21/07/2020
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has told ITV News that he agrees that bizarre attempts by Christian extremist groups to turn gay, lesbian and bisexual people into heterosexuals are “absolutely abhorrent” but he said that before the Conservative government united with other parties to fulfill an election promise to formally outlaw these fake psychological practices, more research would need to be conducted. Mr Johnson elaborated, saying that the government would need to understand where these practices were being conducted and by which organisations. These types of groups, sometimes known as “ex-gay” therapy organisations are extremely marginal in the UK. The only one of any size is the Ulster based “Core Issues Trust” which LGBTQ Newswire Pink News this week exposed as effectively a one person band headed by a man who has been condemned by many campaigners as a fundamentalist with extreme views on sexuality and religion. A poll conducted for ITV News revealed that an overwhelming majority of people in Britain wanted a prohibition on “ex-gay” pseudopsychology. Between the late nineties and late noughties, the US based blog Ex-Gay Watch documented the activities of anti-gay quack treatments, documenting self loathing in victims, feelings of suicide and despair, and the fact that most people found that they remained gay after undergoing the cruel and unusual practices. In both the US and the UK, all secular and recognised mental health organisations, including MIND, NAMI, Sane and dozens of others, have studied “ex-gay” groups and condemned their premises. Several key people involved in the “ex-gay” movement have apologised to those whose lives they affected and have since gone on to develop a more considerate and less fundamentalist Christian position on sexual orientation. One of the most recent was in South Carolina, where McKrae Game, a man who founded an anti-gay group called “Hope for Wholeness” issued a formal apology after over twenty years trying to turn gay people into heterosexual Christians. He said “We have harmed generations of people” in an interview with the Carolina newspaper Post and Courtier last Autumn. Although some gay and bi people expressed anger at the money that Mr Game had made through the “ex-gay” suffering he promoted, a majority of local LGBTQ groups accepted his apology and wished him well in developing a faith free of fundamentalist hatred. Back in the UK, the “Core Issues Trust” appears to be on the run, issuing a statement to conservative religionist magazine “Christianity Today” in which the man behind the group said that “LGBT life is a cult”. This prompted much twitter hilarity, with scores of posts, and one man, who identified as bisexual, responding “as Richard Dawkins points out, science is true whether religious extremists believe it or not. Science demonstrates that reprogramming efforts are ineffective. And surely, the only cult in this debate is the cult of hateful religious intolerance”.
