Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. and D. Paul Sullins, Ph.D.
If you thought that persons who are sexually attracted to the same sex must be gay or lesbian and can only enjoy intimacy in same-sex relations, you would be mistaken. In the onslaught of secular media and the sometimes fumbling responses of Catholic leaders, Catholic teaching on same sex attraction is about as misunderstood as it is controversial.
The Church has been reluctant to refer to individuals as “gay” or “lesbian,” as if their patterns of attractions define a person’s identity. The Church also teaches that homosexual temptations are not the same as homosexual acts. At root, the Church always affirms, and our deathly culture almost uniformly denies, that same-sex attracted people can, to their benefit, resist and change homosexual behavior. No one need be locked into sin.
Scientific research strongly supports the Church’s view. Studies of the human genome and of identical twins have cast serious doubt on the often-heard claim that sexual orientation is an innate immutable trait, comparable to race. Furthermore, social science research going back to the 1990’s has found that people can, and often do, change their patterns of sexual attractions and behaviors. Yet, as with a lot of research that supports the Church, these studies have been vigorously suppressed by secular academics and journals. Persons who have changed sexual orientation are functionally invisible in cultural and policy debates, including the debates over so-called conversion therapy.
The Ruth Institute, a pro-family organization in Lake Charles, Louisiana, decided to do something about this, in a project called Leaving Pride Behind. We sought out and surveyed people who once would have called themselves “gay” or “lesbian” but no longer do. We gathered a sample of 183 men and women who filled out an extensive survey about their journeys into and out of an LGBT experience or identity. We asked questions about religion, child abuse and various types of therapy. We asked “before and after” questions about patterns of sexual attractions and behaviors.
Fr. Paul Sullins, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate at the Ruth Institute, has just published the first round of data analysis from this survey, in Cureus, a peer-reviewed Springer Nature journal. This paper shows:
- Same-sex attractions can often, though not always, change, more so for women than for men. Almost nine in ten women in the sample (88%) had changed sexual attraction from mostly or fully homosexual to mostly or fully hetereosexual. Fewer men, but still a sizable minority (39%), had experienced this much change in attractions.
- Regardless of how much their attractions changed, all of the individuals in this sample had almost completely eliminated their same sex behavior. 100% of men and women reported “slight” or no same sex behavior.
- Therapy can help, but is not necessary, to change sexual orientation. General therapy, not necessarily focused on changing same sex attraction, was more helpful for some individuals in reducing same sex attraction than therapy with a distinct goal of reducing same sex attraction. And therapy with the explicit aim of changing sexual orientation sometimes reduced other psychologically troubling issues, for instance, depression for women and self-harm for men.
The studies purporting to “prove” therapy is dangerous never include people who have “left pride behind” and usually exclude women. In other words, they evaluate change therapy by looking only at people who failed to change. What kind of grade would marriage counseling get if we only asked people who subsequently divorced? This is why our study is so important, to show the many successes from sexual orientation therapy.
Our findings show that the world-wide drive to ban all forms of sexual reorientation therapy is deeply misguided. Women who experience persistent same sex attraction are the most likely to benefit from this therapy. Denying women therapy, based on studies that only include men, is patently unfair. Therapy that does not have the explicit goal of reorienting sexual desires can sometimes result in a reordering of desire. Sweeping bans on “conversion therapy” will likely have a chilling effect on even this type of therapy.
The drive to ban Sexual Reorientation Therapy under the tendentious label of “conversion therapy,” assumes no one can change their sexual orientation, and that even the efforts to change are intrinsically harmful. Every single person in our survey is a standing rebuke to these assumptions.
This is why the entire gay lobby goes into overdrive to discredit them. “You must be lying about living a chaste life.” “You were not really gay in the first place.” And so on.
