Exposing Junk Science About Same-Sex Behavior

From Ex-Gay Watch:

Working with the New Jersey Family Policy Counsel and speaking to the American Family Association’s (AFA) One News Now, ex-gay Greg Quinlan made statements on behalf of noted geneticist Francis S. Collins that were untrue — specifically that his work on the human genome project had led to the “fact” that homosexuality was 100% nurture, with absolutely no genetic component. This echoed a similar distortion made by NARTH’s Dean Byrd earlier this year. See our recent post for details on this.

As noted in that previous post, we contacted Dr. Collins last May and printed, with permission, his correction of what was falsely being credited to him by NARTH. In this latest challenge, Quinlan has accused XGW of fraud, claiming that quote was not accurate.

While this accusation is absurd at best — XGW has never been seriously accused of fraudulently posting anything, let alone has this ever been shown to be the case — it seemed prudent to seek public validation of the quote’s veracity. To that end, we posted the entire email exchange from May with headers intact. We also wrote Collins again and asked that he confirm to a third party that what we were reporting was accurate and that his quotes were true.

Collins has now confirmed this to Warren Throckmorton, who has posted about it on his own blog.

Read the entire entry by David Roberts at Ex-Gay Watch.

From Ex-Gay Watch:

Greg Quinlan was once a prominent ex-gay activist. He founded the Pro-Family Network in Dayton, Ohio in 1998, and appeared in I Do Exist, the ex-gay video by Warren Throckmorton, in 2004. It appears he left Ohio in the last year or so and now works with the New Jersey Family Policy Counsel in an unknown capacity.

In an interview concerning the recent coming out of contemporary Christian singer Ray Boltz, Quinlan attributed false statements to one of the nation’s most respected geneticists, Francis S. Collins. Speaking to the American Family Association’s (AFA) pseudo-news site One News Now, Quinlan responded to Boltz’s contention that he had been born gay:

I’m absolutely shocked. I’ve got some of his CDs and cassette tapes — tells you how long it’s been around. When he says he’s born that way, we know now for a fact that that’s false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

The original source for Quinlan’s comments appears to be an article posted to NARTH’s website last year. In it, NARTH President Dean Byrd quotes a few lines from the appendix of Dr. Collins’ book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, in such a way as to make it appear that his findings support NARTH reparative doctrine — specifically, the contention that homosexuality is entirely based on nurture.

Knowing something of Collins’ character and achievements, we contacted him when the NARTH article posted last year to find out if Bryd had accurately quoted him on the subject — we suspected he had not. We printed Collins’ response in a subsequent post, with his written permission….

Read the entire entry by David Roberts at Ex-Gay Watch.