Working with the New Jersey Family Policy Counsel and speaking to the American Family Association’s (AFA) One News Now, ex-gay Greg Quinlan made statements on behalf of noted geneticist Francis S. Collins that were untrue — specifically that his work on the human genome project had led to the “fact” that homosexuality was 100% nurture, with absolutely no genetic component.  This echoed a similar distortion made by NARTH’s Dean Byrd earlier this year.  See our recent post for details on this.

As noted in that previous post, we contacted Dr. Collins last May and printed, with permission, his correction of what was falsely being credited to him by NARTH.  In this latest challenge, Quinlan has accused XGW of fraud, claiming that quote was not accurate.

While this accusation is absurd at best — XGW has never been seriously accused of fraudulently posting anything, let alone has this ever been shown to be the case — it seemed prudent to seek public validation of the quote’s veracity.  To that end, we posted the entire email exchange from May with headers intact.  We also wrote Collins again and asked that he confirm to a third party that what we were reporting was accurate and that his quotes were true.

Collins has now confirmed this to Warren Throckmorton, who has posted about it on his own blog.  Throckmorton is known to others who discuss these issues and understands the debate, yet has a worldview closer to that of Quinlan.  His confirmation should be enough to dispel any genuine question of validity concerning our quotes.  For the record, here is a message I received from Collins yesterday, after making him aware of the challenge to what we had quoted:

Dear David,

Thanks for the heads up. I am truly sorry to hear that there is a continuing effort by Mr. Quinlan and others to distort this information about genetic factors in homosexuality. The facts have not changed since the e-mail message I sent you on May 20, 2007.

Regards, Francis Collins

And then the cc’d comment after I asked that he confirm all this to Throckmorton:

Hello David and Warren,

I am happy to confirm that these e-mail communications from May 2007 and yesterday are indeed authentic, and represent my best effort at summarzing what we know and what we don’t know about genetic factors in male homosexuality. I appreciate your continuing efforts to correct misstatements that seem to be circulating on the internet.

Regards, Francis Collins

We hope this demonstrates our desire to expose the truth without deception, and of course the validity of our previous quotes from Collins. Would that we could apply an equal level of scrutiny to our ex-gay friends and expect a reply! We are still waiting for retractions by both Quinlan and One News Now, not to mention the genesis of this distortion, Dean Byrd at NARTH.

So far, this is all we have heard:

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