In the wake of Utah’s statewide ban on conversion therapy for minors last week, SPLC attorneys Scott McCoy and Kate Kendell wrote an op-ed in The Salt Lake Tribune to remind readers of the damage the dangerous practice causes.
A New Jersey state judge this week ordered the dissolution of an organization known as the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA) – which facilitated fraudulent gay-to-straight “conversion therapy” – after its directors violated an injunction entered four years ago requiring its predecessor to permanently cease all operations.
This new Southern Poverty Law Center report exposes the bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion therapy and the practitioners who promote widely discredited notions that endanger and stigmatize the LGBT community.
This is a report about junk science and some of the people who propagate it. It is not about silly, perhaps amusing theories about ESP or life on the moon or even purported miracle cures for cancer. The “science” examined here actively harms people, leading with grim regularity to suicide, depression and an array of self-destructive behaviors. It demeans, defames and defrauds human beings, typically at their most vulnerable moments. And, as if that weren’t enough, it regularly lays the blame for the alleged malady of homosexuality at the feet of gay people’s parents, despite the fact that they are wholly innocent.
