Linda Harvey of Mission America is still incensed by California’s new law preventing minors from undergoing pseudo-scientific sexual orientation conversion therapy, and on her radio show this weekend she called it a “fascist” law that is “banning heterosexuality.” She suggested that parents and counselors work to break the law, which she said would be more loving to gay or lesbian youth.
This SB 1172, passed in California, signed by Governor Jerry Brown, bans all counseling that would reduce or eliminate same-sex attractions and especially they ban this for minor who are people under the age of eighteen. So that means that parents, if you have a child who has come to you and said they have same-sex attractions and they think they are gay, and many kids with all the propaganda that is very one-sided are believing that the were born that way if they feel that way, but it’s the blessed parent who at least gets a chance to counsel them differently. Hopefully your response will be one that is, ‘I love you no matter what but this is wrong,’ so the two things at the same time, ‘but I will help you to find the counseling you need.’ California is basically banning heterosexuality. So for these children, if a child has been persuaded that they are born this way, that they have same-sex attractions, and you as a parent want to take them to a counselor, no licensed, professional counselor in the state of California is now going to be able—unless they break the law. Perhaps some of them will have a conscience on this and think differently and think that maybe their responsibility to their client on this as in other areas of counseling and that the client might want to have a choice in the matter as they do in other areas of counseling, they’re not supposed to counsel anything but ‘oh no, homosexuality, you must embrace that.’ It’s so anti-choice, it’s so rigid, it’s so fascist, this is just the same old stuff you get from the supposedly tolerant folks, tolerance is actually intolerance, inclusivity is actually exclusivity.
She also argued that the resounding criticism of ex-gay therapy by the country’s major medical and counseling organizations is “baloney” because she knows “tons of ex-homosexuals.” According to Harvey, the only reason such counseling doesn’t work for some people is that the clients simply aren’t working hard enough to change their sexual orientation because they think it is “too tough.”
Harvey later lamented that school counselors in California will not tell gay and lesbian students to change their orientation, warning of “child endangerment and child corruption” along with “educational malpractice” and “psychological malpractice” in California schools.
‘There’s no such thing as change.’ That’s baloney. I know tons of ex-homosexuals and people that have been ex-homosexuals for twenty years or more, I know ex-transgender people. The fact that a few people try it and it doesn’t work or they give up doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for some people, and that’s true of all counseling. How many people do you know who throw their hands in the air and say ‘oh this is too tough’ and they are just more comfortable where they are even if it’s painful. That is human nature, that is what people do all the time, so it is not going to be any different in counseling. Think about school counselors, every single high school and middle school have counselors on site, in California if a child confidentially comes to them and says ‘I’m struggling with—I think I might be homosexual,’ this person is going to have to say, ‘great, then you’re born that way.’ This is child endangerment and child corruption and I think it is educational malpractice, it’s certainly psychiatric malpractice.
