The Daily Signal - New Research on 'Conversion Therapy' Turns LGBTQ Narrative on Its Head

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

On today's show, Tyler O'Neil sits down with Father Paul Sullins, senior research associate at the Ruth Institute and a former sociology professor at Catholic University, to discuss his research into ..."sexual orientation change efforts." Sullins analyzes the best data on how people who identify as homosexual have fared after undergoing therapies to address psychological issues that might underlie their same-sex attraction. While many U.S. states and health organizations claim that these efforts, often branded "conversion therapy," increase the risk of suicide, Sullins finds the exact opposite. LGB people who underwent SOCE were actually less likely to have suicidal thoughts AFTER the therapy. This finding turns the literature on its head and suggests that therapy to resolve issues underlying same-sex attraction may help LGB people, even if such therapy does not lead them to reject homosexuality. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:04 This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, January 31st. I'm Virginia Allen. Today, Tyler O'Neill is sitting down with Father Paul Sullins. Father Solens serves as senior research associate in the Ruth Institute and as a former sociology professor at Catholic University. They discuss his research into sexual orientation change efforts. Sullins analyzed the best data on how people who identify as homosexual have, fared after undergoing therapies to address psychological issues that might underline their same-sex attraction. While many U.S. states and health organizations claim that these efforts, as they have branded conversion therapy, increase the risk of suicide, Sullins found the exact opposite.
Starting point is 00:00:54 LGBT people who took part in this therapy were actually less likely to have suicidal thoughts afterwards. This finding turned the literature on its head and suggests that therapy to resolve issues underlying same-sex attraction may help LGBT people, even if such therapy does not lead them to reject homosexuality. Stay tuned for Tyler's conversation with Father Paul Sullen's after this. We're all guilty of it, spending too much time on the internet watching silly videos. But it's the 21st century, and maybe it's time for a change. At the Heritage Foundation YouTube channel, you'll find videos that both entertain and educate, including virtual events featuring the biggest names in American politics,
Starting point is 00:01:43 original explainers and documentaries, and heritage experts diving deep on topics like election integrity, China, and other threats to our democracy, all brought to you by the nation's most broadly supported Public Policy Research Institute. Start watching now at heritage.org. YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe and share. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal. I am honored to be joined by Father Paul Solens. He is the Senior Research Associate at the Ruth Institute, which is a nonprofit dedicated to helping the victims of the sexual revolution. Father Paul,
Starting point is 00:02:25 it's great to have you with us. It's great to be here with you, Tyler. So you wrote, I just want to jump right into it. You wrote a really great study, and I want to unpack it because I I went over it. I'm very, you know, very positive about your basic conclusion, but I also am not sure how much we can rely on the data to begin with. So you wrote a story, or you, you analyze many scientific research papers and came to the conclusion that the evidence that many people use to oppose what's called sexual orientation change efforts or Soci, as you say, that that is harmful for people who identify as LGBT that they're likely to commit suicide if they're put through this. Opponents brand it conversion therapy. They've been doing this for a while. That's a bad term because it
Starting point is 00:03:17 associates, you know, the only thing that happens these days is mainstream patient-directed talk therapy where the individual in the driver's seat is the patient, whereas conversion therapy has two connotations, right? It's the shock therapy and it's the person being full. forced against their will to undergo treatments to supposedly change their sexual orientation. Really what the therapies that are most successful do, they tend to address it as, let's look at the underlying conditions. Let's see if someone was abused as a child. Let's see these things. And let's address that. And then it may have an impact if the person has unwanted same-sex attraction or unwanted gender dysphoria.
Starting point is 00:04:03 Can you break down, I guess, so that's basically what SOSI is, where, you know, you went through all of this data and kind of shot right at the heart against this argument. And I'd love you. The LGBT advocacy network came up with the term SOSI because it doesn't include therapy. And so they actually wanted to switch from conversion therapy because their premise is that there is nothing at all wrong with BATO, being attracted to someone of the same sex and living in a homosexual relationship. And so if you call it therapy, it implies that you're curing something. And they're very offended by the idea that some same-sex attracted person might want to be made better or cured or fixed or changed to opposite sex attraction.
Starting point is 00:04:53 And so they're vehemently against these kinds of efforts. It violates their conviction that a person who has... same-sex attractions, is born that way and can't change. And so it's a point of contention, deep contention around the world. The United Nations has branded conversion therapy a form of torture and has called for its elimination worldwide. Now, when I say the United Nations, someone who knows this topic is going to say, no, the UN hasn't done that.
Starting point is 00:05:27 It's just the UN staff that's usurping the UN privileges and prerogatives. About 20 states in the United States have imposed some sort of restriction on therapy to change same-sex attraction. So there's a large movement against it. Major scholarly organizations have pronounced against it. Now, when the American Psychological Association studied the topic in 2009, they came up to the edge of calling for a ban, but they held back and didn't do it. the reason was that the evidence was not conclusive as to whether, A, persons could or could not actually change sexual orientation, and B, whether or not it really was harmful. There was a lot of what they called mixed evidence on both sides. And so since 2009, however, there has been a concerted
Starting point is 00:06:21 effort to provide that missing evidence. And so there have been about 20 studies of SOSI looking at different ways that it might be harmful. Four of those studies have used superior data, population referenced data sets. And the strongest of those studies was published in 2020 by John Blasnick and collaborators. It used really excellent data. They commissioned the Gallup organization to include questions in their daily phone surveys. They called over a third of a million Americans to screen in about 3,000 persons who identified as LGBT. And then from that, they got about 1,500 usable interviews. It's a huge sample for this population.
Starting point is 00:07:16 It's very precise data on this particular question. With that data, they correlated the amount of suicide ideation, thinking about suicide and other suicidal behavior. So there's making a plan to commit suicide, and then there's suicide attempts. And they correlated those with whether a person had ever been to SOSI and found that persons who had been to SOSI had over twice the rate of suicidal thoughts in 1.7 times as likely to attempt suicide. And they published this.
Starting point is 00:07:52 On the basis of this, calls for banning Sosie moved forward. and we got into the situation we're in today. I looked at the data. They, I don't know, made the mistake or they did the great thing that they should have done by publishing the data, putting it on a public repository. So I got the data and looked at it. And I found that they had ignored one very crucial question, which was, when did you think about suicide or when did you attempt suicide?
Starting point is 00:08:21 Now, they already had questions about when they went to SOSI. Actually, it was only when the SOSSI. so we have to infer how long it happened. And so I use those questions to find out whether the suicide activity happened before or after the person went to SOSI. And what I found somewhat to my surprise was that most of the suicidal behavior happened before the person ever went to SOSI. Two-thirds of the thoughts of suicide happened before they ever went to SOSI.
Starting point is 00:08:50 Now, you know, it's logical that if someone engages in a behavior and then goes through an experience, later that that experience could not have caused that pre-existing behavior. Things don't work backward in the space-time continuum. We've known this since Aristotle. But in the studies, they claim that SOSI encouraged and caused people have suicidal behaviors because someone had been to SOSI and then they expressed these behaviors. So I published a firm rebuttal to that study, finding not only did Sosie not increase suicidal behavior, it decreased it. If you compare the amount of suicidality someone has,
Starting point is 00:09:34 after coming out of SOSI, to someone also LGBT who has never been to SOSI or a person who's been to SOSI has much less. They're much less likely to commit suicide or to think about suicide or attempt suicide following SOSI. So I published that. It took two years for it to come out because there was resistance to publishing it. The journal that they published in wouldn't give the time of day to my study. So I had to go look for another journal and so forth. And so it was published in 2022 in September. There were almost immediate calls for it to be retracted.
Starting point is 00:10:12 There was a fierce pushback from a lot of the prominent gay scholars. And so I was in a debate for the next year, responding to a lot of the issues that they raised. They raised some good issues with the study. that may have affected the findings but didn't. And it ran the gamut to calling for its retraction. Even if my study was true, they claimed it was unethical to publish it because it implied that somehow people needed to be fixed.
Starting point is 00:10:41 And it would impede the cause of gay rights. Well, that's the story. But what we're left with is a situation where we're being fed a lie that somehow attempting to change sexual orientation is going to fail all the time, and it's going to cause harm. And the truth is just the opposite. I've done other studies that show that when people attempt to change sexual orientation, it is fully successful in my studies about 17 to 20 percent of the time. So it's not a high rate of going from full homosexual commitment or activity to full heterosexual. commitment or activity, but it can be done. And those that don't change all the way,
Starting point is 00:11:27 change to some extent. And so most persons who undergo it, meaning about 60 to 65 percent, report that they are less caught up in homosexual attractions and behaviors and activity, and they're more able to be caught up in heterosexual attractions and behaviors and activities. Well, your study also doesn't prove that people need to be fixed. No. It merely demonstrates that this claim of suicidality isn't borne out in the evidence. It isn't showing that all LGBT people need to be put through SOSI. It is showing that of those who have gone through it, they're less likely to commit suicide.
Starting point is 00:12:11 Right. If someone is living a gay lifestyle and is untroubled by that and happy with that, I don't recommend that they try to go to therapy to change that. unless, you know, there's something that troubles them about that. Now, on this same survey, which is a random sample of the American population of lesbian, gay, and bisexual identifying individuals, about 30% of them report that they have tried to change their sexual orientation at some point in the past. And about 10% of them say, if I could become completely heterosexual, I would want to do that. So there is a minority of the gay population who wants to change is not happy with living the way that they're living, however you want to say that, and wants to change.
Starting point is 00:13:03 And so those are the ones who ought to have the option for counseling and therapy if they want it. I wouldn't at all suggest that someone who is not troubled by that should somehow. try to be changed or try to change themselves. Those are personal decisions that I think everyone should be free to make. When among those roughly 20% who are successful, then, you know, and the odd thing is you're talking about changing a behavior, right? And so like the underlying attraction, you know, and in a Christian context, there is no inherent sinfulness of the underlying attraction. Right. But encouraging it, acting on it, that is where the sin enters. And so, you know, heterosexual people are just as, you know, just as depraved in a sense,
Starting point is 00:13:55 you know, sinful, inclined towards sinful desires that need to be, you know, held back. Pornography addiction is a much more common problem and just as serious a problem for young men as is same-sex attraction. both of them are inclinations towards sinful behavior, and both of them should be susceptible to help and to resources. One of the things that's often misunderstood about same-sex attraction is that there's not a scale where someone is homosexually attracted on one end and then on the other end heterosexually attracted, and then people are ranged in between, like bisexuals would be in between. We get that idea because of the work of Kinsey, who created this thing called the Kinsey scale and ranged people that way. But subsequent work that asks different questions has discovered that what we really have are same sex attractions and opposite sex attractions that coexist in most people. So if you measure those things separately, you'll find that across the range of human variation, there are a number of people who have monitoring. moderate to high levels of same-sex attraction and moderate to high levels of opposite sex attraction that coexist.
Starting point is 00:15:20 Our sexual attractions, you know, are very variable and can be oriented to lots of different things. And often towards specific persons or persons that we've interacted with that become typical and kind of pegs for us to think about that entire sex. So what often happens when persons go through SOSI or attempt to what we call change their sexual orientation is that not so much that the same-sex attractions diminish, that can happen, but it's much more common that those don't diminish or diminish very much, but the opposite sex attractions become more salient, and a person is able then to live more out of their opposite-sex-attracted side, we might say, than the same-sex attracted side. Now, a lot of people who go to SOSI and are successful do so for one of two reasons. One, they are
Starting point is 00:16:12 deeply committed to a religious faith that makes same-sex behavior problematic. And Christianity, evangelical Christianity and Catholicism, Mormon faith says those are sinful behaviors that draw you away from a relationship with God. So if you really want to know God, you have to leave those behaviors behind. And then the other motivation is that they're in a long-term relationship, often a marriage, to someone of the opposite sex, whom they love and they want to make that marriage work. And so they work on developing an increasing attraction to that person, which often also involves attractions more generally to persons of the opposite sex.
Starting point is 00:16:59 I think a lot of your critics and critics of the idea that it is possible to change your sexual orientation, as you describe, it's a lot more complicated than that. but they often assume that there isn't this group of people, you know, ex-gay people, those who formerly lived out or identified or however. I almost think of it as like a Calvinist, you know, if they ever left, they were never really gay to begin with, right? That's what they say. And I don't think that's a helpful category, but it also, I think, confounds data. So you're talking about two sets of data you've referenced to me that the block study, which was great, but of course only spoke to people who at the time of the study identified as LGBT and therefore it missed anyone for whom so see efforts were successful. And then your other efforts studying the amount of people who struggle with their same-sex attraction and 20% of whom later say or, you know, live.
Starting point is 00:18:07 out a heterosexual lifestyle, 60% of whom you say have, you know, moved in a direction that they themselves would describe as positive. Right. In addressing unwanted. That they don't always change their identification. They may say, they may say, well, I'm still homosexual, but I engage in, I live in a heterosexual relationship, and I engage in that. It's never been, I shouldn't say never, but it's almost never been totally.
Starting point is 00:18:37 exclusive. So most persons who identify as homosexual can and have in the past, at least, engaged in heterosexual relations. I have studied the children of same-sex couples for a long time. And just over half of those children today are the biological child of one of those two partners. So that person must have been able to function heterosexually at some. point, just by simple logic. And so, you know, we have these variety and mix of attractions and identifications. Now, you mentioned the ex-gays who are really the hidden part of this whole discussion. They're the ones that are really in the closet, you might say, today.
Starting point is 00:19:31 And you're right that when someone who was formerly presumed to be heterosexual or thought of themselves as heterosexual, and then they say, oh, you know what, maybe I'm homosexual. They get welcomed and they say, well, you're discovering who you really are. There's this ontological attribution to them. And then if they relieve that, they say, oh, now you're denying who you really are. Who we really are is who God has made us to be and with freedom and choice in that. I just finished a study of the British population looking at how many persons have a history of same-sex relations, but don't do that anymore. Now engage only in heterosexual relations or mostly in heterosexual relations.
Starting point is 00:20:17 And in the British population, there are more persons who have left homosexual life than there are who persist in it. It's only slightly more, but it is more. So you can say that there are more ex-gays than they're actually. actually are gays in that population, but you never hear about the ex-gays. It's not politically correct. It's not popular. It can, in Britain, you know, you can get, it can be criminalized in some ways if you say something that is against the homosexual orthodoxy. And so they stay hidden and stay out of sight. But we looked at the national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles in Great Britain. They have these great population surveys they do.
Starting point is 00:21:06 One of the benefits of a National Health Service, and they're able to measure a person's attractions and their reported sexual behavior. And so we're able to get a good read on how those things are changing. This is so common, in fact, that some of the gay activist scholars have published articles arguing. that the gay activist community should stop claiming that homosexuality is innate and is immutable because it's not true. And when it's shown not to be true, it's going to weaken the legal arguments for class privileges and class standing. They haven't gone down that route yet, but it's a measure of how strong the evidence is
Starting point is 00:22:01 in the United States. we have three or four population surveys, all of whom show that if they measure longitudinally, so at time A, the first measure person identifies as homosexual and reports that they have only homosexual sex, if by time B, if time B is five or more years later than time A, most of those in the first measure now engage in some level of heterosexual sex and a large proportion no longer identify as homosexual. And then if you continue it out through a third measure, it's even more. So this idea that there's this homosexual reality or ontology doesn't work out even in practice. It starts disappearing. It's effinescent almost as soon as someone identifies it.
Starting point is 00:22:52 This is easy to see in some populations. For example, persons tend to engage in homosexual activity or identify as homosexual when there's a restriction on availability of persons of the opposite sex. As in China presently with the larger male population. Exactly. And in prison populations, and we know in colleges where a lot of young women don't feel that they have access to acceptable group of men, particularly as colleges become more and more female. So they say, well, I'm going to be a lesbian until graduation, and then I'm going to reenter the heterosexual marketplace. So it is something that people can change. Young persons today, when they do surveys to ask about sexual orientation, the most
Starting point is 00:23:45 common response today is mostly heterosexual. So I'm not committing to being completely heterosexual. I might experiment, but they also don't want to be categorized or pegged. as something else as bisexual or as homosexual. They're not an alpha-bout-soup person. Yeah. So they're saying, you know, I want to be free. I want to explore who I am and explore my alternatives.
Starting point is 00:24:11 I don't want to be pushed into these particular political or social categories. Well, and these phenomena help explain because when I was looking at your study, and I mean, I resonate with, I really appreciate it. I think it's very important. I also think that there's. so much confounding these data that like, so what we have here is all we have from the block study is evidence. And of course, your reanalysis of the block study showing that any SOC efforts usually came after thoughts of suicidality. Right. Not before. And even suicide attempts. But what we don't have in the block study or in many studies in general is an analysis of this
Starting point is 00:24:54 quote unquote ex-gay population, these people who move. slowly away from homosexuality. And I think that that really weakens the data because I suspect that the effectiveness of Sosi or of, you know, other efforts, you know, in Australia, there's a state in Victoria. And I know you know about this because Jennifer Morris wrote about it with the Ruth Institute. But they have a ban on prayer. And it's not clear how they're going to enforce this. But they've said that if you pray, even not in the presence of an LGBT person, but if you pray for an individual person that they would be able to overcome same-sex attraction, that this constitutes a harm and against the law in Victoria, Australia. And I'm sitting here,
Starting point is 00:25:45 I'm like, either you guys believe in the power of prayer more than most Christians, or you're just going so far overboard in this and proving that, you know, this ideology is essentially an alternate religion. But I just, I struggle because I'm like, when we're talking about these issues, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center had this humongous thing where they said, oh, they're pushing pseudoscience. Everybody who opposes the transgender agenda is pushing pseudoscience. And it is not true that there are any such thing as detransitioners or like all these things. And, you know, there's so many ways the argument falls apart. But the SPLC is a political weapon of the left and an ideological weapon.
Starting point is 00:26:30 So they're trying to silence any opposition to this. They were very successful against a Jewish organization in New Jersey that they got shut down for violating ban on. Yeah, exactly. But so what we see is this weaponization of the very idea of something like SoCi. and even something like prayer that somebody would change, even if it's well-intentioned and even if it aligns with that person's own desire. And yet all of that is militating against any sort of accurate reporting or any sort of knowledge because they make these claims that scientifically, oh, conversion therapy never works and it's evil and it's always harmful.
Starting point is 00:27:12 And it's like, one, it's not conversion therapy. Two, you have no idea because even your best studies that may be good and have a lot. lot of data. They don't analyze the people for whom SoCi is intended to capture and help. So is there a way that we can address these failings of data? Is there a way? Yeah. Well, it's a difficult problem. A lot of the studies of SoC are, I don't want to say fraudulent, but they are certainly so biased and there's there's so much mischief that's going on in the study. You can't really believe their findings. And it's not just with this topic. We've seen this for decades in research on abortion, where you get so-called abortion research from the pro-abort side, which is scientifically so weak
Starting point is 00:28:05 as to not really constitute science at all, but it's lauded as if it's the latest word. And you get then the corruption of elite scientific organizations that come out with pronouncements and statements and consensus statements. You know, I'm thinking of climate change where you see this go on as well. And I don't have any particular opinion on climate change. I don't know that I trust the organizations that pronounce that the debate is over. We've discovered these things. And we saw this during COVID where research that did not go along with the elite prevailing
Starting point is 00:28:43 methodology was suppressed. So it's true today that if you want to publish, a study, let's say, of ex-gays in an American journal, it's almost impossible because it goes against the idea that someone is, when they're gay, that's okay and they shouldn't change. The word for that is heteronormative, and they have committees that exclude heteronormative research. So it's very difficult to get past that. done, but it takes work to do. In response to my... That's ironic. That's homo-normative. And it's also treating
Starting point is 00:29:29 these people's very existence as if it were, you know, solipsism against the grammar of being. Well, it's a corruption of science itself. One of the responses to my study listed all of the organizations that the authors could find who had come out with statements against SOSI and how terrible it and how it should be banned. There were, I think, over 50 organizations worldwide that were listed, all the elite scientific organizations and so on. And my response was that to cite those organizations in a response to my scientific study was a corruption of the scientific process.
Starting point is 00:30:09 If those are really scientific organizations, their resolutions should be downstream from the research evidence. It should not be cited. in an attempt to change it, to influence what we do in research. And so somehow we have to get back to real evidence, to the basic data and arguments that give us the freedom of science. If we don't do that, we have a world of fake science, just like we have a world of fake media and other ways. The answer is not to become polarized where we have the left-wing science and we have the right-wing science. but it's to be to enter a world where we don't impose political tests on scientific studies,
Starting point is 00:30:58 but we just let the evidence stand out there and be what it is. Now, I'm a Catholic priest, and sometimes people will respond to my research by saying, well, don't you feel pressure to to come out with research conclusions that support the Catholic faith and aren't you subject to a kind of bias because you're committed to this world? worldview. And my response is to say, I am committed to a worldview and the worldview that's strongly embedded in the Catholic faith, which invented in some ways modern science, is to seek and to declare the truth, whatever it says, wherever it comes from. We believe that faith and reason cannot be incompatible. But we also believe that they can often seem to be incompatible. And when we come up
Starting point is 00:31:49 with things that seem to be contradictory, we should publish those and make them known and celebrate those because it's only by exploring those anomalies and inconsistencies that we can come to a better understanding of faith and of reason both. And so that's what I try to do. I've come up with findings that conservatives are not happy about. I found that children with same-sex parents, for example, tend to have better grades in school on average. There's some advantages. to that. I have thought of some reasons for that, but... Does it matter which sex? Almost all the children with same-sex parents that we study are with lesbian parents.
Starting point is 00:32:30 Okay. More than 90%. And so one of the misnobers is that when you read a study and it concludes, well, children do well with same-sex parents. What is saying is children do well with lesbian parents? We don't know much about how they do with gay male parents. But when I first published that finding, I got some pushback from conservatives. How can you say that now?
Starting point is 00:32:51 It makes it harder for us to argue for this. That aligns with the boy crisis, the idea that, you know, and if you're raised with lesbian parents, you tend to do better in a generally female. Well, I mean, not to say that all elementary schools are female dominated, but, you know, what they found is that correlative-wise, women, girls tend to do better in early. early schooling. Right, but they do better. Children all across the board do better when there's a father in the household. Right. And so here you have families where there's,
Starting point is 00:33:24 there's no father in the household, and yet the children are doing better. How do you explain that? So I've thought about this for a long time. I looked at some other evidence that has come out from the Scandinavian countries, which confirm these same findings. What I think is going on, the Scandinavian evidence showed that children who grow up from birth with lesbian parents do even better than those who enter into that relationship later on, like from a former relationship or through adoption.
Starting point is 00:33:54 And what we know now, I didn't know then, is that the large majority of children who enter into lesbian relationships from birth are the products of donor conception. And so if you look at what goes on in donor conception, parents have certain things that they look for, certain parameters that they select for in that donor. And one of those very strongly is intelligence. In fact, they donor agencies advertise, and they charge more for donor sperm from
Starting point is 00:34:27 persons with higher degrees and PhDs because parents want that. And so what I think is happening is that these lesbian mothers who are good parents in lots of ways and very intelligent themselves, they say, well, we're going to select for more intelligence. Of course. And so what you have is not a random population like you'd get in the heterosexual population. Unfortunately, those of us who are normally conceived, we just take the luck of the draw, right? And you compare that with persons who are selected for intelligence. Yeah, they're going to do somewhat better in school as a result of that.
Starting point is 00:35:06 Yeah. Well, I want to touch on one more thing, and then we should probably go. but you mentioned briefly that the struggles with coming to accurate conclusions scientifically on this kind of correlate and echo many of the struggles we had we saw during COVID where there was this top down decision where we're saying, look, there are things that do not work and don't you dare question. And even if you're a doctor, even if you're a scientist, we're going to suppress you. Can you talk a little bit more about how the responses to, and I mean LGBT and
Starting point is 00:35:39 particular has been the bulk of our discussion. Transgender, I think, also falls into this. Echo that sort of suppression that we're trying to get to the truth against stacked odds. Yeah. It's a terrible struggle. It's as if there's a certain set of ideas that you're allowed to think. And if you go outside that set, there are these strong forces that want to not allow you to be heard that want to shut down any discussion. that might challenge that. In a way, I find it an encouragement and a compliment when a study of mine is being suppressed because if they had an argument against what I was publishing,
Starting point is 00:36:23 if they found a flaw in it, they would make that known. But the fact that they don't do that, instead they want to suppress citations, as you can do in the scholarly world, or they want to make sure it doesn't get published in journals that are read more widely, You know, I recently gave a lecture where just the afternoon that I was to speak, the venue canceled it and said, no, we're not going to sponsor this. So they had to search for another venue.
Starting point is 00:36:51 When it canceled like that, it says to me that they don't really have an argument on the other side. They want to control us by censorship, by controlling the way that we think. Well, as an American, I don't take well to that kind of control. It rubs me the wrong way and I said, well, I'm going to work even harder to think thoughts that you don't want me to think and get them out there as best I can because we really need to have a debate. And it's not necessarily that I think that I'm right and they're wrong. It's that if we're really going to address the problems that face us as human beings, we have to be able to talk about all sides of it.
Starting point is 00:37:37 We have to be able to argue and debate and dispute. That's where freedom and democracy and the truth in some ways comes from. Now, the LGBT side will say to us, well, the Old Testament is condemning of homosexuality, but look at Jesus. He was kind. He was loving. He was open. And actually, if you read the Bible, that's not true. Jesus debated a lot.
Starting point is 00:38:05 he called his enemies foxes and whited sepulchres and when they tried to pin him down with gotcha questions he handled those very well and then he had a few gotcha questions of his own for them so jesus leaned into debate and dispute he didn't just say oh it's this is too loving we're just going to paper everything over with this kind of oatmeal of niceness, we are going to seek the truth and go for it. And that's really what we need to do across the board. Yeah. Amen. Well, Father Paul Sullins, is there anything more you'd like to add? Where can people follow you? People can go to the website of the Ruth Institute, which has several really good resource pages on my work and on counseling freedom for all, as we're calling it. And then you can reach me also via Catholic University, the Department of Sociology, where I'm a research professor, semi-retired. I don't mind if people look up my email address and email me with questions too.
Starting point is 00:39:16 I'll be happy to send copies of my studies or respond to questions. Wonderful. Thank you again so much for joining us. Thank you. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button so that you never miss that. out on our new shows, like our evening top news editions.
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