Focus on the Family, founded by child psychologist James Dobson, is on pace to fall $6 million short of a $138 million budget for the fiscal year that began last October, spokesman Gary Schneeberger said.

Jim Daly, president and CEO of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based evangelical ministry, explained the challenges in a letter to approximately 800,000 donors.

“Right now we’re facing a serious budget shortfall that threatens our ability to reach out to parents, families and married couples who count on our help,” Daly wrote. “Income is down nearly $6 million from what we expected and planned for this year. I want to assure you that we’re committed to good stewardship AND living within our means, just as so many families are today.”

Focus on the Family also announced Tuesday it would no longer stage “Love Won Out” conferences across the country. The events drew both participants and picketers for their promise to “help men and women dissatisfied with living homosexually understand that same-sex attractions can be overcome.”

The events will go on, instead staged by Orlando, Fla.-based Exodus International, a network of ministries whose core message is “Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”

Schneeberger said it made strategic sense for Exodus, which is expanding its work with churches, to take over the conferences starting in November.

“Financial realities played a role in the decision,” he said. “That said, Exodus is really the one who should be running ‘Love Won Out’ anyway. It makes sense independent of economic realities,” he said.

Gay rights groups have long criticized such initiatives as harmful. The American Psychological Association last week said mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments. The group also endorsed approaches “that integrate concepts from the psychology of religion and the modern psychology of sexual orientation.”

Schneeberger said that one staff position will be eliminated and that other financial steps are under discussion. Last fall, budget problems prompted Focus on the Family to eliminate more than 200 positions.

I’m accepting of help in household duties, because I’m not too handy with repairs, and only capable in the kitchen.

I’m eager to read responses to my columns because I cannot learn, I cannot grow, if I don’t get out of my head and swim around in someone else’s mind.

And really, a big part of a reporter’s job is following people as they show the way through complex, unfamiliar, and, on the best but rarest of assignments, dangerous territory.

I admit I need help, direction, and instruction — the way shown, from time to time.

But I don’t need anyone showing me the way out of homosexuality. Thank you, no, preachers Lou Engle and Michael Brown. Thank you, no, Exodus International.

They say god has a better way than the way I live my life. And I say, what do they know about the way I live my life?

I live true to my partner, with honor for my parents, care for family and friends and compassion for others. I love, and I am loved.

They want to show me the way out of love to what? Show me the way to lying about my true self, to denying my true self, and, along the way, hurting others?

Exodus International recently concluded its International Freedom Conference in Wheaton, Ill. The event was billed as “the largest gathering in the world for those struggling with or impacted by homosexuality,” with ExodusMen and Women’s Oasis forums, an xScape program for youth and a Steadfast program for heterosexual married couples.

Workshops took place exploring “what happens in the heart of a woman that leads her down the path of lesbianism,” “what to do with unwanted sexual attractions and how to become pure again,” the blessing and opportunity of gender roles as biblically defined and, “finding our home in Jesus, rather than other women.”

There’s much to lampoon here, were ex-gay therapy not so serious, were ex-gay therapy advocates not telling a wider and young audience through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube that heterosexuality is “God’s creative intent for humanity.”

“We are excited about the unprecedented access these opportunities provide and are hoping many will respond to a message that reflects God’s truth as well as his heart for those who struggle with questions about their sexuality,” Exodus youth outreach coordinator Scott Davis said in a news release announcing the organization’s social networking adventures.

There’s much to lampoon here, were ex-gay therapy not so dangerous, destroying spirit and family, and promoting stereotypes that gays and lesbians are damaged, wounded people using sex as a “pain-killer.”

New information from writer Thomas Maier suggests that one of the major studies cited to support of ex-gay therapy was falsified.

Maier, in the book “Masters of Sex” and in an article in Scientific American, raises serious questions about the validity of a study by William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

In “Homosexuality in Perspective” in 1979, Masters and Johnson claimed to have “converted” more than 70 percent of women and men struggling with homosexuality.

Staffers at the Masters and Johnson clinic from 1969 to 1977, the research period for which the 70 percent “conversion rate” was made, say then never met any of the converts, the ex-gays.

One team at the clinic maintains they never treated gays, and heard virtually nothing about ex-gay therapy.

Masters, according to Maier, refused to show one associate any files or share tape recordings on alleged conversions, and even Masters’ colleague, Johnson, is on the record as saying, “Bill was being creative in those days.”

“Creative” becomes a soft word for reckless.

And this study showed ex-gay advocates the way?

Having countered several of these conferences, I must confess, I still don’t understand what point they are trying to make.

If Focus on the Family’s goal is to convert gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people into evangelical Christians, they are doing a lousy job. It seems convincing gay people to end their relationships is a far higher priority to this ministry than having gay people develop personal relationships with Jesus Christ.

For every guilt-ridden homosexual who temporarily falls under their spell, they lose hundreds, if not thousands, of gay people who view their conversion program as intolerant. If your ministry causes many gay people to write off not just Christianity, but all religion, by what measurement can you consider your evangelizing a success?

At Love Won Out, speakers go to great lengths to profess their deep concern over the mental and physical well being of homosexuals. It turns out, however, that the anti-gay sentiment expressed at these conferences may be hazardous to the health of GLBT people.

A new Emory University study concludes that the bans on same-sex marriage pushed by Focus on the Family can be tied to a rise in the rate of HIV  infection. The scientists found that  a  constitutional ban  o n  marriage equality raised the rate by f our   cases   per  100,000 people.

“We found the effects of tolerance for gays on HIV to be statistically significant and robust, they hold up under a range of empirical models,” says Hugo Mialon, an assistant professor of economics. “Intolerance is deadly,” Mialon said. “Bans on gay marriage codify intolerance, causing more gay people to shift to underground sexual behaviors that carry more risk.”

Earlier this year, a study by San Francisco State’s Caitlin Ryan concluded that “teens who experienced negative feedback (when they came out) were more than eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, nearly six times as vulnerable to severe depression and more than three times at risk of drug use.”

So, if Love Won Out is truly concerned about the health of gay people, particularly teenagers, it will transform into a gay affirming ministry. To continue down their destructive path of judgmental condemnation is senseless and significantly harmful to the very GLBT people that Focus purports to want to help.

Of course, Focus on the Family will insist that they love gay people and just want to help those who are unhappy. But, isn’t it a conflict of interest when you lobby to pass anti-gay laws that make gay people miserable and then offer yourself up as the panacea to the pain? Is it not hypocritical to sponsor a conference supposedly about love, where the main speaker is Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International?

Chambers hosts a Christian television show, Pure Passion, which pollutes the airwaves by repeatedly calling gay people “sexually broken” and “perverse.” Exodus also sells “Pursuing Sexual Wholeness” a book authored by Andy Comiskey that says, “Satan delights in homosexual perversion.”  Such pronouncements are often accompanied by exorcisms given by churches affiliated with ex-gay ministries. Obviously, such extreme actions are anathema to creating a welcoming church environment for GLBT people.

Focus on the Family also claims its conferences are for parents, friends, family members or ministry leaders who want to “lovingly reach out with uncompromised faith.”

Genuine love, of course, requires making the very compromises and sacrifices that Love Won Out is telling people are unnecessary. Rejecting a friend or family member’s innate sexual orientation as sinful and defective, rarely leads to a healthy relationship based on trust and mutual respect.

Finally, the investigative reporter Thomas Maier just released a groundbreaking book, “Masters of Sex.” In it, he reveals that the famed sex research team, Masters and Johnson, had fabricated claims of curing gay people in their 1979 book, “Homosexuality in Perspective.” Given this vital new information, why hasn’t Focus on the Family taken the opportunity to review and question the validity of its program? Wouldn’t that be the moral course of action to take?

The hard truth is, Focus on the Family’s leaders are only capable of loving people exactly like themselves, which explains their tremendous efforts to remake gays in their image. While their splashy road show may get high marks for good theatre, it’s ultimately futile because their transparent version of “love” rarely wins converts and succeeds only at convincing most gay people to run out of the church door.

Surprise, surprise.

The New York Times’ John Tierney reports on his blog today that a new book questions whether Masters & Johnson faked the conversion of gays and lesbians into happy heterosexuals. Ex-gay groups, like Exodous International, often use the Masters & Johnson study to say that the ability to turn gays into ex-gays has a scientific basis. Fail!

Book author Thomas Maier reports his findings in Scientific American:

“When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.”

Gee. The grandparents of ex-gay conversion therapy made it up? Who would have thought?

 I was in town all week to partner with regional and state organizations to oppose the meeting and its dizzying array of distortions.

A dark cloud hovered over the Exodus event, with violent hate crimes unsettling the local GLBT community. At the very moment ex-gay televangelists were railing against homosexuals in the foothills, news broke of an 18-year old boy in Anderson, South Carolina whose father, “yelled, cursed, swung a baseball bat, prayed and tried to cast the demon of homosexuality out of him.”

In nearby Greenville, South Carolina, Stephen Moller, an anti-gay thug who murdered 20-year-old Sean William Kennedy outside a gay bar, just learned that he would spend approximately 10 months in jail for his ferocious crime. In this gross miscarriage of justice, the message was sent that murdering gay people was tacitly acceptable, if not encouraged. While in town, I spoke to Sean’s grieving mother, Elke Kennedy, who rightfully called the sentence, “a joke and a slap on the wrist.” Meanwhile, on the opening day of the Exodus conference, an anti-bullying bill was stalled in the North Carolina legislature.

Into this backdrop of brutality stepped the ex-gay activists Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas, who were determined to show the progressive residents of Asheville that Exodus did not stigmatize gay and lesbian people. Unfortunately, they kept tripping over reality and revealing the true nature of their duplicitous, deceptive and depraved ministry.

For a week, western North Carolinians were dazzled with disingenuousness. The audacity of the lies was breathtaking and the sheer nerve was mind numbing. By the end of the conference, everyone who had paid attention learned that Exodus leaders are shameless charlatans who lack even a modicum of morality.

For example, Thomas tried to distance Exodus from the controversial practice of “reparative therapy,” telling the Asheville Citizen-Times, “We get lumped into the groups that do reparative therapy, when it’s just not true.”

To put it kindly, Thomas sees the truth as a political pinwheel that he can spin in his efforts to win. I personally visited the Exodus conference (before I was evicted) and found that they were selling several books that taught “reparative therapy” including one from Dr. Joseph Nicolosi who invented the term.

In yet another instance of insincerity, on a local radio talk show Thomas feigned compassion for people living with HIV and AIDS. What “good guy” Thomas failed to tell listeners was that Exodus addresses AIDS on its website by saying that, “In today’s society, homosexuality is reaping a bitter harvest…Homosexual involvement reaps deep devastation in the lives of many who practice it.” That Thomas runs away from such judgmental words when speaking to more liberal audiences shows what a phony he truly is.

The double-talk and dissembling continued when Alan Chambers told the Citizen-Times that Exodus was, “not about fire and brimstone.” This, of course, was the same person who wrote in a 2005 newsletter, “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.” On Sept. 21, 2007, Chambers told a crowd of social conservatives in Florida, “We have to stand up against an evil agenda. It is an evil agenda and it will take anyone captive that is willing, or that is standing idly by.”

With such bombastic broadsides, does one really have to wonder how the violent Andersonville father got the idea that homosexuality was demonic? Or, how the gay bashing hooligan, Stephen Moller, believed he could devalue the life of a gay man?

To underscore this connection, consider Exodus’ keynote speaker on Friday, author Andy Comiskey, who wrote a book that Exodus was selling, which calls homosexuality “spiritual disfigurement” and says that “Satan delights in homosexual perversion.” Inside of a packed chapel, 700 vulnerable and confused gay people had their souls strip-mined, as Comiskey declared war:

“Wickedness is a reality,” said Comiskey on-stage. “And those with same-sex attraction that succumb to the spirit of the age, can become agents of that wickedness…When you claim healing for the homosexual, you have declared war. And people, it is only going to get worse; it is only going to get worse in the changing cultural climate in which we live. Ours is not a benign healing path, it is a call to battle.”

And, Exodus claims it does not preach fire and brimstone?

Exodus may smile sweetly and tell the mainstream media they love homosexuals. But, judging by the recent hate crimes in the Carolinas combined with the reactionary rhetoric of Exodus, it seems that they are literally “loving” us to death.