Can you really pray the gay away?

Across the country, Christian churches and ministries — including at least nine in North Carolina — want to help free you from homosexuality. But does it work? Can you change your sexual orientation?

In 2009, an American Psychological Association task force addressed this very question, concluding that “sexual orientation change efforts … are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm.”

However, some remain unconvinced. Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse felt that available studies lacked rigor because subjects were not followed over time.

They then conducted their own “quasi-experimental longitudinal study … examining attempted religiously mediated sexual orientation change” and published a book and a recent article in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.

Jones and Yarhouse started with 72 men and 26 women undergoing “the change process.” For the next six to seven years, they assessed the subjects’ sexual orientation, psychological distress and self-reported progress.

There are a number of problems with the study, which the authors acknowledge. The quasi-experimental lack of a control group meant they could not assign any causation to the change process.

In addition, they were unable to standardize the interventions, and they retained only 63 of the 98 subjects by the end.

Despite the weaknesses, Jones and Yarhouse were only looking for the possibility of change, and, by the numbers, they found it.

At the end of the study, 14 subjects reported conversion to heterosexual attraction and functioning, and on average, there was not an increase in psychological distress.

Do you believe it?

It is possible that the 14 converts only changed their identity and not their feelings — or that the subjects who dropped out did not report the distress they experienced.

It is also possible that conversion therapy worked. Some of the time. Maybe.

The underlying question is whether or not sexual orientation is changeable at all. Most people keep one sexual orientation, but we should not ignore the experiences of people whose orientations do change over time, heterosexual to non-heterosexual or vice versa.

The distinction that needs to be made here is motivation. I would support someone changing after a shift in attraction or some novel sexual exploration, but I am less willing to back a conversion due to religious values or societal pressures.

Such a conversion might help someone feel more in line with a set of beliefs or at ease in a conservative environment, but it only perpetuates discriminatory ideals that being different is wrong.

Instead of changing people, we should be changing our religions and societies to be more accepting, and we should be educating others that different orientations can be compatible with faith.

The idea of unchangeable sexual orientation has been invaluable in the fight against LGBT discrimination, but who knows? Maybe a person can change.

The bottom line is that we should still accept LGBT identities, regardless of the permanence of those identities.