ABSTRACT

The reader of the commentaries will surely be impressed by the wide range of views expressed by the 26 different commentators as to the value of my study. On the one hand, Yarhouse says the study “has given a voice to the disenfranchised within a minority group,” Wakefield says the study “usefully moves questions about orientation change from the political to the scientific domain and opens them to fresh critical scrutiny, hopefully inaugurating overdue scientific examination of issues currently highly politicized,” and Klein says “Spitzer presents face valid evidence that changes in homosexual behavior and feelings of desire and satisfaction can be achieved by some, to varying degrees, via ‘reparative therapy’.” On the other hand, Cohen and Savin-Williams state that “As scientists, we must disbelieve Spitzer’s data because they are so compromised by subject selection bias as to raise serious objections to any claims Spitzer might make about their meaning and generalizability.” Wainberg et al. not only argue that the study was unscientific and harmful but in the title of their commentary (“Science and the Nuremberg Code”) imply that in conducting the study I violated the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics.