I for one, though, welcome them. Any layperson not pre-disposed to hating gay people will see the absolute silliness in them. They will find the mind-bending contortions these groups go through trying to write a logical, factual legal brief to support hate. In every case they just fail, and to any fair-minded person, they look silly.

I think it can only help the cause of equality. Sure, this is raw meat to the truly homophobic, but we’ll never change their minds anyway, but the folks who mostly don’t care because it doesn’t affect them begin to see the silliness of it all, and realize it is based on hate, and maybe some of those folks will actually get on our side and say, “enough.”

I seriously love that. Love. That.

I know most people strive for completely healthy sense of self and sexual identity in life, but the gays? Pfft! We should be satisfied being *mostly* happy human beings.

I also get this image of people exiting ex-gay therapy/ministry held together by mental tape and chewing gum as brand new heterosexuals, with the counselors looking on, clasping their hands together:

“Yup, that oughtta hold’er. Straight enough!”

It is worth noting that Walker’s legal conclusions and his analysis of the applicable constitutional law will not given deference and the appellate court could much more easily reverse those conclusions.

@Rick:

You make an excellent point and it is one that I have long hoped would be put to use in some gay rights case. If you think about it, all of the established immutable characteristics (race, color, sex) have mutable behavioral components, but that doesn’t render them unworthy of heightened judicial scrutiny. You could never argue with a straight face that African Americans should get less protection because they choose not to bleach their skin. You couldn’t argue that women deserve less protection because, while they cannot change their DNA, they flagrantly choose to dress and talk like women and refuse to undergo surgery to remove their breasts or to wear a burka. It seems to me that those are the parallels to the “they can choose to change” argument put forth in the PFOX brief.

But, that of course does not excuse his attempts to make everyone heterosexual. Nor does it exclude him from using Lively and Cameron, if he did so.

Does that make race a mutable characteristic? Of course not.

Just because someone claims to be an exception doesn’t mean the rule has changed. Sexual orientation is not a mutable characteristic any more than tanning would make me Latino.

There are exponentially more ex-ex-gays than ex-gay and one must contend with evangelical mathematics; A celibate is considered a “reparative” success. Then, of course, there is the obvious self-delusion of people so beaten down by guilt and peer pressure that they will say just about anything to make the opprobrium stop.

Most disturbing, however, is the fact that these miscreants have blood on their hands. Our teens commit suicide at an alarming rate. How many of these deaths were preventable if parents accepted the scientific fact that sexual orientation is neither a choice nor a lifestyle? These idiots are still burning witches.

For anyone who saw this, nobody could give credibility to this procedure.

Also, it was my understanding that Judge Walker’s Findings of Fact were firm determinations, and could not be challenged in higher court, no? (Read this somewhere along the way)

Anyone??

A celibate person can have no demonstrable change in orientation, just change in sexual activity.
I find it truly weird how many straight people in the public daylight express revulsion at the most casual of affection between ss couples, but one of their paths to conversion is the belief that a roll with a straight person is curative too.

There are no organic applications, no other form of intervention for homosexuality that’s worked or been proven to in the long and short term.

And religious belief itself is mutable, fluid and not enforced in this country.
So their whole idea is patently stupid isn’t it?