Don’t be misled into thinking that this bill bans only professional counselors from trying to alter same-sex attractions. It goes well beyond that.

Robert Gagnon. For more pro-family (and pro-freedom) resources on AB 2943, go HERE. Also see SaveCalifornia.com. See Gagnon’s excellent website at RobGagnon.net.

By Robert A. J. Gagnon, reprinted from the Catholic World Report, April 15, 2018

The biggest effort at book-banning, the banning of counseling services and church conferences, the banning of academic courses, and a general banning of free speech in the history of the United States is well underway in California. This is reminiscent of when Southern states in the pre-Civil War era banned any literature suggesting that slavery might not be a good thing; what we are fighting now is slavery to same-sex attractions and gender dysphoria.

The bill in question is California Assembly Bill 2943. It would treat as a criminal violation of the state’s consumer fraud act “the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer” that consists of “advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual.” Don’t be misled into thinking that this bill bans only professional counselors from trying to alter same-sex attractions. It goes well beyond that.

“Orientation change” can be as innocuous as stating at a paid conference that homosexual and transgender desire can be overcome (not necessarily eliminated) by the Spirit of Jesus. Or even complying with an attendee’s request for prayer that the Spirit of God empower the attendee not to succumb to the power of same-sex attractions.

That’s not all. More than “orientation change” is at issue, for the bill expressly states:

‘Sexual orientation change efforts’ means any practices that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.

Did you catch the part that says: “This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions,” not just orientation change? You cannot treat homosexual expression or transgenderism as the product of disordered desires.

John McCartney has been proclaiming the truth about homosexuality and abortion in the Chicago area for decades.

The following open letter was published late last month (in print only) by my friend and longtime pro-life and pro-family advocate, John McCartney. For decades, John has reached out locally in the Chicago area with the truth on two critically important cultural issues: the defense of unborn life and opposition to the homosexual (LGBTQ) agenda. With his steadfastness and reasonable, winsome approach he is a model for morality advocates everywhere. And he never quits–doing more as an octogenarian to defend truth in the public square in a single month than most people do in a lifetime.

For the uninitiated, “Reparative Therapy” is talk therapy designed to help people overcome and manage unwanted homosexual desires, aka “same-sex attractions” (SSA). Many people like David Pickup and Christopher Doyle, have been helped by such “ex-gay” therapy [see my LifeSiteNews piece on the late RT pioneer, Joe Nicolosi]. Nevertheless, LGBTQ ideologues are now heavily invested in demonizing and discrediting the practice, usually by “focusing on the failures,” i.e., people who claim to be harmed or abused by Reparative Therapy. (This in itself is strange, as John alludes to in his letter: in what other area of life–say, people overcoming drug addiction or obesity–do we focus only on the failures as opposed to the heart-warming successes of struggling people who got professional or ministerial help?)

In a seismic assault on liberty, RT for minors has been banned in nine states and the District of Columbia, according to this pro-LGBTQ website. (Interestingly, three governors who signed anti-RT bills into law were Republicans–Chris Christie (New Jersey), Susana Martinez (New Mexico) and Bruce Rauner (Illinois).) Yet it is important to remember that many people who have overcome the strong pull of homosexual impulses in their life, like Stephen Black, did not rely solely on RT-like counseling, and credit God with all or at least a big part of their transformation.

No matter to the neo-totalitarian Left, which is hellbent on destroying the practice and the freedom of people–even childhood victims of homosexual predators–to pursue healthy change away from homosexuality. Note that one method LGBTQ activists and their media echo chamber use to smear Reparative Therapy is to mislabel it as “conversion therapy.” That sounds more menacing and plays to the Left’s anti-Christian prejudices, making RT sound like some sinister cult. It also befits the LGBTQ activist narrative of portraying homosexuality as innate (inherent), thereby unchangeable, and “gays” as perpetual victims. Kudos to John McCartney for rebutting the LGBTQ lies and biased media groupthink. — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH; Twitter: @PeterLaBarbera – americansfortruth@gmail.com

P.S. Special Book Offer: Regarding McCartney’s proper assessment that homosexuality is NOT a normal variant of human sexual behavior, I recommend the thoroughly-documented, 600-page Mass Resistance book, “Health Hazards of Homosexuality,” which we are making available through AFTAH for $20 postpaid. Order online here with your gift of at least $20 [note your book order in the comments box], or send your check to: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522, noting the book order.]

Links and some explanatory notes have been added to this printed Open Letter:

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An Open Letter to the Deniers of Reparative Therapy

By John McCartney

For years, “gay” activists have waged a disinformation campaign against reparative therapy (RT), a service available to the those with unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA). It got national attention decades ago when, using it, [sexologists] Masters & Johnson relieved 60 percent of such persons from SSA. Such therapy consists of conversation between a therapist and a client seeking the source of this unwelcome felling. That there is a source is attested to by the fact that there is no replicated study supporting the born-that-way argument. Anti-RT activists advance assertions that warrant scrutiny, assertions in addition to born-that-way, such as:

• SSA is not a disorder, i.e., a divergence from nature. In support, they cite the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the [American Psychiatric Association’s] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders II at a meeting that made a travesty of psychiatric deliberation by politics and the ever-present threat of 1971-type disruptions [Editor’s note: see this “pro-LGBTQ psychiatric site, which notes: “There were a series of dramatic encounters between activists and psychiatrists at the annual meetings of the APA between 1970 and 1972.” Also see psychiatrist Dr Ronald Bayer’s book, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, which documents how “gay” militants bullied and harassed psychiatrists leading up to the APA vote depathologizing homosexuality.] In a subsequent referendum, psychiatrists without experience with homosexuality were polled; their votes outweighed the votes of psychiatrists who did have it. Psychiatrists with such clinical experience in counseling clients with SSA were marginalized in the proceedings.

The late Dr. Robert Spitzer, who equivocated on whether people could leave homosexuality (a supposed “orientation”) behind. See this compelling article on Spitzer, who once declared in a letter, based on his observations: “In homosexuality…something’s not working.”

• Dr. Robert Spitzer, who quarterbacked the 1973 removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder (with a narrow exception), retracted his 2003 endorsement of RT, which he made after listening to the self-reports of 200 men and women for whom RT worked. Spitzer, after ten years, was convinced by “gay” activists that he really didn’t know what he once knew, that his endorsement was putting homosexuals in jeopardy, and that self-reporting of change was unreliable, even though he had expertise evaluating it. The [then] 80-year-old psychiatrist yielded to the same intense lobbying that his fellow psychiatrists did in the 1973 “scientific” [APA] meeting–to truth’s detriment.

• The assertion that the showcased dozen or so victims of unqualified counselors constituted proof that RT doesn’t work and is often harmful is as unreasonable as asserting that Alcoholics Anonymous is a failure because it has only a 40 percent success rate.

Christopher Doyle, founder of Voice of the Voiceless. Doyle overcome homosexuality in his own life and is now happily married and the father of three children. AFTAH urgers readers to support Doyle’s new organization defending ex-“gays,” Voice of the Voiceless.

Folks, Christopher Doyle–a former homosexual himself who is now living happily as a married heterosexual family man (somebody report him to Homosexual Hatemonger Wayne Besen!)–is doing outstanding work through his new organization, Voice of the Voiceless. Doyle is the lead pro-family advocate confronting the Orwellian campaign by Besen and other homosexual militants (and the Southern Poverty Law Center) to outlaw pro-heterosexual therapy for minors–apparently using big lies when necessary (see the “transgender tale” below).

If Besen and his ilk win, children and freedom lose. So please support Doyle and VOTF. This column originally appeared online in the Christian Post, March 13, 2014.–Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH

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Setting the Record Straight on ‘Gay Conversion’ Therapy for Minors

By Christopher Doyle

As a response to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ refusal to hear an appeal over the 2012 California law prohibiting Sexual Orientation Change Effort (SOCE) therapy for minors, it has been open season for anti-therapy activists. To compliment existing laws in New Jersey and the Golden State, legislation has also been introduced in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, Ohio, Washington, D.C., Florida, Minnesota, New York, Maryland, Hawaii, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Pundits across the political spectrum are anticipating more laws to come in 2014.

A February 16 article in The Washington Times predicted that such laws would likely follow the path of states legalizing gay marriage, and perhaps even pave the way to a national ban if anti-ex-gay advocates were to gain more power on the federal level, while a February 12 editorial in the New York Times suggested that a wiser path would be for “victims” to use legal measures to quell the “deceptive practices” of those who offer SOCE therapy. After all, it’s a well-known fact that such therapy for minors has been “proven” to be “ineffective” and “harmful.”

However, recent legislative efforts by activists in Virginia and Washington have failed, and a hearing in Maryland on similar legislation was cancelled, partly because the lies and half-truths of activists are catching up to them. In Washington, a witness testifying in a January committee hearing said that a licensed therapist forced a child to watch pornography while in an ice bath so that the client would associate sexual arousal with pain. However, when questioned after the hearing, the woman refused to provide the name of the therapist and when it happened; nor was she willing to do any research to help uncover whether, if it had in fact happened, it was a licensed therapist.

In a senate hearing in February, a representative of the Washington Department of Health, which has jurisdiction over professional licensing and fields approximately 10,000 complaints a year, said that the current staff has 11 years of institutional knowledge and no one was aware of a single complaint alleging that a licensed therapist had attempted to coerce someone into not being gay.

This story sounds eerily similar to the disaster witnessed in New Jersey last year, when transgender activist Brielle Goldani claimed to have been sent to a “conversion therapy torture camp” in Ohio in 1997. Goldani alleged to have been electroshocked at the month-long “True Directions” camp in an attempt to make him, now her, straight. Yet, an investigation published at WorldNetDaily.com revealed that the entire testimony was a fraud, taken directly out of a Hollywood production starring drag queen RuPaul.