We’ve heard time and time again from people who were FORCED into these programs by their families and communities.

None, NOT A SINGLE ONE, would have freely chosen that “therapy” if they’d had a loving, supportive environment. NOT. ONE.

Your anecdotes are not data.

Clearly you object to a Catholic school urging children to sign an anti-gay marriage petition.

Yet I can, with a measure of confidence, be certain that you would not object if it were a pro-gay marriage petition.

“What we in the comfort of our adult years forget is that many gay Christian youth want this option.”

Only because their parents and church leaders are calling them “unnatural”, “abominations”, and threatening them with eternal torment in hell for simply being themselves. OF COURSE you’d “want” the “option” of “ex-gay” therapy!

Only because…

I have to marvel at that. Not knowing anyone involved, seemingly unaware of the testimony we’ve heard from many, absolutely with no basis whatsoever… still a bold assertion of “only because.”

What kind of comic book world do you live in? Do you really think that religious teaching is limited to “threatening them with eternal torment in hell for simply being themselves”? How absurd.

The impression that some of y’all have about conservative Christianity reminds me of that other mythical alternate reality called “the homosexual lifestyle”. Both are about as real as Lilliput or Oz.

After all, we allow them to impregnate each other, abuse drugs, drop out of school to become a tax burden directly or indirectly. Surely our libertarian ethos should extend to allowing young people to psychologically destroy themselves over their parent-and-community-induced beliefs. Surely we can recognize that a teenager is perfectly capable of thinking for him/herself just like humans who have reached their majority. How dare we pretend that our minor age children don’t have the right to purchase and use snake oil.

I expect it was those scientifically conducted polls of this group of children which gave you the moral and ethical courage to write, “What we in the comfort of our adult years forget is that many gay Christian youth want this option.” We are so chastened, Timothy; we children of 70.

I’m sure, armed and armored with your irrefutable evidence, you’ll be able to readily dismiss as anecdotal my statement that Mother called her 8 year old an abomination in the name of her god, and my 8-year-long attempt to pray myself straight was only my deep desire to practice my religion unmolested by satanic influences from godless adults.

No doubt my year-long work at the age of 25 to rescue a total of 158 parent-rejected teenagers from NYC’s streets is equally anecdotal. After all, you have evidence that “many gay Christian youth want this option” and they all doubtless would consider being thrown into the street, raped by gangs and pimped out to ephebophiles simply a part of a divine plan for their spiritual welfare. How dare we tell a developing mind that shame and hatred in the name of a loving god isn’t healthy.

Oh divine effluescence, thank you for sending this pure-of-spirit messenger of your holy enlightenment to convict the wickedness of my froward heart, and force me, like Saul, to stop tormenting your chosen teenagers with the truth. How little I understood in 1967 and since; how dared I rejoice when I got a parent to re-choose his or her child over religion, how dared I weep bitterly when I was unable to save the children who died, or lived on in mental agony. Oh! The many gay teens I have kept from finding the comfort of your holy embrace via the cleansing flames of social and parental rejection.

TERF was once a Facebook page with more than 100 members. It has since been archived – and the new “group” has a whopping 16 members. Its founder is not, in fact, a licensed therapist, but an intern.

FB link:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/350665734401/

P.S. I adore Sen. Lieu (the man who requested details of Sarah Palin’s “confidential” speaking engagement contract at CSU Stanislaus a couple of years ago).

Instead of sending their LGBT children to now-defunct “clinics” in California, homophobic parents may simply ship them out to places that don’t have laws of this kind. Even children from poor backgrounds will remain vulnerable, as many churches will enthusiastically agree to fund their “treatment”. So at best the law is ineffective.

But there is also a darker possibility: that there will develop an underground network of ex-gay “therapists”, similar to the back-alley abortion practitioners that were once common in many countries. This doesn’t solve the problem of ex-gay “therapy” – if anything, it makes it a lot more more dangerous. At least if everything is relatively out in the open there’s some protection against sexual predators. Drive ex-gay “therapy” underground and the predators will circle like vultures, and many LGBT teens will end up suffering physical and sexual abuse in addition to the emotional and psychological abuse their families are already putting them through.

Many youth want to drink alcohol, but we don’t let them purchase it. Some youth want to have sex change surgery but we make them wait until they’re 18. Just because youth want something doesn’t necessarily mean society should provide it to them.

This is the correct move and a positive step forward. It’s time to end special rights for religion. If society prohibits people doing something for non-religious reasons its unjust and counterproductive to allow them to do something otherwise prohibited for religious reasons. It is not religious persecution to ask religious people to follow the same laws everyone else does.