Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Success = 70% or more Failure Rate?

Life Site News is proclaiming a new study which they claim shows how successful it is to leave the homosexual "lifestyle" (I'm still trying to figure out what a homosexual lifestyle is):


A new study, entitled the Exodus Project and conducted by two psychologists, has determined that, through "religiously mediated means", it is possible for homosexual individuals to leave their old lifestyle and embrace the heterosexual lifestyle. The study also determined that, contrary to mainstream scientific thought, the effort to change one's inclinations away from homosexuality does not appear to be psychologically problematic.

However, if you continue reading this blather you find that only 38% of the people in the study have "changed" and "changed" is a whole other matter. That 38% includes people who couldn't change but now live a chaste life. There were so many problems with this study that it spins the head.


Box Turtle Bulletin has delved into this shady study (they provide lots of information) But here's the gist of their findings:


    • 33 people reported change (moving from homosexual, bisexual or other at Time 1 to heterosexual at time 3; or homosexual at Time 1 to bisexual or other at Time 3)

    • 29 reported no change

    • 8 reported “negative change” (moving from heterosexual, bisexual or other at Time 1 to homosexual at Time 3; or from heterosexual at Time 1 to bisexual or other at Time 3).

    • 3 reported uncertain change (moving from bisexual to other, or the reverse) .
So it had a failure rate of probably more than 70% and we don't know now many of those 33 people were originally bisexual which would even lower that number of "success". Read Box Turtle's analysis.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

8 reported “negative change” (moving from heterosexual, bisexual or other at Time 1 to homosexual at Time 3; or from heterosexual at Time 1 to bisexual or other at Time 3).

Boy, that's really gotta hurt. You go in to this program as a heterosexual anti-gay fanatic and leave it as a gay or bisexual anti-gay fanatic?

I think I'd be a mite pissed if I were one of those eight folks.

Anonymous said...

If we define "success" as a strictly gay person being converted into a strictly straight person, then this study demonstrates Exodus is a complete failure --- 0% success.

The study's proponents seem more interested in "success" being defined as the gay person behaving in a fashion that the fundamentalists consider non-sinful.