Source: wthrockmorton.com

This is a well hashed subject but sexual identity therapist Dr. Warren Throckmorton has just posted some previously unreleased video of an interview he conducted with Dr. Robert Spitzer a few years ago.

In this interview, Dr. Spitzer gives his candid views on the meaning and value of his 2003 study on whether or not anyone has ever significantly changed their sexual orientation. Up to that point, success rates as high as 70% had been quoted by no less than Exodus International (see note below) and yet no one had even attempted to justify these figures with scientific study. For his part, Spitzer conducted his 2003 study simply to find out if change was at all possible, not how often it might occur.

Few works have been more distorted than this one, an excellent example of which appears on the intro to the PFOX website. Only recently, Daniel Gonzales produced a short instructional video to address just such distortions and Spitzer himself conducted an interview for the same reason.

In 2006, when asked if gays have a choice, Spitzer is quoted as saying:

They have a choice whether to go into therapy, about whether they adopt a gay lifestyle, whether they tell their friends and their family. They don’t have a choice as to whether their basic sexual orientation is gay or straight — that they don’t have a choice about.

I thought this interview was a good example of Dr. Spitzer speaking as a professional outside the (often imposed) political agendas of both sides.

Edit: Exodus president Alan Chambers has asked that we note that this figure was claimed by Sy Rogers circa 1990 and not by him. Our source of the quote is the movie “One Nation Under God” where Rogers quotes a success rate of 71.6% for homosexuals, and that he himself went from complete homosexual orientation to heterosexual within approx 2 years.

Categorized in: