I've heard of some Christian organizations practice a kind of 'rehab' for homosexuals that is similar, but I question if they have a high success rate.
They don't. That's been pretty well-documented at this point, and even the "ex-gay" orgs themselves have felt the need to revise their figures and/or their actual philosopy they share with the people who enter the programs so that their expectations are realistic because for many years they were not.
One of the more interesting books I've read on it was:
Amazon.com: Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (9780520245822): Tanya Erzen: Books
Yarhouse and Jones presented an interesting book a few years back about their own study -- a five-year detailed program. Unfortunately, there are some issues which I've read before and have been summarized by one of the Amazon reviewers:
-- The study was conducted by two supporters of ex-gay ministries.
-- They originally sought 300 participants, but after more than a year of seeking to round up volunteers, they had to settle on only 98 participants.
-- During the course of the study, 25 dropped out, and one participant's answers were too incomplete to be used.
-- Of the remaining 72 only 11 reported "satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment." (direct quote). Some of these 11 remained primarily homosexual in attraction or, at best, bisexual, but were satisfied that they were just slightly more attracted to the opposite sex, or slightly less attracted to the same sex.
-- After the study ended, but before the book was finished, one of the 11 wrote to the authors to say that he lied -- he really wanted to change, had really hoped he had changed, and answered that he had changed. But he concluded that he hadn't, came out, and is now living as an openly gay man.
-- Dozens of participants experienced no lessening of same-sex attraction and no increase in opposite-sex attraction, but were classified as "success" stories by Jones and Yarhouse simply because they maintained celibacy -- something many conservative gay people already do.
-- The study purposely declined to interview any ex-gay survivors: people who claim to have been injured by ex-gay programs and who have formed support groups such as Beyond Ex-Gay. Despite -- or because of -- this omission, the authors of this study make the unfounded claim that there is little or no evidence of harm resulting from unproven, unsupervised, unlicensed, and amateur ex-gay counseling tactics.
One of the biggest issues I've seen in these "reparative therapy" movements and the Christian testimonials online is a lack of follow-thru on long-term results. Converts post their success story... and then within short-term revert so the story is now patently false but the original testimony is never pulled and continues to linger for years as some sort of "hopeful success story" for others to emulate. I can honestly say that for trans success stories, I've either researched the testimonials I've found or connected with others who researched them and tracked down the original speakers, and none of the stories held up long-term; the successes were failures. But they are still out there (some of them have been online for 15 years, while actually being failures for 14 years because the "conversion" didn't take), touted as supporting the idea that change is not only possible but perhaps even common.
So there is a problem with distorted truth in the belief that people can be changed; a lot of the people who want to believe that "change is possible" only ever are fed the stories they want to hear and never realize many of them are either exaggerated or ultimately resulted in failure after all. At that point, with all these "false successes," LGBT people can be seen as morally deficient if they are unable to replicate these false successes.
Also, on the Jones and Yarhouse study, I had to laugh because it had an endorsement from George Rekers: ""This is clearly the best scientific study yet conducted on change of homosexual orientation and on the question as to whether attempts at such change are inherently harmful. . . . This study meets the high research standards set by the American Psychological Association that individuals be validly assessed, followed and reported over time with a prospective, longitudinal outcome research design." -- George A. Rekers, Ph.D., Th.D., FAACP; Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Science Emeritus, University of South Carolina School of Medicine; Diplomate in Clinical Psychology, American Board of Professional Psychology"
Rekers was a board member of Narth (National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality), an organization that seeks to change gay people. He was one of the few people trying to "fix" trans kids back in the 80's and 90's using behavioral modification techniques that were emotionally scarring, and was/is a big supporter of reparative therapy in general. From what I can tell, his work might have been as damaging as John Money's was from the other end of things back in the 70's. (Money assumed that gender was malleable; his failures are best summed up in the life and death of David Reimer.)
This past year, in his 50's/60's at this point, Rekers was
caught going overseas with a twenty-something gay male he picked up on a site called "rentboy." He claimed he just needed someone to help him carry his bags on his trip, so he hired a boy from RentBoy... need I explain more? ... and traveled without his wife. The boy claims he never carried Rekers bags, but was able to describe in large detail the types of nude massages Rekers enjoyed. Rekers has since disappeared from NARTH.
So here's issues why religious people think reparative therapy is still possible, which is a strong motivator in believing that "being gay is a choice" (since "not being gay" is apparently a feasible choice): It's what they're taught by their superiors/denominations, they're not given accurate information about its feasibility, they're taught to view failures of its leaders as attacks on the faith, and ... they also simply don't want to hear about it.
