The Liberty Counsel has filed its final brief in its challenge of California’s ban on ex-gay therapy (SB 1172) on behalf of NARTH. In it, the group reiterates its claims that encouraging young people to change their sexual orientation is simply a “viewpoint,” and thus protected by the First Amendment. Despite the dearth of evidence supporting its effectiveness and the research that shows not only that it’s ineffective but that it can also be harmful, the conservatives stand by their claim that same-sex attractions (SSA) can be changed:

The APA Report admits SSA is “fluid,” which, no matter the debate over “enduring” change, it is clear that SSA can change. Studies reveal that sexual orientation is “not static.” “Contrary to the theoretical notion that one becomes fixated in childhood, the sexual orientation of the individuals in this study often changed remarkably.”

SB 1172 prohibits any counsel under any circumstance to change SSA. If SSA is fluid, then it is changeable. Given that SSA is capable of change, then why does the law prohibit change therapy? If an unhappy homosexual client engages the counselor because he wants to be bisexual, does the counselor violate SB 1172 by providing counsel that helps the client develop sexual attraction for both sexes? Or does the counselor violate the law only when the counsel offered seeks to change the client to be exclusively heterosexual?

SB 1172 prohibits any counsel to change SSA.  What are Appellant-Counselors to do when clients return  after hearing their opinion that SSA can change and asks the counselor to help them meet their self-determined objective to change their SSA? If the clients seek change, and if the Report admits SSA is fluid, and thus changeable, then why are counselors and clients prohibited from pursuing change? Where is the line drawn? What is permitted and what is not? The licenses of the Appellant-Counselors are on the line. They and thousands of other counselors and clients have no idea how to avoid these landmines.

NARTH and Liberty Counsel are twisting words beyond reproach in an attempt to make their case. There is a difference between the fact that sexual orientation naturally changes over time and the claim that it can be manipulated by therapy. Further, just because an individual has a “self-determined objective” to accomplish any bizarre outcome in therapy doesn’t mean it’s healthy or valid to work toward that objective. Indeed, the reason that professional psychological groups have established that affirming an individual’s sexual orientation is a best practice is because that is what has been determined to help patients regardless of what they’ve been taught to believe about homosexuality.

It’s important to keep in mind the mind-game at work. In the original complaint, these ex-gay therapists argued that the treatment was important for bringing families together. In other words, parents with a bias against homosexuality claim they can only love their child if he rejects his same-sex orientation, but the therapists then blame this situation on the patient — as they are wont to do. The young person is convinced to participate in the treatment to appease his family, implying an ultimatum that he can be gay or he can be loved, but he can’t be both. Thus, the “benefits” of ex-gay therapy are often a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in which young people claim to be happier because they’ve managed to placate their family’s homophobia. This artificial construct is self-serving, caters to parents’ demands instead of children’s well-being, and speaks nothing to the actual validity of ex-gay therapy.

Convincing young people to reject their identities is harmful on its face, and the animus behind defending the practice is not particularly well hidden in these arguments. These counselors can claim that they have an opinion about homosexuality, but they can’t claim to have any truth.

The thought of a school banning any conversation about LGBT diversity is disconcerting, but teaching untruths about sexual identities is even worse. That’s exactly what has been taking place in seventh-grade classrooms in Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) system, just outside Washington, DC. Health classes have been showing a video called “Acception” that promotes harmful ex-gay therapy under the guise of an anti-bullying message:

The 21-minute anti-bullying video, called “Acception,” at first appears to promote the acceptance of gay children. In the video, four students are assigned a project on homophobic bullying, with the group splitting up to study the issues of bullying and the origins of homosexuality. Two of the students encounter a cavemen parable about the origins of bullying, but the teens researching same-sex attraction soon find themselves in a different kind of scientifically dicey territory. While the video initially explores gay teenagers being bullied and a young man coming out to his parents, it soon features a student talking about how his once-lesbian cousin used therapy to become attracted to men. Then, the students in the video “watch” an interview with a gay-to-straight therapist.

In the following clip from the film, a woman talks about how depressed she was when she was coming to terms with her same-sex orientation because she was too afraid to tell anybody. When she finally admitted to her family, they “helped” her, essentially by forcing her to not be gay if she wanted to be accepted by them. Then magically, her same-sex feelings went away:

Disturbingly, nobody in the school district seems to understand what’s problematic with this message. In fact, the infamous ex-gay therapist Richard Cohen, who was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2002, sits on the PGCPS Health Council for some inexplicable reason. The district’s recently retired supervisor for health education, Betsy Gallun, thinks students deserve to learn about ex-gay therapy and she “feels very badly that it’s coming under scrutiny.” A district spokesman explained that the district has now pulled the video, but only “because there was too much focus on alternative lifestyles.”

Ex-gay therapy has been roundly condemned by all major medical organizations as being at best ineffective and at worst quite harmful. Encouraging young people to reject their own identities is tantamount to shaming them for being who they are. That proponents of this quackery are making decisions in a school district is inexcusable. Talking openly about LGBT issues has been found to make schools safer for LGBT youth, but educators have to actually be informed about what is valid support for sexual diversity and what is blatant anti-gay propaganda.

Jeff Johnston is Focus on the Family’s resident ex-gay, who regularly promotes harmful ex-gay therapy because he claims conforming to heteronormativity is ideal for society. He applies this to trans people too, rejecting transgender identities as disordered. In a new screed against LGBT equality today, he discounted any understanding of gender whatsoever, claiming the only determining factors in gender are what men and women contribute to human reproduction:

Despite years of brainwashing from academia, radical feminists, the media, and entertainment, most people know that men and women are different, unique and complementary. A society that attempts to erase male and female or to create new categories to stand next to male and female is living in unreality. Which of the supposed “other genders” being created by individuals or groups can reproduce or replicate itself? [...]

As Christians we also reject the reduction of humanity to groups defined by their sexual attractions and behaviors. Male and female are categories of existence – there is the biological reality of being male or female, and we live in the spiritual reality of a masculinity or femininity that reflects God’s image. It is de-humanizing to categorize individuals by the ever-proliferating alphabet of identities based on sexual attractions or behavior or “gender identity” – LGBBTTQQIAAFPPBDSM – however many letters are added. No. We stand with the truth that there are male and female. There is no recently discovered race of “homosexuals” or “gays” or “lesbians.” We don’t define people’s essence, their being, by their sexual appetites or by other desires.

Actually, there is a biological reality of being gay or straight too, and no sexual orientation compromises whether someone is male or female. And gender involves so much more than just whether you contribute sperm or eggs — it is the complex intersection of socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, activities, and attributes that might be associated with one’s sex and how they interact with society.

Johnston believes he successfully erased his own sexual identity so now he works to erase others’. His simple-minded view of the world ignores wide swaths of diversity within sex, gender, and sexual orientation to the detriment of all. He may claim that Christians “reject the reduction of humanity,” but his narrow categories for who people can be does just that.

Joseph Nicolosi, founder of ex-gay group NARTH and trainer of many other ex-gay therapists, is back with another brief article attempting to explain his perspective on the nature of homosexuality. Earlier this month, he explained that his patients can get over their supposed “addiction” to gay porn by simply making friends with more men. This week, he offers a convoluted description of homosexual behavior as an addiction to acting out a fantasy that compensates for a wounded gender identity:

Joyce McDougall has investigated the central role of “theatre and role-playing” in non-typical forms of sexual activity, including homosexuality. She is among the few contemporary psychoanalysts willing to study such forms of sexuality. McDougall understands “sexual theatre” as an acting-out of intrapsychic sexual forces in a symbolic attempt to resolve an identity conflict. In this regard she confirms the classic psychoanalytic understanding of “perverse” (as the term was used in previous years) sexual activity as being rooted in identity confusion. Noting the repetitive-compulsive nature of these role enactments, McDougall found that while her patients complain about the constrained structure of these “erotic theatre pieces,” they could not abstain from their enactments: “…and have to do it again and again and again” (McDougall, 2000, p.182).

What Nicolosi is trying to suggest is that gay people (and “the extreme case of transsexuals”) were somehow sent the wrong messages by their parents about how they are supposed to understand their own gender. This leads to a sense of inner conflict that they then address through compulsively trying to fulfill that “false” identity. Essentially, he thinks that gay people are just actors cast in the wrong role who don’t know how escape the performance because they believe they are trying to fix some kind of “past trauma” by acting it out.

Stepping back from that gobbledygook, it’s actually easy to make sense of how these perpetrators of fraud arrive at such nonsense. The obvious explanation for why there are gay people who don’t want to be gay is because they exist in a society that condemns homosexuality; they are taught from a young age that being gay is wrong and something to be ashamed of. Mainstream social science recognizes this reality, which is why the recommended professional practice is to affirm same-sex orientations to help resolve the inner conflict.

Ex-gay therapists take the opposite approach. They assume same-sex attractions are a defect by default. Thus, they need to invent other explanations for why people feel conflicted about having them. And like most aspects of ex-gay therapy, the easy solution is to blame the patient. Nicolosi’s gibberish is a means of doing just that. It’s a gay person’s fault he’s gay, it’s a gay person’s fault he feels bad about being gay, and only by accepting that shame and blame can that gay person attempt to find recovery. That’s the insidious message behind ex-gay therapy.

Anthony Duk is one of the practitioners of “ex-gay therapy” who is challenging California’s new law banning offering the treatment to minors. He spoke with American Medical News about the suit and explained that yes, his patients have been unsuccessful at changing their sexual orientation, but they’re to blame, not the “therapy”:

With this bill, what’s really at stake is the definition of masculinity as well as the entire basis of civilization,” he said. “When men don’t act like men, you have a breakdown of traditional family roles and weakening of the entire human race.”

Dr. Duk said he sees about three patients a year who he said need help fighting same-sex attractions. His treatment of such patients has not resulted in the desired outcomes, he said.

“I was not successful with the ones I had because they did not stay long enough,” he said. “The major factor is whether the patient really wants to heal. The ones who want to get better, those are the ones” able to change.

So according to Duk, even though his patients pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars and dedicate years of their lives to the treatment, they’re just not dedicated enough. Not one study has shown that ex-gay therapy can actually change a person’s sexual orientation, but the shame and stigma can be harmful. Rather than acknowledge that he’s participating in a fraud, however, Duk is choosing to sue California in the hopes of continuing to profit off of that fraud. This is not a doctor with his patients’ best interests in mind. (HT: Box Turtle Bulletin.)

There was much in-fighting within the ex-gay movement last year after Exodus International, a religious umbrella group for ex-gay ministries, said it would no longer try to “cure” homosexuality. A revelation as a result of that “rift” was evidence that Joseph Nicolosi, founder of NARTH, uses pornography in his “therapy” to supposedly help clients “imagine” having different attractions, despite his claims to the contrary. Last week, NARTH posted an article by Nicolosi about “overcoming gay pornography” that reveals just how warped the organization’s understanding of pornography and sexuality truly is.

According to Nicolosi, gay men are drawn to gay porn because it fulfills three “emotional needs” that result from the compromised masculinity he believes is causing them to be gay. The first is apparently body envy, in which the client feels inadequate in comparison to the porn actors’ “muscularity, body hair, large build, and the archetypal image of masculinity, a large penis.”  The second is assertive attitude, in which men are drawn to the “directness, non-inhibition, and bold aggression” of the porn actors. Lastly, Nicolosi identifies “vulnerable sharing,” in which clients are attracted to the “open sharing of emotions” portrayed when two men are together.

In other words, Nicolosi believes gay men are weak, body-conscious cowards who are desperate for loving attention from other men. And his solution? Make some friends:

As the client comes to identify how he projects onto the porn image his unmet needs and more importantly, as he fulfills those needs in real male friendships, the compelling power of the porn image diminishes. Clinical reports tell us that the client may eventually find such images not only uninteresting and non-arousing, but repulsive and disgusting in the same way that such images are experienced by heterosexual men.

Whether or not Nicolosi uses gay or straight porn in his therapy doesn’t change how distorted his understanding of how it intersects with sexuality. Straight men don’t generally look at women in porn because they have body envy, so it’s bogus to draw such conclusions about gay men. Maybe gay men look at gay porn because they’re sexually attracted to what they see and want to experience the same kind of affection with other men. No “friendship” is going to replace the desire for intimacy almost everybody shares, let alone diminish the attractions anybody has.

The Illinois Family Institute, a designated hate group, is joining the chorus of conservatives claiming that gays and lesbians already have equality under the law. Unlike the National Organization for Marriage and Family Research Council, IFI is a bit more candid about how exactly it sees this vision of “equality”:

First, those who choose to place their same-sex attraction at the center of their identity are “treated like anyone else under the law.” They are perfectly free to participate in the sexually complementary institution of marriage. They choose not to. They are not asking to be treated equally. They are demanding to be treated specially. They want the unilateral right to jettison the central defining feature of marriage (i.e. sexual complementarity) — something, by the way, that polygamists, polyamorists, “minor-attracted persons,” and sibling-lovers are not permitted to do.

Second, does our president actually believe the idea he clunkily articulated in his speech, that “surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”? Does he believe the love polygamists “commit” to their wives “must be equal as well”? Does he believe the love a high school teacher commits to his student “must be equal as well”? Does he believe the love five polyamorists of assorted genders “commit” to one another “must be equal” as well? Does he believe the love a brother and sister “commit” to each other “must be equal as well”?

IFI’s Laurie Higgins presents this not-so-compelling argument in the context of homosexuality is not “heritable” or “immutable,” an allusion to her belief in the validity of ex-gay therapy, despite ample research showing it is at best ineffective and at worst quite psychologically harmful. She goes on to claim Obama has “heretical views of marriage” that are “destructive” and “pernicious.”

It’s an important opportunity to recognize why the comparisons Higgins provides are offensive and inaccurate. Polygamists and polyamorists who are open to multiple simultaneous relationships are not acting on behalf of an innate sexual orientation. A high school teacher in a romantic relationship with a student is violating that student’s consent and compromising the learning environment. Laws against incest protect young people from rape, child molestation, and abusive incest as well as the genetic consequences of inbreeding. Though homosexuality has historically shared a reputation with these other forms of relationships for being taboo, modern understandings of sexuality negate the ongoing juxtaposition. Of course, IFI refuses to acknowledge the innate nature of sexual orientation or the lived experiences of gays and lesbians.

Once again, conservatives are trying to simultaneously claim that the LGBT community already has equality but doesn’t deserve it. Reality shows the opposite of both points to be true: LGBT people do not have equality in society, but there’s no justified reason for continuing to deny it.

The National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute is once again promoting ex-gay therapy, though in a slightly coded manner. The group’s “Prayer Chain” implores supporters to pray for gay people’s “conversion” because they are “deeply wounded spiritually”:

Many of the people who appear to be our enemies, are deeply wounded spiritually. Winning political battles will not be enough! We must pray fervently that each and every person participating in sexual sin has a complete conversion of mind and heart. That is why I would like to enroll you as a member of the Ruth Institute Prayer Chain.

The Ruth Institute is currently praying for Point Loma Nazarene University’s success at blocking the formation of an LGBT student group:

WE PRAY: “That Christian colleges and universities of all denominations would boldly and lovingly teach the ancient Christian truths about marriage, family, and human sexuality, to their students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.

Though “conversion” is open to interpretation — ex-gay vs. Christian — it is more likely the former given the Ruth Institute’s propensity for promoting ex-gay therapy. Executive Director Jennifer Roback Morse has routinely endorsed the harmful treatment.

Louis Giglio, the anti-LGBT pastor who had been announced to perform the benediction at President Obama’s second inauguration, has been removed from the program, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl reported Thursday.

The move came after ThinkProgress reported Wednesday that in the 1990s, Giglio had given a lengthy sermon in which he advocated for dangerous “ex-gay” therapy for gay and lesbian people, referenced a biblical passage often interpreted to require gay people be executed, and impelled Christians to “firmly respond to the aggressive agenda” and prevent the “homosexual lifestyle” from becoming accepted in society.

Giglio voluntarily withdrew from the program, and a spokeswoman for Giglio sent ThinkProgress this explanation:

January 10, 2014 [sic]

I am honored to be invited by the President to give the benediction at the upcoming inaugural on January 21. Though the President and I do not agree on every issue, we have fashioned a friendship around common goals and ideals, most notably, ending slavery in all its forms.

Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15-20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration. Clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years. Instead, my aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ.

Neither I, nor our team, feel it best serves the core message and goals we are seeking to accomplish to be in a fight on an issue not of our choosing, thus I respectfully withdraw my acceptance of the President’s invitation. I will continue to pray regularly for the President, and urge the nation to do so. I will most certainly pray for him on Inauguration Day.

Our nation is deeply divided and hurting, and more than ever need God’s grace and mercy in our time of need.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee also offered its own view on Giglio’s decision to withdraw, promising to select a new person for the slot whose “beliefs reflect this administration’s vision of inclusion”:

We were not aware of Pastor Giglio’s past comments at the time of his selection and they don’t reflect our desire to celebrate the strength and diversity of our country at this Inaugural. Pastor Giglio was asked to deliver the benediction in large part for his leadership in combating human trafficking around the world. As we now work to select someone to deliver the benediction, we will ensure their beliefs reflect this administration’s vision of inclusion and acceptance for all Americans.

The Catholic Conference of Illinois has put out a new “marriage toolkit” full of trite talking points designed to debunk arguments for marriage equality. This includes gems like “It is not bigotry or discrimination to treat different things differently” and “Truth is not told by a clock.” Like much of the Catholic Church’s rhetoric put out lately, it refuses to acknowledge gay identities, instead calling upon Catholics to condemn “homosexual behaviors” as a “grave moral evil” like adultery, divorce, cohabitation, contraception, and pornography. In fact, this guide emphasizes the Church’s Courage ministry, which, mirroring ex-gay therapy, uses shame and sin to repress gays and lesbians into lives of chastity where they are only permitted to have “friendships”:

Moreover, the Church teaches an essential distinction between having an orientation or inclination toward same-sex activity, and freely choosing to engage in homosexual acts. Our culture assumes orientation necessarily results in acts. The Church, by contrast makes a crucial distinction. Even if a person feels he or she can’t help who he or she is attracted to, the attraction itself is not a sin. Only acting in accord with it is sinful. All of us struggle with many temptations, and we all pray for strength.

The toolkit goes on to reiterate the goals of Courage members:

• To live chaste lives in accordance with the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality.
• To dedicate our entire lives to Christ through service to others, spiritual reading, prayer, meditation, individual spiritual direction, frequent attendance at Mass, and the frequent reception of the sacraments of Reconciliation and Holy Eucharist.
• To foster a spirit of fellowship in which we may share with one another our thoughts and experiences, and so ensure that no one will have to face the problems of homosexuality alone.
• To be mindful of the truth that chaste friendships are not only possible but necessary in a chaste Christian life; and to encourage one another in forming and sustaining these friendships.
• To live lives that may serve as good examples to others.

The toolkit’s author, Carlos Tejeda, emphasizes that “people with same-sex attraction… need to be equipped to live out chastity.”

The Catholic Church refuses to acknowledge even a most basic understanding of sexual orientation or the lives of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals and the families they are raising across the state of Illinois and the country. Though this toolkit asserts that the Church is “an expert in humanity,” it seems to only be an expert in archaic dogma.