I have no intention of trying to defend the specific methods used in the therapy mentioned in the article excerpted below. That is not to say they are all bad. I am sure there is much variety of care or lack of it under the banner of “sexual orientation change therapy.†The only therapy I know to be surely effective is confession and absolution and that alone by the power of Christ. However, this article caught my attention because it is a legislative attempt to criminalize a practice connected to the Christian worldview.
There is a pattern which all who hold to such a worldview must be aware. The first step was to convince enough people that homosexuality is not a deviation from normal in any sense. The second step is to ask for the same legal rights as everyone else. The last step is to criminalize those who teach that homosexuality is not good. These steps often overlap as we watch them in the national news since one area can be farther along the process than another. I suppose it is no surprise that this story emanates from California where the earlier battles have already been waged.
Those of us who are conscience bound to hold fast to our conviction must prepare. We cannot change our position, but we must think through what we will do when the laws now being crafted begin to be enforced. I suggest two points deserve our prayful attention:
- How does our submission to authorities look? What is the limit of that submission? We must not hastily lead ourselves to persecution’s doorstep, neither can we avoid standing where we must.
- How do we make sure that when persecution comes that we make clear to the world that our true cause is fidelity to Christ and not being against homosexuality? We must confess Christ to our lost and dying world.
I don’t have all these answers, but I am thinking and praying about it. Let’s have a conversation about it in the comments or on Facebook. Will you join me?
Bill would ban therapy to ‘convert’ gay youths
Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press State Sen. Ted Lieu, a Torrance Democrat, authored SB1172. California could become the first state in the nation to ban therapy aimed at turning gay and lesbian youths straight, after legislators in a key policy committee approved the proposed law Tuesday and sent it to the Senate floor. SB1172 by Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), would make it illegal for therapists and psychologists to provide so-called sexual orientation change therapy – also known as conversion or reorientation therapy – to minors and require them to obtain written consent from adults who wish to undergo the counseling. The bill cites a 2009 American Psychological Association report, which concluded this type of mental health therapy is "unlikely to be successful and involves some risk of harm," including depression, thoughts of suicide and anxiety. If approved by lawmakers and signed into law, the measure would permit lawsuits and damages against therapy professionals who provide the treatment to minors or to adults who have not given written consent. Lieu said Tuesday that the measure would regulate a form of therapy that has "no medical basis." Therapy’s harmTestifying at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday was Peter Drake, a San Francisco man who underwent the treatment for three years and is now executive director of the COIL Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people come out of the closet and live without discrimination. Drake said he was married to a woman for 28 years and almost killed himself before coming out in 2009. "I have a personal, painful experience with the harm that can be done by reparative therapy," Drake said. "My depression worsened during the treatment, and there was no change in my sexual orientation. … This is a form of medical malpractice, with practitioners who make claims about healing something that is not an illness." |
I can’t agree with your take on this, Pastor Hoppe, for a number of reasons.
In the first place, although you may mean regulations like this proposed one are intended to _eventually_ criminalize such “therapy” approaches, the article says it opens up practitioners to lawsuits in certain cases. Only if it was a criminal activity would anyone be looking at a sentence for engaging in it. This is ostensibly an attempt to regulate a non-criminal activity to protect the public.
Secondly, if these attempts at reprogramming people were offered under the auspices of a church or ministry, and offered as being, essentially, a kind of religious indoctrination, rather than a medically responsible therapy, I don’t think there could be any restrictions placed on it. We do still have the First Amendment, after all. I think this bill is probably aimed at practitioners who use a psychotherapist’s license to appeal to panic-stricken parents–parents desperate to enlist the aid of a “professional” to make their kid normal again, and who will gladly pay for such services. But if it’s all just snake oil, what business do we have defending it?
Lastly, this isn’t persecution. I agree an agenda lies behind the bill, namely to reinforce a view that one is simply born with a sexual orientation and reframe anti-homosexual convictions as bigotry. So it’s true American culture is turning against any and all efforts on the part of the Church to retain social stigmas against homosexuality. How Christians should respond is a matter for serious discussion, but I don’t see the discussion having anything to do at this point with submission to the lawful authorities.
Gary, thanks for your reply.
To make something illegal is to criminalize it. I think you are pointing out that no one will necessarily go to jail over it immediately. And that is true. There are many ways to punitively curtail something. This is one.
Secondly, it was not long ago that homosexuality was recognized by all of psychology as an abnormal behavior. Certainly, those in the profession who still believe this for whatever reason should be able to practice as they desire. And the suggestion that it is all snake oil is not an assumption I am willing to make. I am not sure how you arrive at that conclusion.
Persecution is the subjugation of anyone based on a belief. This fits that definition. I agree that in many way the questions I have asked are not relevant to life today in most places, but if we do not discuss it now, we will be unprepared on the day it is relevant, however soon that comes.
Already churches in Kansas are fighting a law which would force them to rent their places to any group for any purpose if they rent it to anyone at all.
It seems any approach to question your child’s attitudes or beliefs will be in time censored by our government. Yet the folks who demand answers of the parents have no clue how faithful to the Lords word some are. Elector John Frederick of Saxony or better known as John The Magnanimous had the courage to tell the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the V and his Heavenly Father, that he would not deny his beliefs in his Lord. Instead he said, “I will rather lose my head and suffer Wittenberg to be battered down than submit to a demand that violates my conscience. It is funny how with 300 +million people you can find some people that can be paid to rewrite history ….. And yet there are some who will die for the TRUTH in God’s word. A Christian’s only choice is to be Bold when you confess your allegiance to your Lord. Do we cast our lot with the Words of Scripture, or the words of mankind ….. The world waits for your answer?
There are a couple of major problems in this legislation.
1: The task force which produced the SOCE (Sexual Orientation Change Efforts) study done by the APA upon which this legislation was built was entirely weighted with people who were openly against efforts toward sexual orientation change to begin with. Yet, in spite of this, the task force could not conclude that SOCE does not work. They could only conclude that “….that there is little in the way of credible evidence that could clarify whether SOCE does or does not work in changing same-sex attractionsâ€
In reading that conclusion keep in mind how the SOCE study was done. They did not go out and interview or research counselors and clients on their own. Instead they combed through reports studies and literature about SOCE to see whether the studies were “methodologically correct.” If they found a study was methodologically suspect then it was considered inconclusive. The problem with that is that there is no possible way for any study on orientation change to be “methodologically correct.” The primary evidence for change would be the personal stories of those who have gone through it. Yet these stories, by definition, are not seen as “credible evidence” because there is no way to verify them. You can’t read another person’s mind and determine that, yes, 10 years ago they were homosexual and now they are straight. This is what all the yelling about the Spitzer study is about. He presented his study of 200 people who claimed to have changed in orientation and then he was accused of using non-credible evidence because the only way to verify the truth of the stories of his subjects was personal testimony which is not scientifically verifiable. 10,000 cases of people saying they have changed orientation could be presented and they would all be thrown out as non-credible.
Yet, even weighted in this way, the study still did not show that SOCE does not work, only that there is no evidence either way.
2: The study concluded that SOCE may cause harm. However, once again, keep in mind that they did not do their own research. They only examine previous studies. The study they used for this conclusion was Shidlo and Schroeder (2002). The authors of this study were careful to point out that their study did “not provide information on the incidence and prevalence of failure, success, harm, help, or ethical violations in conversion therapy.” So, yes, some clients felt they experienced harm but we have no idea how many or few or how frequently. By that definition of harm we would have to ban all form of psychotherapy, medical procedures, medicines and dentistry since all of these cause harm to a small number of people while attempting to help the majority.
I don’t have the study within reach so I’m quoting this figure from memory but, as I recall from a study released about two years ago, around 90 percent of clients of reparative therapy reported being satisfied with the results. Of the remaining 10 percent, certainly not all of them were harmed. Being unsatisfied is not the same thing as being “harmed.”
However, and this is the important thing for people to keep in mind about that 90 percent who were satisfied, that does NOT mean that 90 percent went from being gay to being straight. A good reparative therapist will tell you from the beginning that going from entirely homosexual to entirely heterosexual is virtually impossible. Defining “change” is another pitfall in this whole discussion. I think most people assume change means you no longer like guys and now you like girls. That is not what reparative therapy offers. Of those who were satisfied with the therapy I think the breakdown was approximately: 1/3 were able to form and maintain a satisfying sexual relationship with a spouse of the opposite sex (most of these will still find times when they battle temptation for those of their own sex, however), 1/3 elected to maintain a celibate lifestyle and were happy with the therapy they received which assisted them in doing so, 1/3 elected to continue seeking a partner of the same sex but were happy with some aspects of the therapy they had received.
3: Finally, the SOCE study and the legislation conflate all forms of orientation change therapy. Re-orientation therapy in the late 70s through much of the 80s was primarily behavior modification. Even though I did not experience the actual therapy, I can say I was harmed by it. At 16 I came across and article discussing the methods of behavior modification in relationship to homosexuality. Because there was no way I was going to tell my parents I was gay, it seemed like a god-send. Here was a way I could fix myself. The article recommended mild punishment, such as snapping a rubber band on your wrist, for homosexual thoughts and rewards for heterosexual thoughts. I tried it but it did not work. Firstly, I almost never had a heterosexual thought. Secondly, although the rubber band worked for a little bit, it quickly lost its effectiveness. So I moved on to poking myself with a pin and then burning and then cutting. Each method worked for a little while and so, when it stopped working, I moved on to another – yeah, I was a pretty messed up teen. Unfortunately, from some of the stories I hear from others, some of the live-in programs (though certainly not all) still use quite a bit of behavior modification practices. So I would be cautious to check out the rules and methods of any live-in program that promises sexual orientation change and I, personally, would never place a teen in one.
Reparative therapy, however, sees homosexuality as a reparative drive in which sexual desire is seeking to fulfill an earlier developmental, gender or relationship need. As such, in reparative therapy sexual orientation is seldom the subject of the counseling sessions. Instead, the focus is on forming healthy same gender, non-sexual friendships, establishing healthy boundaries in the client’s relationship with parents and family, and expressing emotions in a listening and respectful environment. All of these are basically healthy things that are used in a variety of counseling situations. Although I am still exclusively homosexual in my desires, I am very happy with the results of reparative therapy and quite comfortable with my choice of celibacy.
This legislation is basically trying to throw out the baby with the bath water by restricting healthy forms of therapy while pretending to regulate unhealthy ones. What reparative does NOT do is try to force the client to celebrate his or her homosexuality, although a good reparative therapist will not try to talk the client out of doing so if he wishes. It is precisely this refusal to celebrate and affirm sexual orientation that the APA hates. If legislation such as this continues to pass through various states, eventually the homosexual Christian will be faced with a therapeutic landscape in which the only options are to go to a counselor who will try to force you to accept and celebrate homosexuality or to receive amateur counseling from a non-trained pastoral counselor.
So, there is some information – hope it helps clarify things a bit.
Matt, I do appreciate your knowledge and candor. It is helpful.