Today, the Advocate magazine released its “Big Ideas of 2013” in it’s Year End issue. Among these critically important ideas was that “reparative therapy should be illegal everywhere.” According to the article:
Wayne Besen, an activist fighting this form of therapy with his organization Truth Wins Out, calls reparative therapy “child abuse.”
“Reparative therapy is harmful because the practice is not really about helping the client, as ethical therapy is supposed to be,” Besen says. “Instead, it is about bolstering the therapist’s antigay belief system at the expense of the client. It is also a mean spirited marketing campaign with the singular purpose of portraying LGBT people as mentally ill.”
The somewhat underground industry began to change however, when California passed a law banning therapy that promised to convert LGBT minors into straight or cisgender people. Despite court challenges, the law remains on the books, and New Jersey soon followed suit with the signature of Republican governor Chris Christie….As more people understand that homosexuality cannot be simply repressed, these so-called ex-gay therapists will lose clients, and money, and power. And as more lawmakers learn about the harms of this therapy, which sometimes go as far as electroshock therapy and exorcisms, more states may follow California and New Jersey in outlawing the practice.
Truth Wins Out is fully committed in 2014 to ratcheting up this battle to a new level. It is our intention to put NARTH and similar organizations out of business, or shove them into the deepest, darkest, fringes of society. What such groups do is commit consumer fraud, divide families, and cause lasting psychological scars.
