Why banning “conversion therapy” is more dangerous than you think

Mar 22, 2019 by

by Will Jones, Rebel Priest:

Labour MP and longstanding LGBT activist Geraint Davies has published a backbench bill to ban ‘conversion therapy’ in the UK. So-called conversion therapy – also called reparative therapy or sexual reorientation therapy – is therapy designed to change one’s sexual orientation from homosexual (or other) to heterosexual.

The bill does not have the support of the government so is unlikely to become law. However, such bills are a way of MPs raising issues and placing pressure on the government to act.

With the government making a priority of LGBT concerns and LGBT activists seeing ‘conversion therapy’  as a key battleground globally (with the Australian state of Victoria set to bring in a ban soon) and locally (the Church of England’s General Synod led by LGBT activist Jayne Ozanne, Bishop Paul Bayes and Archbishop John Sentamu, voting and calling on the government to ban it) it is not hard to see such a measure making its way into government policy before very long, particularly as the government has already indicated its intention to bring a ban in. Here’s why we should be concerned.

You might think it’s fair enough to ban people from offering ‘therapy’ to try to ‘cure’ people from being gay, especially if you take sexual orientation to be basically fixed and attempts to alter it as psychologically harmful. Certainly there are many horror stories, particularly from early 20th century psychiatric practice – lobotomies, electric shock therapy and the like.

But the proposed law is more far-reaching than you might imagine. It would make it an offence to attempt to ‘change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, or suppress a person’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity’ (my italics).

Read here

 

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