Focus on the Family Focuses on Homosexuals

The title of a Denver Post article says what most gays who are not unconscious already knew. Daddy Dobson's Focus on the Family is obsessed with homosexuality. As with the "conservative" Episcopalians, world hunger, genocide, homelessness are of far less concern. It's all about the "gay agenda" and maintaining the choice myth. In the article the number of attendees who have come to bogus "Love Won Out" conferences is noted but as is the norm, there is ZERO documentation as to the number of successful cures. One only hears from the tired "ex-gays for pay" like Melissa Fryrear. Truth be told, FOF likely has no documentation on purpose since it doesn't want to show how the program in reality doesn't work. They make wild claims but have no names of real people who have been "cured" to back any of it up. Even Daddy D himself can only cite 800 out of 50,000 some attendees who claim to have been cured. If true, that's a horrendously low success rate. In short, FOF peddles snake oil and makes the sleaziest used car salesman look like the height of integrity. Here are some story highlights:

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For a decade, Focus on the Family has delved into what it believes is the biblical truth about sexual behavior through its "Love Won Out" conferences. Focus says the conferences started a national conversation on the origins of homosexuality and have nurtured thousands of troubled families and helped hundreds of former gays and lesbians "escape the lifestyle."

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But pro-gay activists and many psychology experts denounce attempts to change people's sexual orientation through religious mediation or other so-called reparative therapies. They say it causes people great harm in an attempt to fix something that isn't broken.

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"These programs give us the tools and weapons to go to war against ourselves," said Peterson Toscano, founder of the support group Beyond Ex-Gay. Failed attempts to change sexual orientation take a tremendous toll on people's psychological, emotional, spiritual, financial and physical well-being, he said. "I've talked to more than 1,000 ex- gay survivors whose lives have been devastated — their close relationships destroyed," Toscano said. "Because of one of these conferences, my mother died feeling she had failed me."

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University of Minnesota researchers recently published a study in the Journal of Homosexuality showing that among homosexual men, the best predictor of poor mental and sexual health, including depression, drug use and sexually transmitted diseases, is a negative attitude toward homosexuality, not being a homosexual.

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Dobson said there are more than 800 known former gay and lesbian individuals who have found "wholeness in their newfound heterosexuality." As evidence mounts for biological underpinnings to human sexual behavior, Christian conservatives increasingly argue science doesn't matter.

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The bottom line is that for Daddy Dobson and FOF, the truth doesn't matter. It's all about shaking down folks for money and keeping the "choice myth" alive for political purposes. He/they make the Pharisees look like pretty upright folks in comparison.