Anti-conversion therapy laws: an ideological weapon to challenge religious beliefs in Australia
LGBTQI+ activists regard the Christian moral code as dangerous and anti-social.
So-called conversion therapy prohibition legislation now challenges religious freedom in Australia. It combines misplaced reliance on research, vague definitions, contested queer theory ideology and a clear targeting of Christianity and has produced objectively terrible laws.
With every new proposal comes a legislative model which further shifts the focus from the nature of conversion therapy to the beliefs which are said to support it. The human rights implications are huge, as many around the world are coming to appreciate. This is especially important for Australia as plans are now being laid for New South Wales and Tasmania.
I would pose this simple question: is it a legitimate and responsible use of power to pass legislation that is motivated to attack a particular “ideology” shared by millions of Australians?
Gay activists Nathan Despott and Chris Csabs attributed the crucial step that achieved this to the moment “when the Labor national conference dropped its existing policy of simply criminalising conversion therapy in favour of a new policy that targets the ideology behind the movement.”
Conversion therapy has an unpleasant history of pointless and obviously damaging clinical interventions such as chemical castration and aversive electric shocks. The term first caught on in the late 1970s, an era of popular pseudo-scientific psychobabble. Over ensuing decades, researchers tackled the question of whether externally applied techniques could reorientate same-sex to opposite-sex attraction. The prevailing belief was that they could not and that it was unethical to promise such an outcome. The “born that way” narrative crystalised.
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