People with unwanted same-sex attraction should be free to choose

Feb 12, 2016 by Jill

by David Van Gend, MercatorNet:

The Victorian government plans to outlaw the provision of counselling to people who want to overcome unwanted homosexual attraction. That is tyrannical.

Premier Daniel Andrews is mimicking laws passed in three US states, even though 20 US states have rejected such legislation as an infringement of client self-determination. Advocates scare-monger about “shock therapy” that no professional therapist employs, and claims of harm which are purely anecdotal. They use loaded words like gay “cure” which no informed person uses, since complex emotional and behavioural conditions are not open to “cure” but only to modification along a spectrum.

We know that sexual identity is open to degrees of change, usually spontaneously rather than guided by therapists. We know from studies like Ott (2010) and Savin-Williams (2007) that two thirds of teenagers who think they might be gay change spontaneously to identify solely as heterosexual. It’s fluid.

Other data supports this finding of the large-scale changeability in sexual orientation. Overseas, the US National Health and Social Life Survey showed a drop in homosexual self-identification from ~8% age 16 to ~4% age 18 to ~2% in their 20s. Kids get over it. In Australia the “Safe Schools” programme claims (an admittedly overblown) 10% of students are same-sex attracted, and yet only 1.2% of Australian adults identify as homosexual (1.8% male, 0.6% female, ‘Sex in Australia’, 2003) – which amounts to a nearly 90% move away from homosexual orientation from teenage to adulthood. “Born that way” anybody? So why does the Victorian Government demand that they “stay that way”?

The take-home message is that most young people – two thirds or more on this data – get over their transient stage of sexual confusion if left to themselves. But on the one hand the radically activist “Safe Schools” programme aims to ensure they are not left to themselves and they don’t get over it: it strives to make them “come out” at a vulnerable stage of emotional development and identify as LGBTIQ – and so lock them into a phase of sexual confusion as an “identity”. On the other hand, the Victorian government wants to make sure no help is available for people who want counselling and support through a time of transition and confusion.

Read here

See also: Born this way? Published and unpublished letters in the Church Times, Anglican Mainstream