Throckmorton Takes on Chuck Colson's Lies

While I don't know what has caused the "conversion" if you will of Warren Throckmorton - a former high priest of the Christianist myth/lie that homosexuality is a "choice" or the result of a dysfunctional family setting - it has been refreshing to see Throckmorton embracing modern medical and mental health knowledge on sexual orientation. Perhaps the American Psychological Association's condemnation of reparative therapy and citing its use by practitioners as "unethical" played a role. Or maybe Throckmorton has seen the hand writing on the wall and realizes that the anti-gay mantra of the Christian Taliban is repelling younger generations. Whatever the cause, in a post on his blog, Crosswalk, Throckmorton has slammed Chuck Colson's praise of the work of the faux experts at NARTH. Yes, that Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon who seems to have discovered the lucrative nature of being a professional Christian while in prison. Here are highlights from Throckmorton's post:
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Yesterday, Chuck Colson posted a column titled “Born Gay? A Parent’s Guide” which asserted that the way parents relate to their male children can create homosexuality. Colson quoted extensively from Joseph and Linda Nicolosi’s book, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality as support for the view that weak or distant fathers and smothering mothers create gay males.
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Did you catch the assumption? If a boy is gay, his father was not “both strong and caring” and the bond with the mother was “unhealthy.” To an audience consisting of evangelicals, these are ominous words. In future broadcasts, Colson promises to bring more information “about what parents can do to lessen the chances their children will grow up homosexual.” Apparently, females are not of interest here since they are not mentioned by Colson.

This advice is unfortunate for academic and practical reasons. It is difficult to research family dynamics and sexual orientation because of the subjectivity of the variables. There are no direct tests of how attached a boy is to his father; recollections of children and parents are subject to bias and reconstruction. In practice, if you believe the reports of men who say they are gay because their fathers were distant, then you are bound to believe the reports of gay men who say they had close relationships with their fathers. In that case, the theory fails as a general explanation for homosexuality because, as I illustrate below, there are numerous gay men and their fathers who report histories of close bonding and mutual love.
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Another academic approach is to test a prediction based on the theory. In this case, one might expect the dynamics proposed by Nicolosi to be more frequent in fatherless homes. However, a 2010 New Zealand study led by Elisabeth Wells reported no effect of single parent homes on sexual orientation or behavior as compared to families with a biological mom and dad. Some of the results seem hard to explain by any theory.
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Practically, such advice has caused confusion and pain among evangelical families, where being gay is a challenge socially and religiously. I have worked with parents who were near divorce over who caused their son to be gay. They had read the books and gone to the conferences which blamed them for their son’s “condition.” Surely, no parent is perfect but something seems wrong about obviously loving and involved parents examining and re-examining every move they made to find out where they “failed.”
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I recall one young man I worked with in counseling who first disclosed his same-sex attractions to his father because his dad was his closest friend. When they read the theory Colson described, they were bewildered and angry. A very masculine linebacker for his high school football team, the young man scoffed at the idea that he was identified with his mother.
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It appears that the underlying purpose in Colson’s presentation of Nicolosi’s theory is to present an alternative to prenatal theories of sexual orientation.
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Fighting a political agenda is not a good reason to promote questionable theories. There is currently no scientific consensus about why sexual orientation takes the direction it does. Homosexuality is not strongly related to genetics but that does not mean that parenting is the only alternative non-genetic factor. Other prenatal factors, such hormonal variations during prenatal development, are being investigated and might be a part of the picture. The jury is out with much more research to be done, but what has been done on parenting does not inspire confidence in the claim that distant fathers and smothering mothers create gay men.