Focus On The Family: Celebrating 10 Years Of Hate

Focus On The Family, the preeminent anti-gay religious group in the nation, is "celebrating" their tenth anniversary with an "ex-gay" conference in Colorado Springs this weekend.

For a decade, Focus on the Family has delved into what it believes is the biblical truth about sexual behavior through its "Love Won Out" conferences. Focus says the conferences started a national conversation on the origins of homosexuality and have nurtured thousands of troubled families and helped hundreds of former gays and lesbians "escape the lifestyle."

But pro-gay activists and many psychology experts denounce attempts to change people's sexual orientation through religious mediation or other so-called reparative therapies. They say it causes people great harm in an attempt to fix something that isn't broken. The conservative Christian media ministry's 10th-anniversary conference is Sunday at its home base in Colorado Springs. Although the program does not track the number of people who have made the decision to become ex-gays, Focus says more than 50,000 gay people and family members have attended 52 conferences around the country in the past decade.