Legal Groups and Lawmakers Work to Rescue ‘Ex-Gay’ Charlatans
By Wayne Besen
It’s always unpleasant when predictions with negative consequences are proven correct. Unfortunately, in November Truth Wins Out offered an insight that is coming to fruition:
Thanks to Donald Trump’s election, the “Age of the Quack” is back. Our dawning of the “Era of Ignorance” is underscored by Trump’s unqualified and dystopian cabinet nominees. This deleterious rise of hucksters and charlatans threatens to revitalize the flailing “ex-gay” industry.
Emboldened right wing Christian organizations are capitalizing on our dystopian political climate time to prey on LGBTQ youth. They are working to turn back the clock by intensifying a crusade to rollback laws, in more than 23 states, that prohibit conversion therapy from being practiced on minors. The Movement Advancement Project found that 51-percent of LGBTQ youth (ages 13-17) now live in states that ban conversion therapy for minors.
The American Psychiatric Association says that attempts to change sexual orientation can lead to “anxiety, depression and self-destructive behavior” including suicide. Yet, this hasn’t stopped these zealots from trying to get their clutches on LGBTQ teenagers and ram their primitive version of religion down their throats.
- In January, a radicalized North Dakota Republican lawmaker, Rep. Lori VanWinkle, (R-Minot), introduced a bill (HB1430) to make it legal for social workers to offer conversion therapy to LGBTQ people.
- On Feb. 3, a federal judge rejected a request in a lawsuit to halt Michigan’s new law banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ youth. The frivolous lawsuit was filed on behalf of Catholic Charities of Jackson, Lenawee and Hillsdale counties and a Catholic therapist in Lansing.
- The latest right-wing salvo against conversion therapy laws occurred in Missouri last week. A slew of “Christian” counselors joined Missouri’s stage horse Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, to file a farcical lawsuit against the city of Kansas City and Jackson County to overturn their conversion-therapy ban policies.
The Baptist Press reported that right wing attorney Jonathan Whitehead and the Alliance Defending Freedom are arguing Christian counselors in Missouri are suffering from discrimination:
“Licensed counselors holding a biblical worldview should be free to help young people pursue the counseling goals they desire – whether that means embracing their biological sex or working through unwanted same-sex attraction,” Jonathan Whitehead said. “The government has no business censoring those conversations.”
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys claim Kansas City and Jackson County are “pushing children to reject biological reality.”
“These ordinances prohibit counselor-client conversations that explore the truth about a child’s sex but allow conversations that push children to live inconsistent with their sex and disfigure their bodies with transition procedures,” they said.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has also joined the lawsuit on behalf of the state.
“Our children have a right to therapy that allows for honest, unrestricted conversations, free from transgender indoctrination,” he said. “These ordinances represent a dangerous overreach, forcing children and counselors to conform to a radical transgender agenda. I will not stand by while Jackson County violates Missourians’ constitutional rights to free speech and religious liberty.”
The inanity of these shallow arguments is difficult to overstate.
- Free Speech: Counselors are not right wing talk radio hosts who can spew their uninformed “world view”, at the expense of clients, to make themselves feel better. They are licensed to hold up professional medical standards to “do no harm”. Conversion therapy is the very definition of harm in the guise of help. This is why it is roundly rejected by every respected medical and mental health organization, including: The American Academy of Pediatrics, The American Counseling Association, The American Psychiatric Association, The American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association. The experts have definitively spoken, so why should professional, ethical and moral standards be haphazardly abandoned to appease a bigoted pressure campaign from religious extremists? Therapy is supposed to be about helping the client, not narcissistic “counselors” proselytizing to teenagers, telling them they will rot in Hell unless they “change”. I suggest these quacks quit counseling and become fundamentalist preachers if they want to spew hate. Counseling offices are highly inappropriate places to exploit power imbalances to bully LGBTQ teenagers. Finally, in any other context the idea of “free speech” in a medical setting is preposterous. Would a doctor be allowed to tell a heart attack patient to “eat burgers and fries” right after open heart surgery? No, because it would be inappropriate, unprofessional and dangerous. Similarly, conversion therapists have no right to harm clients with their barbaric and psychological injurious techniques.
- Dangerous Overreach: Quite frankly, these laws are a dangerous underreach. Conversion therapists are deliberately ruining peoples’ lives and causing grievous harm that can last a lifetime. They are engaged in a renegade practice with no scientific basis, that is almost always motivated by religious bias. So, they clearly aren’t interested in the mental health of the client. Instead, they freely admit their goal is to push the backward “biblical worldview” of the therapist onto clients. This is not genuine therapy, but hardcore indoctrination. For such breathtaking breeches of professional ethics, these quacks should have their licenses stripped, be sued for consumer fraud and psychological damage, as well as be subjected to harsh criminal penalties. They are getting off too easy for the lifelong damage they cause clients.
- ‘Exploring the Truth’: This is just a flat out lie. Conversion therapists are exclusively interested in the one outcome they never achieve, which is heterosexuality. No legitimate “conversation” takes place during their bizarre sessions. There is no “exploration”, where it is acceptable to come out as gay, bisexual or transgender. What conversion therapists do is offer a one-way, self-serving monologue on why it’s bad not to be straight. They habitually make false claims that LGBTQ people are unhappy, ungodly, and unhealthy. Of course, they fail to see the irony that the anti-gay bigotry they preach to clients is responsible for exacerbating unhealthy behaviors they claim to be against. A ”godfather “of conversion therapy, the late Charles Socarides, best revealed the bias these quacks carry with them into counseling sessions: “Homosexuality is a psychological and psychiatric disorder, there is no question about it. It is a purple menace that is threatening the proper design of gender distinctions in society.” Does such prejudiced rhetoric sound like an “exploration of truth” based on mutually respectful “conversations”?
- ‘Transgender Indoctrination’: The Religious Right is opportunistically hopping on the transgender hate bandwagon. They know damn well that an infinitesimally small fraction of their clients are transgender, while the vast majority are gay and lesbian. I challenge these amoral frauds to come forward with the true percentage of clients who are dealing with gender dysphoria.What these unsavory elements are really doing is exploiting fear of transgender people in a sinister effort to get their filthy mitts on vulnerable gay teenagers. It’s worth noting that sexual abuse is rife amongst so-called conversion therapists, who are often closeted gay men who use their power to take advantage of younger clients. To allow conversion therapy is to essentially greenlight sexual exploitation of minors. The “ex-gay” industry has long been known as a notorious cesspool of creeps, cranks and cons.
Laws banning conversion therapy are mostly symbolic, because most “ex-gay” programs occur inside evangelical churches. Nonetheless, these new efforts by the right wing are designed to flex their muscles in a moment of political ascendence. In the same way the federal government under Trump is trying to enact Project 2025 policies, right wing organizations are working to assert dominance at the state level.
Truth Wins Out is undeterred and hardly intimidated by these right-wing antics. We are battling this cynical strategy at every turn. If we must, we will expose every “ex-gay” leader in the nation as a fraud. We hope the Religious Right doesn’t try our patience, lest we humiliate them, as we have many times before.
Eliminating “ex-gay” conversion practices is not a “free speech” issue. It is about protecting LGBTQ people and their families from being ripped off or sexually molested by mentally unbalanced charlatans, religious fanatics and avaricious con artists posing as legitimate therapists.
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