“How Homosexuality Happens” by E. Mansell Pattison, Eternity, May 1982.
Pat Robertson’s Perspective: A Special Report to Members of The 700 Club by Pat Robertson, Fall 1981.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
In Pattison’s Eternity review of Sexual Preference by Indiana University scientists Bell, Weinberg and Hammersmith (cf. REVIEW, Winter 1982), he faults their method as “totally suspect”. Yet he himself employed the same methoed of retrospective self-reporting in his own research (cf. REVIEW, Winter 1981). A big difference, though: Bell and his associates interviewed over a thousand persons (randomly culled from a larger number) but Pattison and his wife interviewed only 30 men out of 300 who tried and failed to become “ex-gay” at Melodyland’s EXIT ministry. He also faults the Bell team because he thinks that maybe homosexuals did the interviewing. How is this, even if true, more biased than heterosexuals such as the Pattisons interviewing homosexuals? He spends the first quarter of his review objecting that Bell and his associates seem to him to have wanted to “influence public opinion” by presenting their data in a “readable and understandable” style. But what is he himself trying to do by reviewing this scientific study in a mass-audience evangelical magazine? (He overlooks the second volume of the Bell report which goes into statistical detail not intended for the lay person.) But for all his complaining of their having made the report “readable”, Pattison either misreads it or misrepresents it by saying that they “propound [that] biology [is] determinant” in homosexuality. They not only do not do so but they go to some effort to guard against such a simplistic conclusion. Pattison confesses ignorance of a “large body of research” on biological factors associated with the etiology of homosexuality, but of course, his ignorance does nothing to make this research disappear. He ends his review by returning to his ideological gripe and saying that Bell and his associates “discount the fact that many persons have changed their sexual orientation”. Of course they discount such nonsense. But Pattison protests: “I have met a number of ex-gays across the United States”. His findings, though, do nothing to substantiate his claim that “many persons have changed their sexual orientation”. In April, in Atlanta, at a meeting of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies convention, I challenged him about his claim. He tried to minimize the significance of the continued homosexuality in the “ex-gays” he claims have changed. He did this with a rather odd notion: “Who doesn’t have homosexual fantasies, especially after a fight with his wife?!” He also admitted at that CAPS meeting that he would not “be surprised if some of those 11 [“ex-gays” he met] return to homosexual lifestyles”. [It should be noted that while Pattison and I were debating in Atlanta, the founders of the “ex-gay” program through whom the Pattisons met their “ex-gays” were leaving EXIT to enter into a gay romantic relationship with each other.]
According to an On Cable profile of Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of “The 700 Club”, he does not see himself as a “fundamentalist, does not identify himself with the political concerns of the Moral Majority and even concedes that some aspects of evolutionary theory may be correct”. Writing in another secular publication, Video Age International, Robertson said that the Moral Majority “speaks for one narrow segment” only. Whatever the basis for these remarks, it is impossible to see any difference between Robertson’s anti-homosexual tirades and those of the Moral Majority. Robertson’s newsletter is filled with the same hatred, scare strategies, and false witness against homosexuals that one finds in the Moral Majority publications. He warns that under the guise of “freedom of expression”, “the antichrist spirit” of Sodom and Gomorrah is “in the air” today in America. Using other Right-wing code words for the “disease” (e.g., “the goddess of reason”, “secular humanism”, “bizarre sex”) that he predicts will finally persecute as enemies all those who represent “traditional morality” – read: his own professed values and lifestyle – he repeatedly lumps all homosexuality with pornography, the ERA, massage parlors, sex education (which, he says, is “force[d] upon little children”), child molestation, incest, sadomasochism, masturbation, nudity, drug abuse, racketeering, gambling, Communism, “rampant inflation”, “debauched currency”, “economic collapse”, etc. Throughout his rambling, though, the homosexuals are the repeatedly identified enemy of those whose welfare Robertson seems especially to care about (“middle class American and their [sic] impressionable children”). Neglecting contrary evidence and using, a heterosexually-germane term (“sterile”), he strangely argues that homosexuality “can never result in procreation and therefore is not sexual. Homosexuality and lesbianism always remain a form of autoeroticism”. If he were to extrapolate from his personal sexual experience as a heterosexual, he would not be able to say such a silly thing about the personal sexual experience of homosexuals.
Ironically, it’s Robertson’s self-righteous hostility and selfish inhospitality to homosexuals that most resembles the spirit and sin of Sodom – as explained in the Book of Ezekiel and assumed by Jesus. It’s in just such a self-centered spirit of Sodom that Robertson embraces only those he perceives are his people and abuses those he thinks are not.