Focus on the Family

Focus on the Family has long relied on its biblical worldview strategy to push back against LGBTQ+ progress and reproductive rights. The organization’s online Daily Citizen demonizes LGBTQ+ people, claiming they are unnatural and un-Christian, and promotes anti-trans pseudoscience, such as conversion therapy that seeks to change their sexual or gender identities of LGBTQ youth.

In Their Own Words

“So today, as profound gender confusion spreads across the globe, all Christians must be perceptive and understand this is not just the latest skirmish in the culture war. By redefining both marriage and the very meaning of what it means to be male and female, it is not just tradition, morality, or biology that is being attacked. Satan is not only just attacking the truthfulness of God, like he did in the garden so long ago. Be sure of this, Satan is attacking God’s very image and likeness in creation.” — Glenn Stanton, director of Global Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family, Oct. 25, 2024, “A Singularly Christian View of the Transgender Problem”

“A key strategy in ushering in this uncritical acceptance and promotion of homosexuality into the wider culture has centered on churches and synagogues. Specifically, homosexual activists and their allies know that the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic found in the Bible is the last bastion of defense holding back the widespread embrace of homosexuality throughout the culture. They understand that if Bible-believing Christians and Jews can be convinced that homosexual behavior is no longer sinful in God’s eyes, then the battle to fully implement their political and social goals will be won.” — Faith on the Family website, June 18, 2024, “Revisionist Gay Theology: Did God Really Say…?”

“June’s annual focus on ‘Pride Month’ brings the subject of sexual confusion front and center each year. In fact, more and more young people, especially girls, are experiencing gender confusion. Ten years ago, the prevalence of transgenderism in children was 0.1% in the United States. It’s now between 2 and 3% — an increase of 4,000%. Media will often portray this rise as a good thing, of a person breaking free from bondage, becoming the man or woman they were always meant to be. In reality, it reflects a painful, tortured, devastating and chaotic journey. Despair, anxiety and depression are common within the transgender community.” — Jim Daly, June 18, 2024, “The sexual revolution has brought nothing but chaos, but there’s an answer with Jesus”

“Trans activists will use the natural discomfort of puberty to sow seeds of deceit in the hearts and minds of young girls. They are, essentially, encouraging these girls to hate their natural bodies.” — Daily Citizen, March 19, 2024, “Protect Your Kids from ‘Trans’ Activism — Look for These Red Flags”

“It’s important to note, first of all, that ‘conversion therapy’ is a made-up term. LGBT activists oppose offering help to people seeking to change, since any ‘help’ a patient receives could undermine their long-standing argument that people with same-sex attraction or sexual identity confusion are ‘born that way’ and cannot change.” — Daily Citizen, Sept. 9, 2022, “Can Minors Receive Counseling Help for Unwanted Same-Sex Attraction or Sexual Identity Confusion? Federal Courts Split on Local Prohibitions”

“Focus on the Family is of the deep and long conviction that some family forms indeed do a better job than others at providing the things children and society need for healthy development. Therefore, some family types should be favored and encouraged over others when it comes to public policy and personal life choices. We believe this family form is the married, mother/father family raising their own biological or adoptive children.” — Glenn Stanton, March 9 2021, “Is Advocating for the Mother/Father Family Bigoted?”

“Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.” — James Dobson, 2004 
 
“I am familiar with the widespread effort to redefine the family. It is motivated by homosexual activists and others who see the traditional family as a barrier to the social engineering they hope to accomplish.” — James Dobson, May 1990, Focus on the Family newsletter

Background

James Dobson, a psychologist, radio host and Christian author, founded Focus on the Family in 1977 as a weekly radio program. Originally based in Arcadia, California, the 25-minute weekly radio program expanded to include a daily radio program broadcast on 200 outlets by 1980. The radio program focused on conservative Christian parenting advice and built from Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline, a parenting guide that recommended strict discipline and corporal punishment. The book helped establish a Christian-right political framework that situated conservative evangelicals as defenders of true religion, culture and family. The book warned that a family led by a cis-heterosexual male was the only cultural institution that could stand against the sexual revolution.

Throughout the book, on his radio program and in newsletters, Dobson portrayed a society in rapid decay from a common Christian-right strawman of secularism. The remedy to Dobson was a reinvigorated conservative Christianity with a strong influence on American culture and politics. In the text, Dobson made the claim that poverty and racial injustice were not central causes of societal turmoil — instead, he claimed, bad behavior brought on by weak parenting was fueling society’s collapse.

Dobson, an evangelical raised in the Church of the Nazarene, reflected common sentiments and attitudes held by evangelicals of the late 1960s toward the Civil Rights Movement. To Dobson and his peers, the calls of racial injustice were a threat to white Christian hierarchy. Historians have documented, for example, how in the 1980s, Dobson partnered with anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Jerry Falwell to spread propaganda opposing IRS regulations that barred private schools from refusing to enroll Black students. Dobson, Falwell and other leading figures of the Christian right claimed that the IRS threatened religious freedom with its actions to strip tax-exempt designations from white Christian schools that refused to desegregate.

Dobson played an integral role in cofounding, funding and platforming what has become the infrastructure of the modern anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion movements. In 1981 the Council for National Policy, a powerful secret club of far-right religious figures, began meeting. Key membership included Dobson, R.J. Rushdoony, Falwell, Tony Perkins, Beverly and Tim LaHaye, and Phyllis Schlafly.

In 1980, Dobson met and prayed with a group of eight Christian leaders, sparking the eventual formation of the Family Research Council (FRC) in 1983. FRC’s Washington, D.C., headquarters was referred to as FotF’s “embassy,” and the group formally merged with FotF in 1988 before splitting off again in 1992. During this time, FotF helped distribute FRC’s “homosexual packet” complete with a document titled The Homosexual Agenda: Changing Your Community and Nation. Dobson also co-founded the Alliance Defending Freedom in 1994, alongside D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries (now D. James Kennedy Ministries), and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

During the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Dobson used his platform to spread disinformation so extreme that in 1989, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop publicly called out Dobson’s activity as “reprehensive” and “homophobic.”

That same year, Dobson was the last to interview convicted serial killer Ted Bundy on the eve of his execution. Dobson vouched in the filmed interview that Bundy was a born-again Christian. Dobson used the interview to push an anti-pornography campaign uncritically allowing Bundy to blame his crimes on pornography. This was a major win for Dobson, who served on the Meese Commission, a committee convened by President Ronald Reagan to investigate pornography.

By 1991 Dobson moved FotF to Colorado Springs, Colorado, earning the city the nickname “the Vatican of the Religious Right.” Immediately following the move, Dobson and FotF engaged in an anti-gay campaign supporting Amendment 2 in Colorado. Sponsored by Colorado for Family Values (CFV), Amendment 2 prohibited the state or local governments from passing anti-discrimination protections for gay and lesbian people, arguing that gay and lesbian civil rights were “special rights.” FotF played a major financial and political role in the success of this amendment, as Dobson used his daily broadcasts to propel his listeners to vote in favor of it, which was followed by an increase of volunteers and money for the campaign.

Former FotF staffer and co-host Gil Alexander-Moegerle published Dobson’s War on America in 1997. The book details Alexander-Moegerle’s 20 years with Dobson and quotes him as saying, “Communities do not let prostitutes, pedophiles, voyeurs, adulterers and those who sexually prefer animals to publicly celebrate their lifestyle, so why should homosexuals get such privileges?” Another anecdote talks about Dobson’s frustration with the lack of research on the dangers of pornography and the intellectual inferiority of Black Americans who were descended from slaves. Many of the arguments Dobson and other anti-gay actors made, ironically, said that LGBTQ+ rights would devalue Black Americans’ rights.

FotF has been a major proponent of conversion therapy and the “ex-gay” movement. Conversion therapy is a deeply discredited practice and has been disavowed by leaders who left the movement. The practice has been disavowed by U.N. independent experts as a form of fraud and “may amount to torture depending on the circumstances.” Love Won Out was FotF’s “ex-gay” ministry, launched in 1998, complete with a media campaign backed by 15 Christian right groups that placed full-page ads in major newspapers. In The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, the ads were framed as a message of “hope” to LGBTQ+ people to become heterosexual. However, another type of ad run in The Washington Times was tailored for a more conservative audience and alleged “homosexual activists” were blackmailing and obfuscating the truth about homosexuality.

The key faces of this ministry were John Paulk and his wife, Anne, who both identified as ex-gay. In 1999 they published a book with the same title as the ministry. The message of ex-gay success was soon called into question when John Paulk was photographed at a Washington, D.C., gay bar in 2000. Paulk was demoted from board chairman to “probationary” board member following the incident. In 2013, Paulk renounced Love Won Out and acknowledged that his role in promoting conversion therapy caused “great harm to many people.”

Love Won Out held multiple conferences each year throughout the 2000s, with a total of 52 by 2008. Exodus International, the largest ex-gay ministry at the time, often cosponsored the conferences. By 2009 FotF had turned Love Won Out over to Exodus International, which billed itself as offering “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”

Love Won Out platformed and incorporated the research of Joseph Nicolosi, who was widely considered to be the father of “reparative therapy,” aka conversion therapy. Nicolosi spoke at multiple Love Won Out conferences while Dobson still led the organization. Dobson also relied on Nicolosi’s conversion-therapy method and included a section from Nicolosi’s book A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality in his own book Bringing Up Boys. He shared an excerpt of Chapter 9 in a 2002 newsletter. The chapter contains what Nicolosi described as “certain signs of prehomosexuality which are easy to recognize.”

In 2004, FotF formed a separate lobbying and political action organization. First called Focus on the Family Action, then CitizenLink, it rebranded in 2016 to Family Policy Alliance. FPA’s political activities reflect Dobson’s and FotF’s dominionism — a theocratic philosophy whose adherents believe Christians are entitled to rule all aspects of society. In 2004, Dobson led a campaign to unseat Democratic politicians, whom he characterized as obstructing the confirmation of anti-abortion judges to the federal judiciary, and he organized “Mayday for Marriage” rallies in six major cities to promote constitutional amendments to prohibit same-sex marriage. These initiatives were passed in 11 states by wide voter margins.

In 2006, Dobson endorsed the congressional election of Operation Rescue founder and prominent dominionist Randall Terry, who called for executing abortion providers. In 2008, the FPA sent out a letter titled “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” which attempted to forecast a series of anti-Christian events through a list of  top 10 predictions.  The predictions were rife with dystopian scenarios of Christian businesses being shuttered and pastors arrested and jailed for speaking out against homosexuality. They warned Boy Scouts of America would be forced to “hire homosexual scoutmasters” and “allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.” Another prediction that has not become true is that churches would be forced to hold “homosexual weddings.”

Recent efforts

In recent years, FotF has called conversion therapy a made-up term and continued to spread disinformation about LGBTQ+ identity and health care along with a network of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups the SPLC identified in its CAPTAIN report. By billing itself as a Christian counseling “ministry,” the group positions itself as a seeming trusted source for information that pathologizes LGBTQ+ identity and advocates harmful psychological interventions that reinforce anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies.

In 2017, FotF officially changed its tax status from a public charity to a church. The designation is consistent with a pattern of anti-LGBTQ+ political groups pursuing tax designations that limit transparency by reducing public disclosure requirements around donations and executive salaries.

Despite its status as a church, FotF has worked alongside FRC, the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) and Family Policy Alliance to position its supposed ministry as integral to anti-LGBTQ+ politics. By generating Christian-styled self-help programming that casts LGBTQ+ rights in opposition to their religious freedom, the group claims that it has a religious right to limit medical care to LGBTQ+ people, especially to trans kids. Through the efforts of Family Policy Alliance and its network of state policy groups, has provided the aid and legislative models for over 24 anti-trans gender-affirming care bans for minors through Help Not Harm campaign.FotF has created guides and compiled resources on “transgenderism” and homosexuality for its audience. The guides and resources share a common thread of severing LGBTQ+ people from Christianity by denying that they can be Christians. Their content also implies that LGBTQ+ people’s identities are caused by mental conditions, neurodivergence or trauma, a common trope consistent with the historical pseudoscientific stigmatizing of LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill and dangerous to themselves and society.

They also assert that gender identity isn’t real, and that trans and nonbinary people are experiencing “gender confusion.” Across these resources, FotF promotes its Christian Counseling Network (CCN), offering referrals for therapists who offer counseling for “homosexual issues” and “gender identity issues.” The group often advertises a promotional “one-time complimentary consultation from a Christian perspective” through the CCN in articles and guides around LGBTQ+ issues, particularly in parenting resources.

In a parenting article titled “Biblical View on Transgender Identity: A Primer for Parents and Strugglers,” FotF warns parents about rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) and offers a list of conditions “found in greater numbers within the trans population.” ROGD is a pseudoscientific phrase made popular by Dr. Lisa Littman and others that is used to legitimize the claims of anti-LGBTQ+ activists and parents who rejected their trans kids that transgender identity often occurs “out of the blue” and typically accompanies social media use. It is not a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis. This sentence on the website includes a link to a WebMD page that is merely a primer on mental illnesses with no mention of transgender people having higher rates of mental illness. The list includes the following cherry-picked conditions as potential signs of gender dysphoria that parents should look for: low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, lack of identity, eating disorders, personality disorder, self-injury, autism spectrum disorder, sexual trauma and gender trauma. The article instructs parents not to allow “trans behaviors” and warns, “Once you say yes to the ‘lesser’ trans behaviors like cross-dressing, you’re soon going to be asked to sponsor greater ones.”

In the “How to Talk to Your Children About Homosexuality” guide for parents, the second page states that the guide is not meant to advise parents with kids who have already come out and offers a “one-time complimentary consultation from a Christian perspective” through the CCN . The guide offers this when educating kids on homosexuality: “We suggest you avoid such statements as, ‘Being homosexual or lesbian is when two girls like each other.’” Instead, it recommends telling children: “You can then explain that it is one distortion of God’s design for human love. Two men who ‘marry’ are missing something — the femininity of a woman. A child raised by two women is deprived of a father. Two moms can’t be a dad.”;

The guide insists on not using the word “love” at all when referring to homosexual relationships, suggesting “romantically attracted” instead. The guide links to articles with Love Won Out Conference videos. Throughout this guide, FotF frames LGBTQ+ people as “fallen people” and claims that self-acceptance of their identity makes them incompatible with a “biblical worldview.” In another guide, FotF claims self-accepting LGBTQ+ people subscribe to a “competing worldview,” which it assesses as an innately nihilistic existence devoid of purpose. The guide says, “In this worldview, there is no larger purpose and nothing is sacred—not sexuality, marriage, family or children.”

In the “When Transgender Enters Your World” guide, FotF states: “You’ve probably accessed this resource because your life has been directly affected by transgenderism or ‘gender ideology.’” The guide claims transgender people are a manifestation of sin that “causes disconnection and separation from God and others. It also causes disconnection and brokenness within.” This section also contains an infographic about Walt Heyer titled “Stories of Hope and Healing.” Anti-trans pseudoscience is repeatedly linked and cited in this guide, with Paul McHugh and Miriam Grossman directly quoted. McHugh and Grossman are members of ACPeds and are major contributors to the anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network outlined in our CAPTAIN report. This guide also offers the one-time free counseling session through CCN as an additional resource to those reading the guide. The endnotes cite other prominent pseudoscience progenitors such as Kenneth J. Zucker and Susan Bradley, along with an ACPeds resource.

In 2021, an OpenDemocracy investigation revealed CCN connects those across the United States looking for counseling on “homosexual issues” and “gender identity issues” with a therapist, including in states that have bans on conversion therapy for minors. OpenDemocracy reporters attended sessions with CCN therapists, with one claiming to be 17 in a state that bans conversion therapy for minors. The report quoted the therapist saying that LGBTQ+ communities were “unhealthy” and “the suicide rate is considerably higher than the national average.” The therapist pointed to resources provided by FotF to support their argument: “The sexual assault rate, the crime rate, all that is higher. The transmitted diseases, those numbers are higher in the gay community. … All those numbers are out there. … Focus on [the] Family has done those kinds of studies.”

Christopher Rosik’s member bio page on the CCN website explains his expertise in counseling for “unwanted same-sex attraction” (aka conversion therapy). Rosik is also president of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI), formerly known as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization he cofounded with Joseph Nicolosi. NARTH was notorious for its anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience around conversion therapy and was a partner of FotF during the time when Nicolosi was a speaker for Love Won Out conferences. ATCSI was revealed in the SPLC’s CAPTAIN report to be in league with the American College of Pediatricians to generate anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience and conspiracy theories to create a secular and scientific mask for the anti-LGBTQ+ groups to aid in regressing LGBTQ+ rights and policy. ATCSI has also made damning remarks about slavery being beneficial for people who were enslaved in the U.S.

The Daily Citizen (DC) has become FotF’s more aggressive platform for spreading and platforming pro-conversion therapy and anti-trans pseudoscience and arguments. The DC repeatedly links to resources through FotF’s website, namely the transgender resources page. A Gender Resource Guide, created in collaboration with Parents of ROGD Kids, Family Policy Alliance and ACPeds, is linked in the resources and reading referrals section.

Among the other resources is a link to ACPeds’ anti-trans pseudoscience literature, along with an ACPeds “Find a Therapist” page where CCN is a resource. They also promote FPA’s Help Not Harm campaign, along with information on FPA’s Webinar on the Truth about Transition. The section on Organization Referrals on the Transgender Resource page links to Do No Harm, Partners for Ethical Care, Advocates Protecting Children, Sex Change Regret, and Restored Hope Ministries, which is an ex-gay organization formed by John Paulk’s ex-wife, Anne Paulk, following the former’s renunciation of conversion therapy.  

In an March 2024 article on “Protecting Your Kid from ‘Trans’ Activism — Look for These Red Flags,” Daily Citizen plugged FotF’s Christian Counseling Network as a means of “navigating the issues of homosexuality and transgenderism.” FotF has repeatedly claimed it does not endorse conversion or reparative therapy, but it makes counseling available via its service. DC has frequently argued conversion therapy is a made-up term; in April 2024 an article titled“What Is ‘Conversion Therapy’?” was pulled directly from Joe Dallas’ blog.

Dallas is a former speaker at Love Won Out conferences, a longtime proponent of ex-gay ministries and an advocate of conversion therapy. The article is a play-by-play of blog posts attempting to subvert the term “conversion therapy” and separate their brand of counseling. The article claims that the counseling offered by CCN and other ex-gay ministries is just “talk therapy, biblical counsel, support groups, discipleship, spiritual formation and healing prayer” employed as “some of the normal means of assisting people who want freedom from homosexuality.” The article says the APA’s 2009 report of Sexual Orientation Conversion Efforts was “written by a heavily biased group of investigators.”   
 
A DC article from July 2023 titled “Do Not Fall for the ‘Affirm Them or They Will Die’ Lie” by Glenn Stanton makes a case against the increase in risk of suicidality among gender-diverse youth who are not affirmed by family and friends. Stanton incorporates pseudoscience and research from the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM). The article starts out mockingly: “It has long been parroted as an unquestionable truism that if we do not fully affirm and support the wishes of every gender-confused or gender-pretending young person or adult, we risk being responsible for their possible death.”

The article cites pseudoscientific Dutch and Swedish studies as their go-to source studies, which we previously exposed as grossly misrepresented in our CAPTAIN report. Stanton decries the impacts nonaffirming family and friends have on trans youth and calls it “manipulative and untrue.” Instead, the article implies that suicidality is a symptom of “gender confusion” and utilizes the research to state affirmation can cause suicidality more so than unsupportive families and friends. Stanton concludes the piece by writing, “Gender affirmation is a false love. What gender confused people need is compassionate help in coming to terms with the fact that God does not make mistakes by putting us in the wrong body.”

Still promoting ex-gay and anti-trans detransitioners

Walt Heyer and Kathy Grace Duncan were featured on the “Focus on the Family with Jim Daly” broadcast in two parts in March 2021. Heyer and Duncan are detransitioners whose stories the Christian right has long cited as evidence that trans people are broken and mentally ill. Heyer is a fellow at the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Family Research Council.

This interview was no different. Daly asked questions focused on Duncan’s and Heyer’s trauma as an influence on their trans identity and asked questions implying transition had separated them from their Christian faith. The interview, though couched in sympathy, hinged on Duncan’s and Heyer’s transgender identities being a barrier to a connection with God. Duncan stated, “Homosexuality, transgender, all those sexual identities are actually from a place of brokenness,” alleging that LGBTQ+ people are a product of being damaged. Daly agreed with Duncan’s invaliding statement. Daly then prompted Heyer by saying Heyer believed transgenderism doesn’t exist.

Heyer runs an anti-trans website called Sex Change Regret, which alleges that regret is common among trans people — that such regret is “far deeper and broader than reported.” The site hosts a compilation of stories of “trans regret”; analysis has shown, however, that out of the 30 individual stories, only 13 of these stories expressed regret over transitioning. That may seem like a large number, but many of the stories date to the 1990s and 2000s. The rest were not regretful about their transition, and some even stated they might resume their transition later. The site is also home to anti-trans pseudoscience from Genspect, Help Not Harm (a Family Policy Alliance campaign that takes credit for the gender-affirming care bans for minors in 24 states), and the Child and Parental Rights Campaign. Heyer joined Christopher Rosik in 2018 for a case brought by Liberty Counsel challenging California’s conversion-therapy bans for minors. Heyer is also a senior fellow at FRC

Duncan is an “ex-trans man,” now chairwoman of the Portland Fellowship and a member of the CHANGED Movement. Duncan was part of a crew of ex-gay ministries and detransitioners who worked to undermine a class action lawsuit demanding equitable health coverage for trans people in Arizona. The Portland Fellowship is an ex-gay ministry that claims it does not “practice reparative (or conversion) therapy” and says it does offer “freedom and hope in Jesus Christ” to LGBTQ+ people who are conflicted by their identity and often seek their services. The Oregonian spoke with a former participant who found the program unsuccessful, claimed the program “shot” his self-confidence and placed blame on those who don’t achieve freedom from their LGBTQ+ identity, participants they claimed were not trying “hard enough.” 

In July 2024, Jim Daly interviewed Rosaria Butterfield. Butterfield claims to have been a feminist lesbian activist before becoming saved in 1999. Butterfield’s sexuality, in her own words, was a “political lesbianism.” Butterfield has become quite extreme in her beliefs, telling LGBTQ+ people to “get back in the closet,” and has stated monogamous same-sex couples are more evil than heterosexual assault on a child. In her most recent book plugged in the interview with Daly, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, Butterfield advises readers to not use preferred pronouns, not prioritize LGBTQ+ youth over God, not to give biblical meaning to LGBTQ+ vocabulary and not call conversation therapy heresy.