Fraudulent practices cannot be justified by the plea that there is a “need” or a “market” for them. Of course there is, otherwise they wouldn’t be offering them, and no-one would be falling for them. Sometimes the charlatans themselves actually believe in what they’re doing, but that still doesn’t alter the fact that it’s fraud. In the case of purely subjective “needs”, e.g. a change of sexual orientation, the charlatans actually try to create the “need” in others. That simply makes it all the more reprehensible, if possible.

“I don’t know too much about the conversion movement and I’m sure it has plenty of charlatans, but I’d think it must also have one or two well intentioned people?”

I’m sure it has at least one or two well-intentioned people, quite apart from the charlatans, the self-deceivers, the evil people, the out right liars, the political hacks, the people who need to earn a living but don’t give a literal damn for whom they hurt in the process.

But especially, there are the people who have their own to issues to work out, and use this means as a method for doing just that. and like AC, it’s even better if you can earn a decent living by doing so. One of the truisms of the psychotherapeutic field is that people become therapists as a way of approaching their own issues.

But let’s go back to the people who are, as you say, well intentioned. Fill in the blanks: the road to ________ is paved with __________. The ex-gay industry, like the anti-gay industry, is filled with people with an agenda. It is based upon demonstrable lies, questionable assumptions, twisted interpretations of data and opinion, scriptural passages which many people have demonstrated in fairly conclusive ways that are highly questionable for linguistic, historical, religious, theological, psychological, and factual reasons. Logic, experience, consistency, common sense– let alone actual facts– have nothing to do with this. You have only to listen to Paul Cameron– St. Paul, as those in the anti-gay industry think of him– and his latest diatribe that if don’t-ask-don’t-tell were to end, gay men would be sexually assaulting anything that moves, male and female, to know that. Does that even make the slightest bit of sense? Gay ,men raping straight women because of…huh..wha???? Yet these people quote him without reservation or shame.

So how good can your intentions be if you are willing to ignore mountains of facts, logic, common sense, and experience, all in pursuit of your ideological position that gay is bad?

” I realize even good intentions can cause harm but I think there is a legitimate need or market for “change” out there.”

There is certainly a market out there, a market created by 2000 years of deliberately ignorance and/or stupefying blindness, playing upon the fears and psyches of (I think primarily) heterosexual men, replete with misogyny, homophobia, sex-as-abyss,masculinity fears, obsession with sin, redemption, fear, and more fear.

The market is there because for the past 100 years or so, there have been enough people with enough marketing skills and enough cultural support to make it work. they used to just murder, torture, and imprison us. Now they can make money and gain political power. All in the name of exorcising (or exercising, depending) their own demons. How sweet is that?

As for a “legitimate” need for change out there? What makes it legitimate? Quotations from a book 2000-3000 years old, translated, mistranslated, politicized and agendized well beyond what desert tribes 2000 years and 5000 miles, as far removed from us as they could possibly be, may have had to say about a subject that may or may not be about homosexuality as we understand it today?

It’s not legitimate because it is not my book, my religion, my god, or my interpretations. It is not legitimate because it assumes that there is something wrong with me, something seriously broken, threatening, and dangerous, something so serious that laws must be passed, children, marriage, family, must be protected lest the assault of my outlaw sexuality utterly destroy all that we hold dear.

Or something. Because the sands on which homohatred are base are always shifting, never stable. Because they are based upon the fantasies, obsessions, fears, and financial needs of its proponents. They are almost never based upon fact. Because there is only one fact: that apart from the “issue” of sexual and affectional orientaton, there is not one true thing you can say about gay people as a group, any more than there is about heteros.

Not one. And after that one, you’re making it all up.

Let’s talk about the product that they are selling: change. Because here’s the real problem. They are selling a product that like its philosophical underpinning, homohatred, is always elusive and changing. There have been extensive posts on this website about the ever changing nature of change. you should read them. Likewise, you should read about the aformentioned jones-Yarhouse study. 15% of their subjects had changed, excluding one who said he had but recanted. but change was ambiguous, complicated, difficult. 15 highly questionable percent, AND they had God and the forces of psychotherapy on their side.

change is change even when nothing has demonstrably changed. Change is the yearning to change. Change is celibacy. I’m not gay because I have changed– my behavior. I’m not gay but my attractions are still down on their knees in the men’s room at the QuickeeMart.

There is nothing so true on heaven and earth but wishing will make it so. That is all they are selling.

As I pointed out– and the editors here could provide the links in this blog– Allan chambers ALONE has claimed to “change” hundreds if not thousands of people. Old Nick has claimed to change people by the busload. Where are these people? Why could J&Y find only 100 people for their study out of the thousands who should be flocking to prove the efficacy of ex-gay therapy.

I suspect the answer is that for a lot of people, they are more than willing to deceive themselves. But they are not willing to put their integrity– more accurately, the lack of same– on public display to be exposed for what it is. and perhaps they even have compassion enough not to wish on others what their lack of integrity has wrought on themselves. Even self delusion has its limits.

They are not selling change, however variably and loosely that may be defined, and however non-demonstrable it may be as an outcome. What they are selling is a chimera, a will-o-the-wisp– the hope of change. This is the very definition of snake oil: a product which at best is useless, at worst harmful, that is a non-solution to a real problem, or a solution to a non-existent one. And they are selling it to people who are the least able to withstand the sales pitch, because they have already become addicted to the product. It’s like selling extensive and expensive weight loss programs to people who are obsessing about their weight, but not doing anything about it, such as the simple expedients of eating less, eating better, and exercising more. They are selling the hope of change to people who have becomes obsessed about their sexuality instead of actually integrayting it into their lives in a way that works for them.

Perfect example: change is defined as celibacy. If change were simply celibacy, they wouldn’t have a product to sell any more. Celibacy is rather simple: stop having sex. (Or get married. same thing. I’m not bitter).

so you go through these extensive and expensive exgay programs, months or years of therapy, worship services, religious indoctrination, residency programs, and possibly unpaid political volunteerism. And for what? To stop having sex, especially of a kind which other people disapprove of.

It doesn’t take all of that. you just have to stop having sex. You can cruise craigslist for self-destructive, pornographic sex whether you are gay or straight, The problem is not having sex, whether hetero or homo, the problem is the reasons you have sex, reasons whch may not work for you. It has nothing to do with orientation, let alone changing orientation. If that were not true, all straight people would be exemplars, all gay people total messes. Ultimately, it is all about the choices you make.

But here’s the snake oil: you don’t like your behavior? It must be becuase you’re gay. Otherwise, you wouldn’t do it. So buy our product, whatever it may be, and let us reinforce the sales with out outrights lies, distortions, and fear mongering half-truths. You can also believe in Jesus AND buy our product.

Tell that to Tiger woods and John edwards and elliott spitzer and Ted Haggard. Believing in Jesus isn’t going to do it either.

“but I think there is a legitimate need or market for “change” out there.”

There are indeed people who don’t wish to be gay, for whatever reason they may have. I disagree with the reasons for their conclusions, but it is their choice. It’s unfortunate that they have bought the whole meshuganeh story, but there you have it.

In that sense, the market is legitimate. But in no other sense, based as it is upon fear, lies, stupidity, hatred, and fairy stories. But there really isn’t a need for it, and there isn’t a real product they are selling. Change may be possible, but the exgay industry have not been able to demonstrrate that they are providing it.

I have to go now. more if I have time later.

However, one thing is certain; no matter what makes people gay, there is nothing reliable to show that one can make any substantial change in sexual orientation by any particular process. Some people appear to experience shifts to one degree or anther, but acts of will or therapy or whatever affect behavior and perhaps frame of mind, not actual orientation.

So those who might be “in the market for change” as you put it deserve a legitimate, professional response with some real research and scientific awareness, not snake oil. A start would be to find out why they think “change is possible” and go from there.

If they want help becoming celibate or, if they are bisexual, learning to emphasize their heterosexual feelings, more power to them — as long as they have been properly qualified by a real therapist and receive real therapy. That does not mean Paul Miller talking over Skype about his own self-gratification.

When you said that there are gay people who want to change ‘for whatever reason’ that there should be some resources to make that happen.

It’s the ‘whatever reason’ that lacks the same specificity that it’s being homosexual that has any roots in the reasons.

For example,
It is a cultural and societal calculation that gay people fail, not only in their relationships with their families, but romantically as well. After all, young gay men and women are uniquely divided to NOT form romantic and enduring bonds with another gay person. Dissatisfaction with previous relationships, divisive ultimatums brought on by one’s church and family network works against a gay person BEING satisfied with being gay.

So that they are not, is predictable.
But where the bad assumption is, is that affecting heterosexuality will give any more satisfaction or ABILITY is up in the air.

Because of the open freedom and lack of challenge to being hetero, it looks like the holy grail of living happily. And the straight folks invested in changing gay folks make it look that way.
But that affectation carries another set of burdens and expectations. You don’t really trade UP, you trade SIDEWAYS and one might find that there is just as much, if not more insecurity in whether your performance is convincing
Having all the pertinent trappings…wife, kids the house and job….most of the ex gays I’ve seen seem to have little that make them stand out.
There’s an unbelievable sameness to them that begs the question of who they REALLY were before the ‘body snatchers’ got to them.

That they have so buried those things that make a gay person identifiable within gay culture, that affecting the most bland and beige ideals of hetero life is all that they could do to blend in so thoroughly.

If you talk to enough ex gays about what they were and what made them gay and why they left it, there is little variance from the stereotype, if any. To say nothing of virtually NO ONE ex gay is atheist or without Christian imprint on everything they do.
Everything.

So WHY, JMC would this fade to bland be SO desirable and SUCH a badge of validation for those who don’t want to be gay ‘for whatever reason’?
Why ISN’T there a more efficient way of giving a person to change the option WITHOUT all the conditions on which doing so would rest?
Like not only denouncing being gay, but participating in denouncing equal rights and protections for gay people?

And then enfolding themselves in communities and families with little diversity or challenges to that white picket fence standard of happiness.

Well, one has to question whose happiness and comfort this really is for given what is happening in the real world from attacks on marriage equality and Kevin Jennings to who really is out there to endorse being ex gay.

Those ‘hundreds of thousands’ claimed to have reached the ex gay nadir by the ex gay industry, have yet to materialize.
Even for the purposes of their own research.

So really, JMC…’whatever reason’, might be a real aspect in the life of a gay person who feels like they are a Dickensian orphan, left in a cold street, looking in a window on the warmth circle of hetero lives.

But when it’s all said and done, it’s all very hollow. The reason there is no efficient help for a gay person who doesn’t want to be gay, is because being hetero doesn’t carry any more or less security for one’s life either.

Just difference in how the world views you, and it’s up to you what you make of that.
Sexual orientation can’t do it for you gay or not.

But saying that being gay is EVERYTHING about who you are and the direction your life will take in a negative way, has dramatic effect and can make a profit too for those who simply have made it their life’s work that a gay person NOT be gay…’for whatever reason’.

What kind of change? I don’t really believe in a “cure”. Maybe some sort development of opposite-sex attraction. An awakening of sorts. Again, I think for SOME people homosexuality is a result of unresolved issues. In my case, I am currently best friends with my father too but when I was just a few months old we were separated and I knew nothing about him until I met him as an adult. However, I had internalized this as rejection as far back as I can remember and this became a huge deal to me growing up. As far as the same things happening with heterosexuals, I think it has to do with a combination of personality and identification. Not all personality types will interpret and internalize things the same way. Also, some might be able to identify with other men in the family or in their community, heck, maybe even on TV, which obviously doesn’t resolve all the issues of absent fathers, but maybe at least provides a resolution for this one in particular.

It has created quite a few comments.

That makes it sound like a lecture towards you and I didn’t want that.
I wanted to say “I concur with you Ben.”

Sorry! Meant no offense.
Not enough caffeine this morning.