:49:50:11 – 00:49:50:22
Father Paul Sullins
Easier to.
00:49:50:22 – 00:49:55:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Do it so casually. So they’re hoping no one will check?
00:49:55:01 – 00:50:00:10
Father Paul Sullins
Yes. Well, if we hear what I’m going to say next, they also don’t
00:50:00:10 – 00:50:20:12
Father Paul Sullins
tell us that Nicholas C prevent presents. Not just one table. He presents another table in which he takes similar measures, not the same measures. And he is comparing them as the means of a distribution. And he does that using t tests. So he does report t tests.
00:50:20:14 – 00:50:46:05
Father Paul Sullins
They don’t even mention that in this critique. But if they just looked at his second table, they would find that that supports change, positive change, lack of, difficulties, psychological difficulties following. So C quite well, but yet they dismiss it in this, in this footnote as if he, he made some kind of error and well, I think maybe they are noticing hoping that no one will notice.
00:50:46:07 – 00:50:52:22
Father Paul Sullins
I don’t know what they’re, they’re hoping, but it is all just deceptive
00:50:52:22 – 00:50:56:18
Father Paul Sullins
nonsense. This is whoa.
00:50:56:20 – 00:50:57:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Whoa whoa.
00:50:57:23 – 00:50:58:14
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah, yeah.
00:50:58:14 – 00:51:08:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
My concern is, Well, I should say, and I have noticed in some of the material that I read, this kind of dismissive attitude, they they’ve gone into the
00:51:08:16 – 00:51:22:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
the with the preconceived idea, you know, they’ve got a, they’ve got a handful of, of, of ideological claims. I’m just going to call them ideological claims, because if they were scientific claims, you would say, oh, this is working, or oh, this is not working.
00:51:22:20 – 00:51:48:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Let’s adapt our hypothesis around the data, you know, and they really, really are resistant to doing that. If you don’t mind, I’d like to turn to a little bit earlier what you just talked about, the 2009 document that formed their basis for, condemning, sexual orientation change efforts. I read a review document from 2016, which I’m not completely sure of its status.
00:51:48:23 – 00:51:54:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s the one that’s barely at all. Do you know the one that I’m talking about? Yeah. The public interests,
00:51:54:23 – 00:52:11:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I forget exactly what it’s called. It is called a sexual orientation controversy and science. Psychology or science in the public interest. Okay. And so there’s this business of dismissing things. Father Cellent I saw I saw multiple times.
00:52:11:04 – 00:52:35:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And it really troubled me because, as you know, we at the Ruth Institute are quite concerned about childhood sexual abuse, quite apart from anything having to do with homosexuality, because we’re tracking the whole sexual revolution, and we’re aware that these things are happening to kids and it’s having a lifelong impact on kids. And there was there were parts in this study where they’re exploring.
00:52:35:07 – 00:53:04:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I wanted to when I looked at this, are that do they know that nobody’s born gay? Do they really know that? Right. So in 2016, they had not yet done this big study, the big gene study from 2019. That that should have put an end to a lot of this stuff. Okay. So I’ll just mention, since we talked about the 2022 definitive conversion case against conversion therapy, are they in nowhere?
00:53:04:20 – 00:53:11:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Nowhere in that book do they mention an entire book. Multiple authors? Nobody mentions that at all. Study
00:53:11:12 – 00:53:18:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
from 2019. That is a complete, thorough look at the human genome. And there’s no gay gene.
00:53:18:02 – 00:53:28:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But these guys are still going on and on like it’s an inborn, immutable trait, you know? And so, okay, in 2016, that hadn’t been done yet, but there were a lot of twin studies.
00:53:28:08 – 00:53:53:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And this piece, they analyzed the twin studies and they came up with they said they said something very telling. Here’s a direct quote based on the evidence from twin studies, we believe we can already provide a qualified answer to the question is sexual oriented orientation genetic? The answer is probably somewhat genetic, but not mostly so. So in 2016 they know that and they know it on the basis of twin studies.
00:53:53:08 – 00:54:14:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So I’m like, okay, that’s cool. Or they also said listen to this exclusive same sex sexual orientation across the life course is however, extremely rare among animals. Do you know how many times I’ve had gay guys show up on my website and say, well, you know, all these animals are gay. They have gay penguins, they have gay. You know, and it’s like, here they are sick.
00:54:15:00 – 00:54:24:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, okay. But that’s opportunistic gay behavior. That’s not the same thing as permanent gay homosexual. It’s not the same thing.
00:54:24:12 – 00:54:51:01
Father Paul Sullins
No, it’s it’s it’s mostly animals who are confused when they, they signal they signal their sexuality to other animals in different ways by stripes or, or putting the tail up or. Yeah. And sometimes the animals misread the signals. And you know, the most that that accounts for most of it. But then there’s also animals who don’t have access to members of the opposite sex.
00:54:51:01 – 00:55:05:17
Father Paul Sullins
So yes, situations, they will try to mate with members of their own sex or even sometimes with other animals. Just anything to, to kind of, express that instinct that they have.
00:55:05:19 – 00:55:16:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. Situational homosexuality is well known among humans still, of course. Right. Of course I it’s not it’s and and I don’t think anybody I don’t think any serious person
00:55:16:06 – 00:55:18:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
thinks that’s the same thing as.
00:55:18:09 – 00:55:18:18
Father Paul Sullins
No.
00:55:18:21 – 00:55:21:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And what people mean when they say sexual orientation, if you.
00:55:21:22 – 00:55:31:16
Father Paul Sullins
Think about it, it couldn’t be any large group of animals that engaged in homosexual behavior because they would die out after generation.
00:55:31:18 – 00:56:11:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
We keep saying this. Yeah, right. Well, I don’t know. I don’t, but but what struck me about this, what struck me about this, though, father sons, is that they they make this admission, which I was glad to see, you know, that it’s not mostly genetic. But then. Well, what do you think the causes are? You know, and they seem they don’t seem too interested in it, but what they the way they did treat it, I was really quite troubled by some of what they did because, one of the it’s almost like gender nonconformity is taking the place of sexual orientation, you know, that some kids just are born not conforming to their gender.
00:56:11:19 – 00:56:39:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so they’re pre homosexual or something like that. But it was the material on, on sexual abuse and childhood trauma that really troubled me the most because, because of what I just explained. You know, we’ve been tracking that in our interviews and our studies of clergy sex abuse and so on and so forth. And, and I just want to say the Ruth Institute is one of the few organizations that is really addressing childhood sexual abuse.
00:56:39:06 – 00:57:04:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, it’s not being our main thing we do. We have a pretty big footprint in that area. And so, so at one point in this document, they’re, they’re they’re asking, well, what are the other alternative explanations? And one that they cite and dismiss? And this is what I’m talking about dismissing. There’s a repugnant theory out there which is called the recruitment theory.
00:57:04:08 – 00:57:26:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And the recruitment theory is that children become gay because adults recruit them into becoming gay. And so they, of course, want to refute that. And I’m thinking to myself, well, wait a minute, that’s about the motives of the adult. I’m actually not that interested in the motives of the adult. I want to know what is actually the impact on the child, no matter what the adult is thinking.
00:57:26:10 – 00:57:53:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay, so they’re trying to confront this, this fact that I don’t I don’t think anyone disagrees with father. And if I’m wrong here, you tell me I’m wrong, but I it’s well known in multiple studies that persons who are, identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual have higher rates of childhood sexual abuse and indeed, childhood childhood trauma of all sorts, actually, but particularly sexual abuse.
00:57:53:13 – 00:58:07:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
They have higher rates of it, sometimes remarkably higher than people who are solely heterosexual. And so they’re it’s like they’re trying to explain this away by saying things like, well, let’s see if I can find it.
00:58:07:05 – 00:58:53:20
Father Paul Sullins
Well, that’s highly associated with, a let’s say a non-heterosexual, lifestyle or identity or behavior, however, in order to make the argument that that is causal in some way, of same sex attraction or same sex orientation, you would have to compare persons who have been and have not been, abused. In other words, it the fact that many persons with same sex attraction have been abused doesn’t mean that most people that have been abused grow up to have same sex attraction, right?
00:58:53:22 – 00:59:32:01
Father Paul Sullins
True, true. And even though there are higher rates, most people with same sex attraction haven’t experienced childhood trauma or abuse. So, you know, it’s like, let’s take suicidality, which has the same etiology as a lot of persons who are trauma traumatized in some way as children, end up more suicidal as adults. So among the general population, those who attempt suicide might be 4%, I think it is, or 5%.
00:59:32:03 – 01:00:02:17
Father Paul Sullins
In, in the gay population, it’s about 30%. It’s extremely high. The 30% is still much less than a majority. It means that 70% of the gay population isn’t particularly suicidal. So it can’t be that that is the the cause or a main cause of same sex attraction. They have to be other issues. It might be a contributing factor, no question.
01:00:02:19 – 01:00:17:23
Father Paul Sullins
And so, genetics might be a contributing factor. Trauma might be a contributing factor, and it might be that they don’t want to talk about trauma as much. I understand that, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a cause.
01:00:18:01 – 01:00:47:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, but but but this this area to the best that I can understand it, this whole area of the origins of same sex attraction, persistent same sex attraction to the the way I put it in my layman’s terms, because I’m nowhere near a psychologist. Right. And I know that I’m aware of that. But it looks to me like there are a lot of pathways in to a same sex identity, and there are a lot of pathways out, and there are contributing factors, a contributing, things.
01:00:47:20 – 01:01:12:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But no one is, no one is causal the way a gay gene would be, for example. Right. So there’s nothing there’s no cause that’s like that. You know, like causing blue eyes or causing left handedness or something like that. There’s nothing like the contributing factors. Surely we want to understand what the contributing factors are, especially if we’re interested in helping people deal with it, manage it, overcome it.
01:01:12:12 – 01:01:42:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, and especially if we are understanding that this is not something that is like race, this is not the new black gay is not the new black, right? That’s incorrect. You know, in any case, that’s incorrect to think like that. So, I was troubled by these guys dismissing it in the way that they did the the language they use it, homosexual males tend to have earlier sexual interactions compared to heterosexual males, and they tend to have more age discrepant.
01:01:42:04 – 01:02:07:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay. All right. So that’s some nice neutral sounding kind of thing. But within that set of kids are certainly some for whom it was a traumatic and abusive experience. And I’m not willing to whitewash that. Right. I’m not willing to. And that’s what it that’s what it that’s what it feels like to me that they’re whitewashing it and, you know.
01:02:07:22 – 01:02:09:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
No.
01:02:09:06 – 01:02:09:18
Father Paul Sullins
And for.
01:02:09:21 – 01:02:10:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
No, even.
01:02:10:12 – 01:02:11:07
Father Paul Sullins
If it wasn’t
01:02:11:07 – 01:02:40:08
Father Paul Sullins
traumatic, what you’re describing is pederasty, where an older homosexual male enters into, liaison with a younger homosexual male, that younger homosexual younger male gets introduced to the homosexual life if their early sexual experiences are with an older man. That is a gateway to, that patterning, that kind of behavior in their own lives.
01:02:40:10 – 01:03:23:15
Father Paul Sullins
We know that children of, in the care of homosexual adults, end up declaring themselves to be non-heterosexual at a much higher rate than children of heterosexual adults. And so there’s that kind of patterning, on the, on the parents and on the sexual behaviors that they see as children, whether that’s traumatic or not or without trying to put any moral, consideration on that, that just is a natural process, that, that we go through.
01:03:23:17 – 01:04:03:13
Father Paul Sullins
So, all of those things are factors now. Bailey would say that homosexual is not mostly genetic. He would say it’s mostly environmental. But what he means by environmental is prenatal and or just there’s a hormonal change, that induces men particularly doesn’t talk. It’s a different issue for women, but for males, he believes that there are prenatal changes, that would induce males to be more likely homosexual.
01:04:03:15 – 01:04:34:23
Father Paul Sullins
So it’s not genetic, but it’s also not something that you learn or that a result of after birth. And, it he he believes this because he also believes that sexual arousal is part of the homosexual more complex. So most theorists would say that sexual orientation, is a product of attraction and behavior and identity. But he would add arousal.
01:04:34:23 – 01:05:01:19
Father Paul Sullins
He does this explicitly in a couple of these studies. And so if a man is sexually aroused by other men or by images of other men, so on, and that arousal can be measured, by psychological instruments or by physical instruments that are attached to him. Then he would say that that arousal pattern says that he’s homosexual no matter whatever else is going on in his life.
01:05:01:21 – 01:05:39:04
Father Paul Sullins
Now, many theorists, push back against that on a number of grounds. And one is that, a man’s sexual arousal doesn’t determine his sexual orientation. You may be aroused by pictures of other men, but that doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to, adopt a homosexual identity. Because what Bailey doesn’t acknowledge is that almost all men who are aroused by pictures of other men are also aroused, to some extent by pictures of women.
01:05:39:06 – 01:06:01:16
Father Paul Sullins
So that sexual arousal is not exclusive. In fact, you know, men can be aroused by pictures of a lot of things. They’ve tested animals. And, you know, there’s a whole wide range of things, and it’s hard to put any definitive of character on sexual arousal. But Bailey believes that, the men who are aroused by other men are therefore homosexual.
01:06:01:16 – 01:06:24:04
Father Paul Sullins
So that’s why he he Hedges, on that particular issue. Now, I don’t know if he’s responded to the subsequent research you referred to gonna kind of, is very clear that, there’s no particular, genetic basis for, male homosexuality. So he
01:06:24:04 – 01:06:27:10
Father Paul Sullins
might revise his views to some extent, but the androgen.
01:06:27:12 – 01:06:53:14
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But but the but the in utero androgen factor could still be there, even if there even if the genetic thing doesn’t work. I mean, that’s the point of it, right? It’s pre birth. It’s pre-birth. And so in that sense it’s it’s I guess I guess you could say hardwired. But you know when you look at the, the number of contributing factors that we’re talking about here, you would think that people would have some interest in studying.
01:06:53:15 – 01:07:23:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. And studying those, you know, the combination of things are there are there some of these that are more distressing to people and that they want to be you know, you’re right. Do we know do we know, for example, if somebody had the, the hormone bath they interviewed or interviewed or a hormone bath, right. Are they less likely to seek social therapy or, you know, are they are they more content or is it just the kids who had, sexual abuse experiences who are not content and want to be not?
01:07:23:03 – 01:07:32:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, and so on and so forth. You would think there would be a whole range of questions worth asking here. And I’m not seeing him. I’m not seeing him ask these questions. Right. What do you think?
01:07:32:22 – 01:07:37:10
Father Paul Sullins
Well, I if you read that article, Bailey, does say,
01:07:37:10 – 01:08:02:10
Father Paul Sullins
very helpfully, that no matter what a man’s particular arousal or attractions are, it’s entirely possible for that man, to choose to identify as heterosexual and to forego homosexual sex. He says you can certainly choose who you have sex with and, and how you’re going to live your life and how you’re going to identify.
01:08:02:10 – 01:08:37:22
Father Paul Sullins
So he is clear that a man’s, internal sexual attractions do not determine his behavior or his identity. And I think that’s a very helpful statement to make in, in that context. Now, that’s not the main point of that particular writing, because it’s written for political purposes. But, he even says that this is probably what people are doing when they claim to be gay, that they still have sexual attractions, to persons of the same sex.
01:08:37:22 – 01:08:51:21
Father Paul Sullins
But they’re making choices about their lives and their behavior that, that, manage those or restrict. Yes. In some ways. Well, I yes, I think that’s pretty accurate.
01:08:51:22 – 01:09:02:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. I was just going to say, some of our friends report that kind of thing to us that they, they, they have the feelings, but they’re not controlling their life with those feelings. Right? That there’s more to the story
01:09:02:06 – 01:09:08:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
than, trying to make somebody left handed who’s right handed or something, you know, that that’s.
01:09:08:01 – 01:09:11:20
Father Paul Sullins
You could find genetic orientations and and early life
01:09:11:20 – 01:09:39:18
Father Paul Sullins
orientations, about whether people smoke or not. If you study that, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t quit smoking. I don’t think anyone has ever said, you know, you’re doomed to smoke because you can’t do it. In fact, we think smoking is addictive. And that’s also true of, drinking alcohol, which, a lot of folks think, is genetic.
01:09:39:18 – 01:09:47:09
Father Paul Sullins
There is strong genetic basis for that. But no one says, well, you can’t stop drinking. You have to drink the rest of your life
01:09:47:09 – 01:10:03:11
Father Paul Sullins
because you’re you’re stuck. You’re in this destructive. Now, nobody says that. Right. So I think that Bailey is applying that same basic scientific, commonsense view, to sexual orientation, and that’s.
01:10:03:17 – 01:10:34:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But but and I think we should also say that human sexuality, generally sexual activity has an addictive quality to it. Okay. So not everybody is a sex addict, but but the way, the the way the, the sexual arousal and sexual release interacts with your brain. There’s an addictive quality to it. Right. And so, our society right now is, I think, in pretty serious denial about that, you know,
01:10:34:11 – 01:10:39:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
and, and, you know, it it’s just occurred to me this is a little bit off the track, but but not really.
01:10:39:22 – 01:11:04:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You’ll see our friends like at the at Desert Stream, living Water and some of the other groups that help people deal with with sexual problems, the things that help the same sex attract the person with unwanted same sex attraction, and the person with pornography addiction and the person with sex addiction. There’s a lot of over lap in what is helpful to them, you know?
01:11:04:19 – 01:11:24:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so I just think that has to be a factor in any discussion, particularly if we’re going to have sweeping laws saying you can’t help people convert from this or that, when the thing itself is so amorphous because actually, let’s put that on the table now, you you’ve we’ve both hinted at it, but let’s put it on the table.
01:11:24:20 – 01:11:39:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
The concept of sexual orientation itself, if you’re going to say you can, it’s illegal to try to help somebody change their sexual orientation. Do we even know what that means? What is that category of sexual orientation you’ve listed already? I think
01:11:39:01 – 01:11:45:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
least four different items that it could mean, or some composite of those spell that out for everybody, would you?
01:11:45:11 – 01:11:55:02
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah, sure. Well, sexual orientation is an amorphous concept. Let’s just state that, at the beginning, when it’s
01:11:55:02 – 01:12:13:19
Father Paul Sullins
measured, that’s not necessarily defined, but when we measure it, it, we have to measure who people say that they’re attracted to. So if I say, well, I’m homosexual, you would expect me to say I’m attracted, sexually attracted to other men, not to women.
01:12:13:21 – 01:12:40:02
Father Paul Sullins
And we also measure who they have behavior with. So we would expect a homosexual person to have sex with men, not sex with women if they have sex at all. And then we would expect a homosexual person to identify themselves as a homosexual if they adopted any identity at all. But in fact, none of those things overlap very much.
01:12:40:04 – 01:13:20:11
Father Paul Sullins
Only, about 20%, 20 to 25% of persons who, who claim any of those three things claim all three of those things for non heterosexual people, for heterosexual people, it’s above 95, 96% of persons who claim any one of those things claim all three of those things. If I call myself heterosexual, you can reliably expect that I’m going to want to have sex with women, and if I have sex, will have sex with women and not with men that that.
01:13:20:13 – 01:13:57:10
Father Paul Sullins
So we call that congruence that there is a congruence to heterosexuality. There is not congruence to homosexuality or to non heterosexuality. There’s this whole range of different experiences and identities and behaviors. And what that suggests to me is that, non-heterosexual ality is not really a thing. It’s really the absence of heterosexuality. Which doesn’t leave you with any particular identity.
01:13:57:12 – 01:14:48:01
Father Paul Sullins
Now, we have been trained to believe in some way that there are two ways of being sexual. There’s heterosexual and homosexual, and that those are like two sides of a coin or something. But that, I think, turns out not to be true empirically. If you look at the evidence, there’s there’s no real definitive thing to being homosexual, to the point that, a number of gay, activists have said, homosexual persons should not try to, be classed as a legal class for legal purposes of legal rights or privileges because there’s no definitive boundaries to that class.
01:14:48:03 – 01:15:21:01
Father Paul Sullins
People are not born gay. They, live, move in and out of gay life, at a pretty startling rate. Particularly women do. Well, how the women’s experience of being gay is very different than men. So it’s not, I think, there’s there’s just so much variation there, that you really can’t talk about. It is a particular thing, and get your arms around it for, any particular purposes?
01:15:21:01 – 01:15:27:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes. And what I’d like to say is that has been known, that has been in the literature since 1994.
01:15:27:12 – 01:15:28:04
Father Paul Sullins
Absolutely.
01:15:28:04 – 01:15:30:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay. So this book, what I’m what I’m holding right here,
01:15:30:23 – 01:15:34:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
this is the this was at the time the definitive book.
01:15:34:04 – 01:15:39:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s called The Social Organization of Sexuality Sexual Practices in the United States by Edward Laumann
01:15:39:20 – 01:15:52:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
at all. And it was a big University of Chicago study. And it was basically it. My understanding is that this was written in partially in response to the Kinsey Report to check out is Kinsey’s or Kinsey’s numbers correct?
01:15:52:06 – 01:16:13:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And it turns out Kinsey’s numbers had a lot of problems. And, and the whole section. There’s a whole chapter in here on, on homosexuality. And they very clearly say what you just said. So it’s not like this is a new finding and it’s not like, it that it’s so they’ve, we’ve known this since 1994 that that’s been in the literature.
01:16:13:20 – 01:16:37:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And it’s also not the case that even with vast amount of acceptance of homosexual practice and homosexual identity compared to 1994, it’s still there. The ambiguity is still out there, you know? So I think this suggests to me that the model that we’re all working with, the model that has been created by the gay activists, is not really scientifically sound.
01:16:37:05 – 01:16:57:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s not correct. There are too many pieces that there’s too much anomalous data, right, to to support the claim that gay is an innate, immutable trait. Right. And that it can never change, and that if you try to change, you’re doing violence to yourself somehow. There’s just too much anomalous data,
01:16:57:09 – 01:17:01:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
to make that work. What do you think, Andre?
01:17:01:06 – 01:17:04:22
Father Paul Sullins
I think that there’s not a lot of coherence to the whole idea
01:17:04:22 – 01:17:40:15
Father Paul Sullins
of being something other than heterosexual, whether you call yourself gay or lesbian or bisexual. Spirit. Non-binary. I just think that there’s not a lot of clear definition for any of that. And, and so it, it’s just that it’s it’s kind of messy once, once you move away from, the plan of a man and a woman, having relations with one another, the whole thing becomes kind of messy.
01:17:40:15 – 01:17:52:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So. So it’s almost it’s almost as if there was a designer that designed the man and the woman thing to work in a coherent manner, and the other things don’t work.
01:17:52:16 – 01:17:53:07
Father Paul Sullins
They just.
01:17:53:07 – 01:17:54:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
As much.
01:17:54:06 – 01:18:09:06
Father Paul Sullins
They don’t work and they don’t make sense. And. Right. So yeah, I just think it’s one thing for people to explore different ways of expressing themselves sexually. But all, all of those different ways of
01:18:09:06 – 01:18:21:12
Father Paul Sullins
expressing themselves put together don’t make a separate thing that stands over against the normal way of men and women having sex relations with each other.
01:18:21:14 – 01:18:26:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Are you telling me that heterosexuality is normal? I mean, is that really what you’re trying to say?
01:18:26:07 – 01:18:59:08
Father Paul Sullins
Yes. Well, it’s not like it has to be normal because it’s the human species way of producing new life, and there’s no other way to do it. So people can, have fun or, get experiences with one another that, that mimic that kind of sexual expression. It can be pleasurable. They can, develop deep relationships around it.
01:18:59:10 – 01:19:32:08
Father Paul Sullins
But it it doesn’t achieve the purpose of normal sex. And it doesn’t, it, the attempts to, fit a child into those kind of relationships, don’t achieve the purpose of supporting the flourishing of that child. So, yeah, I say that we are a species that is created, to have bisexual by. But I mean a man and a woman.
01:19:32:08 – 01:19:46:22
Father Paul Sullins
Two sexes. Relations. That’s true for all higher mammals. Yeah. Not just human beings. And so I think it’s it’s normal, in that sense.
01:19:47:00 – 01:19:50:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with being normal.
01:19:50:03 – 01:19:51:02
Father Paul Sullins
Now.
01:19:51:04 – 01:20:15:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
How about that? How about that for a radical statement? Okay, so so let me bring up another topic that corresponds with things that I’ve heard from many of the people that I’ve interviewed. They’ll talk about childhood trauma multiple times. I’ve heard about, a neighborhood boy molested me when I was six years old. I encountered homosexual pornography when I was eight.
01:20:15:18 – 01:20:51:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, this kind of thing. My parents divorce shattered my sense of identity. Those kind of things. But. But one also hears this, particularly from the men, in some form or fashion, that there there was no father figure who was an attractive and available attachment figure. And that can mean all kinds of things. And some of the fellows, you know, in some cases, they’re reporting whether dad beat him up in some cases there’s you’re saying, you know, my dad really was a good guy, but he he couldn’t relate to me with my temperament the way I needed to be.
01:20:51:12 – 01:21:37:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so I don’t blame my dad, you know? So there’s a there’s kind of a range of these stories, but they do hover around this, this concept that, that the young boy is looking for a male, exemplar perhaps, or attachment figure, you know, and it’s not there. And then, you know, that combined with the right combination of other things, his arousal patterns and behavior patterns get derailed into into choosing a homosexual partner, a male partner, that is, the hypothesis that some version of that hypothesis, it seems to me, has been around for a long time, sometimes in Freudian language, sometimes in developmental language.
01:21:37:02 – 01:21:54:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But it’s not the sort of thing that you can prove, like you could prove with the gene studies or something you know what I mean? It’s not a 1 to 1 causality, but as a contributing factor, it seems like a you see it in here it often enough that it’s worthy of attention. What’s your take on that father.
01:21:54:13 – 01:22:41:20
Father Paul Sullins
So I remember reading, Joseph Nagle, Nicholas Senior, made the statement that he had never met, homosexual man in therapy, who who did not have a difficult relationship with his father, usually a distant, relationship the father neglected or wasn’t available. And Nicholas, he defined, homosexuality for men, as impaired gender identity, by which he meant that they did not fully see themselves as a man.
01:22:41:22 – 01:23:27:13
Father Paul Sullins
And so they, you know, they didn’t know how to play on sports teams with other men. They didn’t know how to do how to be a man, how to talk to women as a man. They hadn’t done the roughhousing with other guys as a man. There was just a general lack of, understanding themselves as a man now that that was that’s often, linked with, itself judgment because of that, the sense that you’re defective, you’re not conscious as as it comes that, but he saw that as the root of developing, same sex attraction.
01:23:27:14 – 01:23:55:09
Father Paul Sullins
Not that every man that experiences those conditions once again is going to develop those. But the ones who saw therapy, that he dealt with, all of them, did that. So there’s a certain proportion, certain slice of the homosexual population that, that that helps to explain, their, their journey into same sex attraction.
01:23:55:11 – 01:24:31:16
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah. So I, I all of these things come from our early lives. And a lot of research has shown that the absence of a father has all kinds of, generalized, deficits that are produced for a child. And they produce a lack of confidence, a lack of self-identity. It affects women, too, young women who don’t have a strong male model, grow up not quite knowing what to look for in a boyfriend or in their own mate.
01:24:31:18 – 01:24:59:00
Father Paul Sullins
And not knowing how they should be treated in some way. And so often we’ll get into relationships that misuse or abuse them in some way. It’s generally called seeking for a father’s love. For both the man and for the woman, to be able to understand oneself as a full human being. It’s in the reflection of the the image.
01:24:59:00 – 01:25:07:20
Father Paul Sullins
The way that my father, saw me is how most of us began developing our own identity.
01:25:07:22 – 01:25:29:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And, you know, the, the point of being for a girl to be not sure what to look for in a guy and end up with the wrong kind of guy. I’ve heard that from, from women and in fact, in fact our friend, our friend Shirley and Catherine will say, I can tell you the exact moment I decided I was a lesbian because I’d had enough of being abused, you know?
01:25:30:04 – 01:25:51:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so it’s like, this makes these kind of explanations make sense, make some kind of intuitive sense. And so it it seems like it would make more sense for the psychological profession to be interested in these things and to be working out different ways of helping people rather than shutting, shutting it down with the idea that all forms of conversion are.
01:25:51:15 – 01:25:52:04
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah, or.
01:25:52:04 – 01:25:55:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Wrong or bad or or harmful, you know, I mean, it just doesn’t make sense.
01:25:56:03 – 01:26:19:22
Father Paul Sullins
There are, there are parts of the cycle psychological profession that are very interested in these things, where there is a large body of research on the importance of having both a mother and a father for a child. And that the two are not interchangeable and replaceable. Mothers provide things for children and and that fathers don’t and fathers that mothers don’t.
01:26:19:22 – 01:26:23:21
Father Paul Sullins
We do a whole probably show on just that right. Which.
01:26:23:23 – 01:26:30:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right right, right. But that but doesn’t that count. Doesn’t that oh hold on. Doesn’t that count though is super hetero sexist.
01:26:31:02 – 01:26:31:22
Father Paul Sullins
Yeah I mean that.
01:26:31:22 – 01:26:36:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Is, that is that is so heteronormative right there. You know, to say that. Right.
01:26:36:07 – 01:26:57:22
Father Paul Sullins
And so there’s a limit in the APA publications on those kinds of studies and those kinds of research. Because if if you begin to think, well, you know what? That has an implication for children growing up with two men or two women and which suggests that they’re at a disadvantage. And so such studies generally move away from that.
01:26:57:22 – 01:27:20:19
Father Paul Sullins
They have a disclaimer saying, well, we we this only applies to heterosexual families or something of that nature. But if you begin to think about it, it should apply to all families. If we’re talking about, outcome effects on children, the children that are resident with same sex parents are no different than any other children in their developmental needs.
01:27:20:21 – 01:27:59:20
Father Paul Sullins
So, that kind of research has lots of implications for same sex parent families. They just decide not to draw out those implications. Or if they do, they can do it in other journals and other other settings. And that and that is going on. It’s you know, there’s there’s a lot of good, honest researchers out there that are, you know, but but they, they don’t want to draw out the, the, the political implications of their studies to clearly, because, you know, there’s a lot of pushback, as you and I know, there are a lot of people that would want to limit your career life, doing that.
01:27:59:20 – 01:28:02:16
Father Paul Sullins
So, so they don’t. Yeah.
01:28:02:18 – 01:28:22:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And and, you know, it’s not just the homosexual issue. It’s also the single parent, the unmarried parent issue, you know, and that was prominent in a way, even even earlier, because I can remember when I first started writing in this area, my first three books had nothing to do with homosexuality at all. I was worried about, family breakdown and too much daycare.
01:28:22:19 – 01:28:26:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I was worried about too much daycare. Can you imagine that? How how quaint that is, you know?
01:28:27:02 – 01:28:29:03
Father Paul Sullins
But it’s still an issue, I think.
01:28:29:03 – 01:28:59:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, it’s still an issue. It needs. It needs to be an issue. Kids need their parents. I mean, this is a core value. The Ruth Institute people. If that makes me hetero sexist, fine. Kids need their parents. They need their mom and their dad. But I was surprised to see in this 2016 study that we’ve been talking about, they they they make this statement, the idea that homosexuality resulted from pathological parent child relationships became prominent because of psychoanalytic psychoanalysis.
01:28:59:07 – 01:29:29:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay, great. In general, psychoanalytic analytic theorists came to blame a dysfunctional relationship between children, their parents, for children’s homosexuality, which they regarded as pathological. The landmark study by Bill at all seemingly disposed of the idea that homosexuality resulted from the quality of parent child relationships. So I went look for this landmark Bell study, 1981. Okay, they’re saying as of 1981, we’re done with this theory.
01:29:29:19 – 01:29:51:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Everything you need is here. We don’t even need to ask anymore whether the quality of parent child relations is relevant. So I look at this book and I’m like, well, yeah, that’s how they interpreted their data. But the very numbers say produce, those are consistent with yes, they are a contributing factor, you know. And so it’s not that’s not the only possible interpretation of the data.
01:29:52:01 – 01:30:16:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so that’s the kind of thing fathers own that, that kind of thing that make that just upsets me. Right. Because drawing such sweeping conclusions with so many implications for people’s lives on the basis of something. No, no, you know, I mean, that’s just not good enough, you know, that you’re going to tell people it doesn’t meet whether you choose a girl partner or a boy partner, it’s just a coin toss.
01:30:16:17 – 01:30:22:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s really not that important, you know? No, I I’m not going with that.
01:30:22:09 – 01:30:38:21
Father Paul Sullins
I think when they use the word discredited, well that’s accurate. You can find some minor flaw in a study. And every study has flaws and say, well, look at that. That’s we should pay no attention to that study. We have discredited it. Well, you.
01:30:38:23 – 01:30:39:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right.
01:30:39:18 – 01:31:08:15
Father Paul Sullins
You might you could say accurately you have discredited it, but you haven’t disproved it. You haven’t said that it’s, not a relevant factor, that it shouldn’t, shouldn’t be discussed. People shouldn’t, try to do research that rebuts it or that affirms it. You just said, well, you know, it’s the wrong color or it’s the wrong size or some small thing that says, well, I don’t want to pay any attention to that study.
01:31:08:17 – 01:31:32:05
Father Paul Sullins
Well, that’s not science. That is, good rhetoric in a way. It is, good political, dialog. In a way, you see politicians doing that, about their opponents, they’ll find some small thing and then they’ll say, well, you know, that’s a terrible thing for that person to say and do, and they’re trying to discredit them.
01:31:32:07 – 01:31:37:21
Father Paul Sullins
And it’s not it’s not really, rational form of argument.
01:31:37:23 – 01:32:00:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right. It’s a t test instead of a chi square or or the reverse of the chi square roots, you know. Right. You know, or also another, another kind of rhetorical strategy along the same lines is to say, well, we have an alternative explanation for this data. Yes. Okay. That’s great. You have an alternative explanation that doesn’t really prove that the first explanation was incorrect.
01:32:00:10 – 01:32:26:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right. And you haven’t eliminated all. And if you may eliminate the psychoanalytic version of this theory, but that doesn’t eliminate every version of this theory, you know. And so I just, I think the public should be aware of just how fragile, how fragile the evidentiary base is for a lot of the things that we’re taking as given this session, that we’ve had here.
01:32:26:22 – 01:32:46:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Father Sullins is back and forth. We’ve done it’s been kind of technical. It’s been a little hairy. I don’t know how many people are going to sit and listen to the whole thing, but I do think the everybody will find some part of it that will benefit them when they’re, you know, they’re actually trying to make sense of something that you heard in the news or something, you know, wait, does this really add up?
01:32:46:16 – 01:32:59:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Does this really make sense? You know, I hope we’ve equipped people to to answer some of that for themselves and to be a little bit more confident, in the natural order of things. What what do you say, father?
01:32:59:23 – 01:33:39:05
Father Paul Sullins
I agree, it’s a house of cards. There’s not much there. In most of these claims. To me, that’s because, it it is a collection of untruths. There’s not a concern for whether or not something is true. It’s just a concern for whether or not it advances a favored political agenda. And the best thing for someone to do, when faced with these kind of claims is to scrutinize them carefully, to be very skeptical.
01:33:39:07 – 01:34:09:06
Father Paul Sullins
If they cite a study and it says it says this, go look at the study and see if it actually says this. Much of the time it doesn’t say anything like that. It sometimes it says the opposite of what they’re claiming. But the, you know, they put those out there and sound authoritative and hope that if they say it enough, repeated enough that people are going to, people are going to buy it and accept it.
01:34:09:08 – 01:34:36:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And just to add to what you said there, that if you start with something that’s not true, then you hang on to the thing that’s not true. You’re going to end up spinning off self contradictions. And I think that we have been seeing that the whole sexual revolution is just one giant set of contradictions, in my opinion. But just in this area of gender and gender ideology, there are plenty of people who think gay marriage was a fine thing and it was a great civil rights advance.
01:34:36:08 – 01:34:59:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But transgenderism, that’s a step too far. The fact is, there were things being accepted that that needed more scrutiny, that needed to be looked at more critically. And since we didn’t do it, then, it’s spinning off, you know, yet another kind of, a contradictory, half truth or untrue, complete untruth, you know, and that’s why we are where we are.
01:34:59:21 – 01:35:13:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so I if those of you who have watched this far, I want to thank you so much for hanging in there with us. And I hope that you’ve learned something that all of this material is going to be in the show notes. So you’ll be able to look at it for yourself and and make your own conclusion.
01:35:13:10 – 01:35:32:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And I want to just thank you, Father Solis, for being part of this conversation. And I want to thank you, our listeners and followers of the Ruth Institute, for being so interested in getting to the real heart of what ails us. And thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode of The Doctor J. Show.
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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 get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.
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