A few minutes ago, one of my best friends and I were standing on the balcony talking about politics, like we do, and I drew a contrast between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, my contention being that Bachmann isn’t at all dumb, but rather that she’s quite intelligent when you consider her statements within the context of her limited, incorrect worldview. Put simply, wingnuts live in a different world, far away from the real world, where they make up their own “facts,” which then become orthodoxy.
Here’s an example of that. Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute went on Janet Mefferd’s radio program and touted absolute nonsense, completely discredited piffle, straight from the bowels of NARTH, about so-called “ex-gay” therapy:
MEFFERD: Brad, is there overwhelming evidence that reparative therapy is a fraud?
DACUS: Actually it’s contrary, there’s overwhelming evidence that reparative therapy actually works. It’s not 100% because you have individual will and every person has their own issues. But Dr. [Joseph] Nicolosi and other famous psychiatrists who have treated this, thousands and thousands of patients, report a very high success rate, I know it’s at least over 80 percent, I believe it’s 80-85 percent success rate. These are people who leave the lifestyle, get married to people, have children, and enter heterosexual relationships. It’s a big mass of deception that they are trying to carry out at the expense of many hundreds of thousands or millions of youths who will be led down a path of death and destruction, unfortunately, if they get away with this.
Oh my dear God. One of the hallmarks of “ex-gay” reparative therapists is that they don’t report success rates, or if they do, their definitions of “success” tend to be laughable. Indeed, in many of them, a person is considered a “success” if they complete the de-gaying program and graduate. Moreover, self-reporting on sexual orientation change is not reliable and absolutely not scientific. On top of that (!!!), the great majority of people who go through de-gaying programs end up back out of the closet, if they survive the horrific depression caused by the religious abuse known as “reparative therapy.” But Dacus’s claim is sort of remarkable, in that I’ve never heard a wingnut attempt to claim such a laughably high “success rate” for such institutional, spiritual bullying. It’s like they’re not even aware that the great majority of humans who live outside their echo chambers think they’re insane.
Think Progress adds more:
Dacus, an attorney, went on to explain that “the homosexual lifestyle gives…boys an average lifespan of the age of 40″ and is “worse than being a chain cigarette smoker.” He also suggested that being gay is the consequence of sexual abuse or poor bonding with their father.
Equating homosexuality with “death and destruction” presents a hefty bias to Dacus’ other claims, and it’s unsurprising that his “evidence” carries no weight. When the American Psychological Association resolved that ex-gay therapy is ineffective and harmful, it was only after a systematic review of the available literature. One of the most prominent studies used to support ex-gay therapy was just disavowed by its primary researcher, who apologized to the gay community for promoting its faulty results. Even anti-gay researchers at Pat Robertson’s Regent University admitted in their research that the “ex-gays” they studied who were now in opposite-sex marriages still had the same same-sex orientation as before their therapy.
It’s significant that Dacus is getting his info from Joseph Nicolosi, as he is probably the most egregiously bigoted, loose-with-the-facts character in the No Homo Industrial Complex. I mean, good god, his entire organization is predicated on the lie that they are “secular,” when the truth is that they are 100% religious in nature.
These people truly are ridiculous.
