“Coming Out” by Tim Stafford, “I found Freedom” by Colin Cook, “Homosexuality According to Science” by Stanton L. Jones, Christianity Today, August 18, 1989.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Eight years ago Christianity Today bannered across its cover: “Homosexuals CAN Change”. Its latest “ex-gay” cover seems less sure: “Can Homosexuals Really Change?” Senior writer Tim Stafford tells of his interviews with several “ex-gay” leaders and – for the first time in conservative evangelical publishing – with “the arch critic of the ex-gay movement, Ralph Blair”, whom he reports he found “neatly dressed in a coat and tie”.
After spending a few hours with “ex-gay” leader John Freeman and his wife, and even after they honestly spoke of Freeman’s continued “homosexual feelings”, Stafford says it’s “hard to believe [that] the years of marriage, the stressed but happy family” is not evidence of real “ex-gay” change. This, even though he had noted “ex-gay” leader Alan Medinger’s “double life of 10 years. While married and having children, he secretly cruised gay hangouts”. “Ex-gay” leader Andy Comiskey also confessed that “homosexual desire continues” and that “ex-gays” are “not necessarily attracted to the opposite sex generally”. Stafford adds that, “other ex-gay leaders questioned whether generalized [hetero]sexual attraction was all that positive” anyway. Incredibly, Stafford downplays involuntary erotic attraction as definitive of sexuality: “a man’s erotic interest in other men” doesn’t mean homosexuality. He finds strange the idea that homosexuality should be “defined by erotic desire for one’s own gender”. The “ex-gays”, he concedes, did not describe a “reversal of their sexual desires; rather they described a gradual reversal in their spiritual understanding”. He says it’s not surprising that they “struggle and fall and struggle again”. But he explains this not in terms of their never having changed from homosexual orientation but as analogous to heterosexuals’ struggles and falls into heterosexual promiscuity. He misses the point entirely. Heterosexuals fall heterosexually because they’re still heterosexuals; “ex-gays” fall homosexually because they’re still homosexuals! He concludes with “cautious optimism” that even though “ex-gay” ministry “is more risky than most”, evangelicals should support it. He ends where he began.
(Stafford says that Blair is a “mild man” in person who “seemed generally to be a charitable man” in contrast to “his caustic reviews … and sarcastic diatribe” in print. He correctly reports my “opposition to promiscuity [and] dogged determination to remain evangelical”. But he misunderstands me as saying “ex-gays” are bisexuals, that they’re “actually ‘falling’ on a regular basis [and] living really promiscuous lives” – I was not referring to them. And he’s wrong about my being an alumnus of Ball State, etc.)
For its first-person article, CT comes up with nothing more convincing that Colin Cook’s retreaded testimony. Cook was expelled from the Seventh-day Adventist “ex-gay” ministry he led in Pennsylvania. He’d being found to have had sex with young men coming to him for the “ex-gay” experience. Cook admits that while married as an “ex-gay” leader, he “rationalized” his homosexual “seduction” of those counselees “for years”. After all this, CT publishes anew the same old claims he’s made all along: “I now stand free. … In Jesus, I was identified as whole, a heterosexual man”. He says his mistake was in judging change “by how I felt”. Those who would try to endorse Cook’s word-game should frankly ask: Would I have qualms about my daughter’s plans to marry such an “ex-gay”?
[After Cook’s expulsion from “ex-gay” ministry in Pennsylvania, he moved to Colorado, set up another “ex-gay” ministry, and was again found to be having sex with his young male counselees. His wife divorced him. Today, he continues to counsel via the Internet. His website contains a disclaimer of legal responsibility “for any negative results claimed to ensue from viewing of or use of [this service] or from counseling by Colin Cook”.]
The third strike in this CT series is an attempt to enlist scientific support with an article by the head of Wheaton College’s psychology department. Stanton Jones repeats the false tale that the American Psychiatric Association’s dropping of homosexuality as psychopathology was a result of a vote fearful of gay activists rather than a result of extensive scientific research and in the context of a total revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. To have retained the old classification on homosexuality would have made it the only condition at odds with the new APA nomenclature. The two-fold standard throughout the APA revisions: Does it regularly cause subjective distress and is it regularly associated with some generalized impairment in social effectiveness? Even Jones admits that homosexuality “is not inevitably correlated with personal distress”. He says that instability in some gay relationships is a sign of the maladaptiveness of homosexuality as such, but he doesn’t take seriously the effect of antigay prejudice. Do unhappy heterosexual marriages and the high divorce rate mean that heterosexuality as such is maladaptive? Jones’ argument that homosexuality is pathological because most people take a dim view of it would allow us to say that any violation of majority norms – such as much of what evangelicals think and do along “the narrow way” – is pathological. He seems not well-read in the biological literature on homosexuality. The scientific consensus is that homosexual etiology includes both biological and environmental factors. He grants that “some … are helpless victims of powerful influences” psychologically, but he demands nonetheless that they act contrary to these if they wish to please God. The textbook he uses at Wheaton “says unequivocally that psychotherapy for homosexuality ‘has been ineffective’,” but Jones claims: “Change is possible for some … But change is difficult”. He endorses the “ex-gay” movement.
It’s unfortunate that the most influential evangelical magazine still pushes unrealistic responses at the pastoral problems of Christians who need to effectively integrate their homosexuality and Christian lifestyle. It’s encouraging, however, that views critical of the “ex-gay” movement are finally given at least some notice in CT.