Conversion Therapy or Sexual Reorientation Therapy is the topic of many states across America. Not because of a resurgence in use, but because many states are banning the practice from being used on minors. Since more states are following suit and many LGBTQ advocacy groups lobby to have their state pass similar measures to protect young LGBTQ people, religious groups are crying religious persecution and are using the defense that these restrictions violate their religious freedoms.
Conversion Therapy is a type of behavioral therapy that uses a mixture of therapeutic techniques that include varying degrees of aversion, cognitive, and religious therapy. At least that’s what they say on the surface and what the more ethical therapist practice. The more common approaches are akin to torture and brainwashing. What the therapies typically include depend on how much control the therapist or facility have on the clients and what the parents or clients have agreed to allow. Sessions in aversion therapy have included ipecac injections to reduce arousal to specific pornographic images. Basically, they would show porn the person would be attracted as they’re puking uncontrollably to form a negative association with that type of arousal. If that didn’t work, they would use shock therapy, attaching electrodes to the genitals and other parts of the body to monitor arousal and shock them as they became aroused until they stopped. And if that didn’t work, some places would beat their clients, or in the ’40s and ’50s, they would lobotomize them to curb the sexual desires.
But that isn’t all they do. Many programs are religiously based and weaponize their already pointed agendas (think the gay agenda only stoning with actual stones and not rhinestones). This is where brainwashing or counter-therapeutic cognitive therapy takes place. In normal and effective cognitive therapy, the therapist works with the client to determine their problems. Say someone had severe anxiety. The therapist would ask questions to determine what causes their anxiety and works to address those problems and hopefully, they find the source. They can then form a plan to progress, and hopefully, the person learns coping skills to manage their anxiety, because there isn’t a cure in most senses of therapy. And here is where proven therapy is hijacked and twisted into brainwashing. What most have done is taken the therapeutic model and apply it with telling the person that their choice to be gay, bi, trans, effeminate, masculine, or anything perceived as deviant is bad and against, insert deity here. Their only agenda is to make someone straight and follow heteronormative standards. They demean, belittle, bully, and abuse their clients while forcing them to pray for forgiveness and to a God to save them and make them straight while interjecting their beliefs that something made them this way on a societal level. They don’t try to work with the client but force a change. They work off of the faulty premise that being LGBTQ is a learned behavior that can be altered and that it isn’t an inherent part of a person’s psyche. Some people sign up for these programs, but most minors don’t. They’re forced into these programs or therapy sessions and endure hours of abuse and psychological damage by people who say they are doing it to save them, but in the end, cause more harm than they prevent.
Now comes the part where I explain how this isn’t religious persecution…as if I should have to… Persecution isn’t being prevented from doing something that is proven to be harmful to people. Persecution would be something like being fired, prevented from access to housing, not allowed being allowed to adopt children, prevented from marrying, or prevented from access to medical treatment, basically things that have and are allowed to do against LGBTQ people. Religious freedom does not extend to causing harm to others. If it did, we might as well allow rapists to marry those they rape, stone people who commit adultery, and burn down all of the Red Lobsters… But it doesn’t fit the narrative they’re trying to spin, which is that they’re doing some form of God’s work by curing the world of a homosexual illness and neglecting to explain what happens to most if not all of the people who go through Conversion Therapy.
The short answer is many of the participants of Conversion Therapy succeed in suicide. They are never able to reconcile the war in their hearts and minds, and it wins. They kill themselves because that was easier than living with the knowledge that their family, friends, and religion viewed them as an abomination. Their success rates are reported as high because they don’t count those who present with disorders, they are unable to handle, meaning they will quickly diagnose someone with depression or another personality disorder so they can move them somewhere else and not count them against their program. They also don’t count those who attempt or succeed in suicide, which many do. Their guilt builds that they aren’t able to control their impulse to find love and who they’re attracted to until they reach the cliff’s edge, and off they go.
No medical or psychological association supports these practices and even the man who created the therapy ended up saying that it didn’t work once he saw the harm it caused. On top of that man like John Paulk and David Matheson are just links in a feeble chain who profited from these pseudoscience practices. The sad thing is that, at least for Matheson, they don’t feel bad for what they did to others or how they ruined people’s lives. Instead of helping people come to terms with who they are and showing them a path to a life that is filled with authentic love and how to love themselves, they encouraged people to deny themselves acceptance and a fulfilling life.
People always use the tagline, “what about the children,” or “we need to protect the children,” but this practice does anything but protect them. It emboldens homophobia but in a societal sense and the person who endures the practice. It instills shame and puts the blood of the dead on the hands of those involved in promoting its use. Matheson may think he did something noble, and many who champion its use do as well, but they are far from saints. When will we recognize that religions are bullies and that it was never about the cake? As a Portal said, “The cake is a lie,” and so is their crying religious persecution.