Father Paul Sullins, a Roman Catholic priest, senior research associate at The Ruth Institute, and former sociology professor at Catholic University, found that the opposite is true, however.

Not only is there no evidence that efforts to change sexual orientation, which Sullins refers to by the acronym SOCE, increase the risk of suicide among those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. There also is evidence that such efforts actually decrease the risk of suicide or thoughts of suicide among them.

“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,” Sullins tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

Sullins analyzed the data from a study conducted in 2020 by University of Southern California health researcher John Blosnich. The study, “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Suicide Ideation and Attempt Among Sexual Minority Adults, United States, 2016–2018,” published in the American Journal of Public Health, used data collected by the Gallup Organization.

Gallup called over 330,000 Americans to screen about 3,000 who identified as LGB and then collected 1,500 interviews on the issue, yielding what Sullins described as “very precise data on this particular question.”

“With that data, they correlated the amount of suicide ideation—thinking about suicide and other suicidal behaviors,” such as making a plan to commit suicide or suicide attempts, Sullins explains. “They correlated those with whether a person had ever been to SOCE and found that person who had been to SOCI had over twice the rate of suicidal thoughts and were 1 .7 times as likely to attempt suicide.”

“On the basis of this, calls for banning SOCE were moved forward, and we got into the situation we’re in today,” the sociologist explains.

Yet it seems the researchers made an elementary mistake in analyzing the data; Sullins caught the mistake because Blosnich and his colleagues published the interviews along with the study.

“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?’” Sullins recalls.

When he read the interviews, he looked to see “whether the suicide activity happened before or after the person went to SOCE, and what I found, somewhat to my surprise, was that most of the suicidal behavior happened before the person ever went to SOCE. Two-thirds of the thoughts of suicide happened before they ever went to SOCE.”

“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 preexisting behavior,” Sullins explains. “Things don’t work backward in the space-time continuum.”

“So I published a firm rebuttal to that study finding not only that did SOCE not increase suicidal behavior, it decreased it,” he says.

Critics attempted to silence his study’s findings.

“Even if my study was true, they claimed it was unethical to publish it because it implied that somehow people needed to be fixed, and it would impede the cause of gay rights,” Sullins says.

Although Sullins is Roman Catholic and believes same-sex activity to be sinful, he says he doesn’t encourage lesbians, gays, or bisexuals to try to change their sexual orientation unless they feel uncomfortable about that orientation. He says that sexual orientation change efforts don’t always work, but his studies find that they do succeed, to some degree.

“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% of the time,” he recalls. “Most persons who undergo it, meaning about 60 to 65%, report that they are less caught up in homosexual attractions and behaviors and activity.”

Sullins noted that about 30% of the 1,500 lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in Blosnich’s study said that they have tried to change their sexual orientation, and about 10% said, “If I could be 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,” Sullins notes. “Those are the ones who ought to have the option for counseling and therapy if they want it.”

The sociologist also says that his studies show sexual attraction is variable and complex.

“If you measure those things separately, you’ll find that across the range of humans, variation, there are a number of people who have moderate to high levels of same-sex attraction and moderate to high levels of opposite-sex attraction that coexist,” he explains.

“What often happens when persons go through SOCE 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,” Sullins says.

The sociologist goes on to describe how some in the scientific community have attempted to stifle his research.

“In a way, I find it an encouragement and a compliment when a study of mine is being suppressed,” he says. “Because if they had an argument against what I was publishing, if they found a flaw in it, they would make that note. But the fact [is] 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.”

Sullins also describes having a venue cancel a presentation on his research.

“When they canceled like that, it says to me that they don’t really have an argument on the other side,” he says. “They want to control us by censorship and by controlling the way that we think. Well, as an American, I don’t take well to that kind of control.”

Listen to the podcast interview with Sullins below.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir reported on August 31 that he obtained a memorandum by Secretary of State Antony Blinken instructing federal agencies to safeguard LGBT youth against what they deem as “dangerous practices,” including conversion therapy for LGBT people.

The said paper had been leaked by an officer in the state department’s foreign service and was derived from Biden’s Executive Order 14075 in June.

City Journal said in the report that the directive instructs U.S. embassies to submit robust information on the so-called conversion therapy practices of their host countries as part of the annual human rights reports.

Sapir said the reports will be sent to Jessica Stern, Biden’s appointed special envoy to advance the human rights of LGBT persons, and she would design an “action plan to combat the practice across foreign policy and foreign assistance lines of effort.”

The said policy could make the U.S. classify first-world countries like Sweden, Finland and the U.K. as human rights abusers due to their reticence to fully adopt transgender ideology. It could also effectively turns American consulates and embassies into global gender-affirming spies.

The “woke” regime defines conversion therapy as “efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

The internal document reportedly provides clarification that conversion includes only those efforts to help a person leave behind a “transgender identity” and adopt a “cisgender one,” or the gender identity that corresponds to the sex assigned at birth, thereby explicitly targeting therapies that do not align with radical left-wing’s gender affirmation.

US government plans to starve states that refuse to impose “woke” ideology on children

Florida’s Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz said last month that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is threatening to withhold funding to states that would not impose “woke” ideology on children. (Related: Biden regime trying to STARVE school children to force them into LGBT grooming.)

He added that the USDA is already threatening to stop school lunch program funding because of the Parental Rights in Education Act signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, which is the state law to stop school children from being “groomed” into the LGBT “cult.”

“We’ve seen the latest attempt by the federal government imposing their radical agenda here in Florida’s schools with the June 23rd USDA guidance that they issued, proposing changes to the regulations in Title IX, and adding ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ as protected classes under that – which was not designed for that,” Diaz explained to host Joel Pollak during an episode of SiriusXM‘s “Breitbart News Sunday.”

Diaz said the government is basically trying to hold the most vulnerable kids hostage with the food program to implement this radical agenda.

“We have a law and we’re going to stand by it and protect it,” he said. “Governor DeSantis is leading the way on that, and these federal guidance and regulations are not law. In fact, there are cases pending on that. So we’re going to put a stop to that and protect our kids here in our state.”

He noted that Diaz’s USDA’s directive “would end up allowing biological males who identify as females to access female bathrooms and locker rooms, assign biological males who identify as female to female rooms on school trips.”

“We are not going to allow that in Florida. We are going to protect our children,” he said.

Visit Transhumanism.news for more news related to Biden and his woke policies that favor the LGBT ideologies.

Watch this video about how the current administration is punishing pre-schools that do not support LGBT indoctrination.

This video is from the zolnareport.com channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• These violent facts about LGBT couples are so real even Biden’s DOJ forced to admit inconvenient truth.
• Demonic Washington Post says LGBT drag shows for children are “family-friendly.”
• LGBT meltdown: Florida bans Medicaid coverage for gender-related medical treatments.
• Kamala Harris put in charge of “Ministry of Gender Truth” to harass anyone who doesn’t bow down to LGBT insanity.

Sources include:

• LifeSiteNews.com
• City-Journal.org
• WhiteHouse.gov
• Breitbart.com
• Brighteon.com
• NATURAL NEWS