Two years ago, a Colorado therapist named Kaley Chiles sat with clients who came to her wanting help. Some wanted to feel more at peace with being gay. Others, she claimed, wanted her help suppressing that attraction, or bringing their gender identity in line with the sex they were born... the practice every major U.S. medical association calls "conversion therapy" and warns can cause lasting harm.
Colorado had banned counselors from practicing conversion therapy on minors. Chiles filed a lawsuit, arguing that the restriction curtailed her right to free speech. The case eventually reached the US Supreme Court, who ruled that the ban went too far and sent it back to the state for revision. That decision didn't end in Colorado, though. The ripple from Chiles has already reached Missouri, Michigan, and an Oregon case that isn't about conversion therapy at all.
What Is Conversion Therapy, Exactly?
The term covers any effort to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. Decades ago that included some extreme methods: electric shocks, nausea-inducing drugs, even institutionalization. Those techniques have been abandoned almost everywhere, including by today's challengers.
What remains contested is talk conversion therapy alone: steering a client toward suppressing an attraction or aligning gender identity with sex at birth using only words. Every major medical and mental health body still calls it ineffective and harmful. More than 20 states have banned it for minors specifically, since kids can't meaningfully consent to a debunked treatment their parents request for them.
That word, minors, is important here. Colorado's law never touched what counselors could say to adult clients, only what they could say to kids... but the SCOTUS decision in that case appears to have opened the door much wider.
What Just Happened in Missouri?
On July 2, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived a similar lawsuit to the one in Colorado from two Kansas City counselors, Wyatt Bury and Pamela Eisenreich, who sued after Kansas City and Jackson County banned conversion therapy for minors. A district judge had thrown the case out; the panel sent it back, citing the Supreme Court's March ruling in Chiles, which ULC covered when it came down.
That 8-1 decision found Colorado's law banning conversion therapy for minors regulated speech, which gets the First Amendment's strictest protection. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the law "censors speech based on viewpoint." Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone, warning the ruling risks putting almost any talk-based therapy practices beyond the reach of state regulation.
Where Else Is This Playing Out?
Missouri isn't alone. In Michigan a Sixth Circuit ruling issued just before Chiles blocked the state's own minors-only conversion therapy ban. That case now hangs in limbo, depending on how lower courts apply the new SCOTUS standard.
Colorado has already rewritten its own law in hopes that a ban could survive the stricter review. Kansas City repealed its ordinance outright under state pressure. Jackson County's ban still stands.
Then there's Oregon, where the Chiles decision just did something none of the conversion therapy cases predicted.
The Oregon Case That Isn't About Conversion Therapy
Frank Canepa is a Catholic counselor in Beaverton who saw one adult client weekly for two-and-a-half years without ever volunteering his views on same-sex relationships. When she pressed him for twenty minutes to personally bless her own same-sex relationship, he told her he couldn't, citing his faith. As a result, Oregon's counseling board fined him nearly $90,000 for violating its ethics code against imposing personal values on clients.
Canepa claims he never tried to change anyone's orientation, and no one alleges engaged directly in conversion therapy with his adult client. But once the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects what counselors say in session, Oregon's board withdrew Canepa's fine within weeks, citing Chiles directly.
The Chiles ruling, it appears, could be used to allow therapists to practice in ways they never could before.
What Do Supporters of These Rulings Say?
The group Alliance Defending Freedom, representing counselors in both Missouri and Oregon, frames all of it as one free speech question, whether the client is a teenager or an adult. Senior Counsel Bryan Neihart says the Kansas City and Jackson County ordinances "push kids down the dangerous path of gender transition" while forbidding the opposite conversation, even at a client's own request.
Eisenreich says in court filings she's felt compelled by the ban to refer away teenagers whose parents specifically sought conversion therapy services in line with their religious beliefs, calling it a barrier between families and the counseling they want.
What Do Survivors and Clinicians Say?
Every major medical and mental health association still classifies conversion therapy as ineffective and harmful, a position that the majority opinion in Chiles didn't touch.
Justice Jackson's dissent leaned on testimony from the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, which told the Court that even nonaversive, talk-based versions of this conversion therapy teach gay and transgender children shame and self-hatred, and that survivors can carry PTSD, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts for years afterward.
Clinical researcher Dr. Luis Alvarez Hernandez told Colorado Public Radio that loosening these bans risks a return to coercion, isolation, and in extreme documented cases, physical abuse. A recent Trevor Project survey found the share of LGBTQ+ youth who'd undergone conversion therapy fell by half since 2020, to 5 percent, as more states passed bans. That rate could soon increase again.
What's Really at Stake?
Counselors on both sides describe their work in nearly identical language: helping people become who they're meant to be. That's the paradox underneath every case ULC has covered, from Idaho's law letting religious therapists opt out of LGBTQ+ clients altogether to the web designer the Supreme Court let turn away same-sex couples.
Courts keep deciding whose faith gets protected: the adult holding the credential, not the person who came seeking help, whether a teenager in Missouri or an adult in Oregon. Increasingly, the law seems to suggest that a counselor's right to speak their conscience matters. It appears to be less interested in protecting a client's right to leave a session without new shame to carry home.
What Do You Think?
Where should the line sit between a counselor's freedom of speech and a client's protection from a practice every major medical body calls harmful? If Oregon's case is any indication, how far could this ruling stretch beyond conversion therapy itself?
75 comments
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Pastor Bobby Roy
As an ordained minister, I believe our first responsibility is to protect those who cannot protect themselves — especially children. This article makes it clear that every major medical and mental health body calls conversion therapy harmful , and that states originally banned it because minors cannot meaningfully consent to a debunked treatment their parents request .
The recent rulings described here shift the focus away from the child and toward the counselor’s “right to speak,” even when that speech has been shown to cause shame, trauma, and long‑term harm. Survivors testify that even talk‑based conversion therapy teaches self‑hatred, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidal thoughts . That is not counseling — that is wounding.
As a minister of the Gospel, I cannot support any practice that burdens a child with shame or tries to “fix” what God did not break. Jesus never taught us to coerce the vulnerable. He taught us to lift them, protect them, and heal them. Any method that harms a child’s spirit violates both the medical evidence and the heart of Christ.
Our calling is simple: Stand with the vulnerable. Reject practices that cause harm. And ensure that every child who seeks help finds compassion, not condemnation.
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Douglas Robert Spindler
Pastor Bobby Roy, You are so right. Yet Christians use conversion therapy and torture to get young children to change how they feel without success. How you can support a religion that lets Christians do this to a minor.
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Steven Tyggrr Vijayananada
What IF I Identify Myself as the NON-PHYSICAL, SPIRITUAL ENTITY known in a great majority of traditions as THE SOUL. What are the pronouns of the SOUL? I find it personally highly offensive to be reduced to a set of physical components. I AM THAT I AM! Theologically and Metaphysically speaking, ALL HUMAN SUFFERING is based on delusion: MIS-IDENTIFICATION OF SELF as NON-SELF. Grifters, predators and parasites, lost in their own false narratives, perpetuate and deepen their own hellish, painful existence by GROOMING INNOCENTS into making delusional choices of LESSER LIGHTS. ASCENDING SOULS, who distinguish the WORLD as THE CREATOR'S BLESSING, who are among the WISE ONES Understand that Spiritual Knowledge (VIDYA or GNOSIS) is IDENTICAL with FREEDOM (MOKSHA). Is THIS not the GOAL?
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Rev. Matthew Mastrogiovanni
Stop the HATE!
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Dorothy Hawkins
Hmm...so we still haven't gotten past the phobia about there being more than TWO genders in the world?
Let's talk frankly about the actual science here, instead of cultural norms enforced over centuries to give clout and power to the majority of people.
Let's instead recognize and honor the gender expression which is most natural to the persons concerned.
Being upset about somebody's sexual identity being different from our own seems to me being overly concerned with making the prevailing cultural norm stand - hindering God's own handiwork in the creation of the human species to be adaptable to changing Earth conditions.
Who are we to say that there are only male and female genders? "Male and female he made them" - Well...did the authors of that leave out the others that we're now seeing in our world. To me, it's a human-made overlay of our own preferences and comfort levels. And it doesn't stack up with the reality that so many are living with right now.
Check out links to documentaries about intersexed people - people born with ambiguous genitalia - and tell me again how there are only two genders that God has made.
I don't think we can re-interpret what God has made to make it more comfortable for what we are used to. It's up to us to care for and comfort those around us, no matter what they are going through.
Forcing people into this binary way of thinking is like telling God: "Hey! You got it wrong!" I'm not in any way sure God would like or accept that kind of thinking on our part.
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Joshua Martin
This shouldn't even be a debate. Until a child becomes an adult, it's up to the parents to decide what's best and right for a child. Anyone who says differently either has no children, or has ulterior motives. It is what it is.
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Patricia Ann Gross
Joshua,
Yes, it is what it is. What you just stated is a perfect example of projection. Just because you have the best interests of your children in your heart and mind, doesn't mean everyone does, even those WITH children. I have seen too many parents living vicariously through their children, abusing them for not wanting the "perfect life" they have laid out for them. Fathers who were decent athletes or business people abuse their own sons for not wanting to play sports or to go into the Daddy's business. Mothers who assume their daughters are going to have sex on every date because they were a teenage mother. Those are two extremes that I have personally witnessed, and in the case of the girl, she liked women more than she did men, but the mother still assumed when she came in late that she was going to end up pregnant. She never did and is beyond child-bearing age now and happily married to a woman. My son was an exceptional athlete, but if he hadn't been I hate to think what his abusive father would have put him through. Many of the kids on some of his teams absolutely did not want to be there, but were shamed into it by their fathers. Most parents would rather their children not be gay or trans, but some only because of the abuse they are receiving by society, not because of their own ideals. They stand with their kids, and end up taking as much abuse as the kids do. The others try to manipulate their kids into an image they have (or had) for themselves.
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Teresa Louise Barberot
Whether the Creator of Humans (I say God) created all the different types of beings in this world or not we shouldn’t make anyone feel less than what mainstream society or the Bible written by Kings & Man has established as right or wrong. Even though I was taught Adam & Eve for procreation I never read God/Jesus saying specifically anything different was a sin. They were about Love for All of mankind. Only Kings & man wrote about it. Not even listed in the Ten Commandments! However the Government, Parents, Non-God & God believers end up ruling about all this I hope they are gentle with much love. Taking the time & caring to really listen to what these young people feel in their hearts. For the God believers give the issues to God in prayer and wait for his wisdom & instruction. ✝️🙏🏻💜
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Bridget Kielas-Fecyk
"Conversion therapy" is little more than brutality and abuse. It should be outlawed by every nation on this planet. It's, literally, allowing GROWN ADULTS to beat the sh... out of kids, belittle them, threaten them, and RPE THEM to try to force them to being "heterosexual" and to "obey the church".
It is the most EVIL things on this planet. Any actual TRUE god that preaches warmth and love would forbid it. And I very highly doubt that the Jesus of the New Testament would ever have condoned it.
There is no right in this world that should allow ADULTS to brutalize and rpe CHILDREN!
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Leslie A. Hulberg Née Tomasura
Conversion therapy makes those children ashamed of their natural instincts. That’s wrong. So it certainly should never be done. If anything, a parent or third neutral party should be there to ensure the therapy is beneficial to the patient’s well being and not harmful to their mental health. Being LGBTQIA is nothing to be ashamed of. It has been practiced since man first walked the earth. Even in the animal kingdom it is sometimes practiced. Therefore it is natural instinct.
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Steven Ferrell
If people don’t like conversation therapy or a therapist that is not going to support their sin, then find another therapist. To force a therapist to agree and support sin, is a dangerous road. What next, a therapist cannot counsel against someone feeling a desire to rape, harm others, commit violence or murder.
You want a therapist to agree with you, find one who will agree with you.-
Bridget Kielas-Fecyk
What's that got to do with Conversion Therapy? Unless you're trying to claim that if a person is LGBTQ+ that they're automatically violent, a murderer, and a rpist?
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Patricia Ann Gross
This is the exact reason why therapists have to be licensed and subscribe to a code of ethics. Therapy can be dangerous in the hands of someone unqualified or using methods that are not sanctioned by the licensing boards. These can lead to clients falling deeper into their psychosis or commiting suicide or homicide. Conversion therapy is not sanctioned by any behavioral health licensing or accrediting board, and practioners can be sanctioned and lose their licenses if they do it. Any therapist who utilizes conversion therapy is likely NOT licensed which is equivalent to giving a loaded AK-47 to a gorilla.
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Bridget Kielas-Fecyk
Being LGBTQ+, especially being Trans, is NOT a psychosis. It's not a mental health disorder or a disease. It is, literally, how a person is born. It's genetic. An LGBTQ+ individual is no more going to just "go straight" than a heterosexual person is going to suddenly wake up one morning and not he hetro. It just doesn't happen that way.
It's literally encoded into a person's genetics. And yes, you CAN, in fact, be genetically male, and yet your body be born looking female, and you CAN, in fact, be genetically female, and your body be born appearing to be male. This is 100% proven medical fact.
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Patricia Ann Gross
My comment about psychosis was relating to people who are mentally ill whether or not they are LGBTQIA++ and being treated by an untrained and unlicensed practitioner.
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Patricia Ann Gross
Bridget,
I am hoping that you posted this under the wrong response, because I said absolutely NONE of that. AND, I agree with you. My response was to Steven.
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Bridget Kielas-Fecyk
It was to someone else my apologies.
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James Douglas Beaumont
To resolve this we must understand what we are. People are taught to believe that we are a physical biological form. No that is not true. We are eternal spiritual beings. Through time we pass from one physical form to the next. This isn't a new idea. It is called reincarnation. The spiritual being does not have a gender. When you live forever reproduction is meaningless. However many beings prefer having a body of a particular gender. Myself I prefer male. Most people will have their own preference. The problem starts when a being of a certain preference ends up reincarnated in a body of the other gender. The crime being committed by any of this counseling is only that they are trying to convince the being that they ARE the body they are in. Better to clarify with the person that they ARE a spiritual being. Then it is left up to that person a decision that is only theirs to make. One option is to modify the body they have till it more nearly represents their preferred gender. The other option is a "walk on the wild side". While acknowledging with them their preferred gender, suggest they try embracing the gender of the body they are in. After all a being has no gender so it is only their preference that is under consideration. As an analogy say you hate red cars but ended up owning one. To keep the analogy closer let's say it is a really big process to go about transitioning from one car to another. Then you would have to decide if you want to go through the hassle of having the car repainted and interior redone. Or you could walk on the wild side and embrace that ugly red car and maybe even learn to love it. So that is the real solution to this situation by going back to the truth of what we are.
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Daniel Todd Kamm
Another line with lots of nonsense, so again, my 2 cents.
I (just very) recently retired from 38 years of providing mental health services in my community. I started out a case manager, working with chronically mentally ill adults to help them maintain in their communities versus the ever-revolving door of relapse and multiple hospitalizations; and later I thought maybe kids... could I intervene before they became like the adults I'd been working with?
So... on to "managed care," and later Emergency Treatment Foster Care and Treatment Foster Care, kids with multiple needs : abuse/neglect; placement outside the home, in kinship or foster care, often multiple homes; school issues both academic and behavioral; mental health issues; developmental issues [autism spectrum, MR, etc.] and alcohol, drugs, sex and guns; legal issues; dead friends; dead family, accidental deaths due to autos, home fires, community violence, overdoses and suicides and more ... neighborhood "trap houses," akin to "Lord of the Flies."
And that's just the kids. Now add in their adults.
I have been embedded in schools providing mental health services for the past 14 years of my professional 38. It's been a ride, believe me (we should all have the experience of a juvenile with schizophrenia swinging a 2 x 4 at us when we discover he has a 65 year old girlfriend who is "so beautiful" to him, he wants to cut her head off and put it on the mantel where he lives, right?
Many more tales from the "crypt" will remain in my memory and heart... because you just can't make this stuff up.
I add that because, there are way more serious things people have to deal with than the simple matter of emotional and sexual attraction and ill-informed treatments such as conversion therapy, which my particular profession adamantly disavows. So do I. Research conclusive: it's a racket.
Where I worked, kid's parents trusted me enough to sign a release @ "there may be some things your child may want to share with me, that they are not ready to share with you," and I assured parents that I would do everything to ensure that at some point their child would be able to engage them and share ... very rarely was the issue "sexual orientation" as many parents have a handle on that.
Apparently some people "here" do not, which is why I am grateful to the parents and the kids I have worked with all these years... it's the hood... but...
Way more real than people who have to much time on their hands and worse, the inclination to debate things that are simply not important.
Peace, Out...Reb tk
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Ari Joseph Bertine
Where's the line going to be drawn? If conversion "therapy" becomes legal, then it will be legal to use torture to condition anyone to accept anything, like women who don't want to leave their husbands even though they keep beating them up and hospitalizing them. Oh, no one would ever try to do that? Bet. A few thousand JW wives would beg to differ. She basically wants to torture her patients into not wanting relief from a biologically based condition that causes them to suffer. That's sick. And it's only even being considered because of people who are so squeamish about things that don't even affect them that they refuse to believe in hard evidence.
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David A Foreman
I am a survivor of the false, destructive torture of so-called "Conversion Therapy." There are millions of us who finally escaped, and have accepted ourselves and our sexuality, whatever that may be. I can now truly thank GOD for being born queer! And nothing anyone in the CULT of right-wing fundamentalist evangelicalism says or does can take that away. The Religious Right is neither!
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Roy S. Thorpe
Modern parents are always pushing their responsibilities off on the school, the church, or somebody, anybody else! My parents taught us basic skills to guide us through life! They weren't worried about our pronouns and converting us! We were exposed to school, church, and life! If we needed help in finding our way they were there! In today's world the lazy dull wits are growing in every aspect of society!
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Clara Ries
Parents and qualified medical professionals should work together to determine what is best for their children. Politicians, theologians, and other people should not. Care should be based on our best professional information available and should follow professional standards of care. If parents seek treatment that is determined to cause harm, that should be consider child abuse. As an adult, you can make your own decisions regarding your treatment (informed consent), children cannot. Studies of kids who were committed to conversion therapy have increased suicide rates and higher levels of future mental health issues.
Another thing to remember, being gay, trans, autistic, left handed, red headed, and many other things are not a diseases that can be cured, it is who we are. We are all created in the image of God.
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Rolando Couce
THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT AND NOT SAFE DUE TO THE OBSESSION OF THE DEMOCRATS TO MULTILATE KIDS
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Wendy Hoffman
What are you talking about? Some dumb and destructive conspiracy theory evidently. Your statement is so ridiculous I wondered if it was worth my time to write this. Do you seriously believe it? If so I feel very sad for you as this type of thinking is dangerous, hurtful and obviously untrue!
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Bishop William Dusenberry, DD
Point of information; the only true provable God is Nature; ergo, when atheists state the is no God — they’re not considering that the only provable God (Nature) is, in fact God, even though Nature always was and always will be, is the maker of all things, visible and invisible, Nature created (through the process of evolution) everything that there is — even human brains calling Nature something else — God. God is mostly used by those kept ignorant of science — but because those who know that Nature is God, can’t explain where Nature came from (who, or what created Nature) they claim that only the Christian God created him or her self — that’s if God has a gender, and is considered itself. For my Christian fellow ministers? Will there be gays in Heaven (all Heavens) or will the Christian Heaven be gay free? So, why might a homophobic Christian God have created gays in the first place? We non-homophobic non-Christian ministers want to know — so that we can “tend for our flocks, accordingly.” In my denomination of the ULC, I’ll preform a secretive gay to straight conversion therapy in private — so that gays are able to enter the homophobic Christian Heaven — come what may.
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ServantOfJudgement
People who believe in God the creator who is Jesus Christ gave us the theory of gravity, electrical theory, the motor, capacitor, flight and antibiotics to name a few. I hope you're able to see what you said is the very definition of wilfully blind ignorance. Because of the Christian scientist, you and I enjoy niceties never afford to even the kings of old.
Sometimes I think atheists and antichrists are jealous we Christians know more that they do.
To your question, man created gays. Mankind knows no limit in depravity and needs no help searching out these things. The disease spreading act of homosexuality first in there someplace.
For what it's worth, all human beings who don't partake in homosexual stuff, are by definition homophobic. Every single straight liberal on planet earth is homophobic with zero exceptions.
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Michael Hunt
"Every single straight liberal on planet earth is homophobic with zero exceptions."
What? This is absurd, even for you SoJ.
Homophobia: discrimination against, aversion to, or fear of homosexuality or gay people.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homophobia
Tell me, where in that definition does it say that it's homophobic to not partake in homosexual acts?
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Patricia Ann Gross
SOJ,
Your bias is showing -- in reverse. Just because a straight liberal does not engage homosexual acts does NOT make them homophobic, it simply makes them attracted to the opposite sex and respectful of those who are not. It also makes them intellegent enough to understand that sexuality is not a binary, or something that one can choose, but something that they are born with. When did you "choose" to become a heterosexual? Have you never admired a male figure or understood why women might be attracted to them? Even conservative straight people can have attractions to the same sex, admire the beauty of the male and female forms, and even those that are cross-dressing.
Also, being athiest or agnostic does not make a person stupid or idiotic. There have been some people who were brilliant that did not subscribe to the Christian God. Some of them were some of our first presidents, who were deists, not Christian.
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Lynnea Urania Kaylor
Bishop Dusenberry, there are a number of provocative ideas here.
I keep coming back to the ideas of scientists like John Wheeler, Richard Feinman, and Robert Lanza surrounding what came out of Feinman's approach to the Double Slit Experiment and mind games surrounding superposition Why on earth those photons should care whether they're observed or not has invoked proposed answers in many directions including the idea that the universe is growing self-aware through the aggregate observations of sentient beings. And taking that idea further in Wheeler's terms, once the universe gains full awareness, it creates itself--not just in the far future, but from the beginning. It's an idea that sounds like Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence and causes me to wonder whether we learn anything in the next cycle or we're doomed to repeat our many errors. For most of us, it seems like we're left without as much as a flashback from what (or who) the universe was previously... or even in a persuasive lucid or semi-lucid dream so realistic we may speak of it as a modal reality we may visit and explore.
One may well be inclined to speak of this self-creating universe in terms of God. Then again, of what kind of God do we speak when we approach the subject this way? Is it the purportedly loving Christian Creator God, or more like the Gnostic Yaldabaoth or Demiurge? Seeing how so much of nature depends upon dualities in which death is an inevitability, it seems more like the latter than the former.
As for God and gender, I often come back to an early Rabbinic view of Genesis 1:27 in which Adam isn't male only, but intersex before being separated into male and female, perhaps some eisegesis from the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium of Plato. Then again, if we speak of Shekhinah as the spark of Life between the Keruvim on the Ark of the Covenant, as it were the 2 represented male and female (YHVH and Israel), as Kabbalists have proposed, then we might infer that God expresses as both male and female united; and if that be so, then Intersex people naturally express this union bodily--- duality realizing unity.
But as a survivor of conversion therapy in the 1980's, I cringe at your last statement. Secretive gay-to-straight conversion therapy to get into a homophobic heaven? Yeek! Would anyone actually want to seek this? Or are you simply speaking of a ritual that you use to provide relief and assurance to those filled with a lifelong and imposed sense of guilt?
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Rev. Carol M Anaski-Figurski
Interesting article why don't they make conversion therapy legal?
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Patricia Ann Gross
The national ethics boards of all behavioral sciences have determined that conversion therapy is:
Not a defined or repeatable method
Has no scientific proof that it is effective.
Has significant scientific proof that it causes harm.
Basically, it is equivalent to psychological and sometimes even physical torture.
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Rev. Miche'al Yosef Dixon
Actually the comments prove the statement in the article; "That word, minors, is important here." As there is two levels of the word, "the legal" meaning and "the common" meaning which everyone uses. PRIME Example: In the state of Louisiana and Federal Law "Minor" is defined, "any person that is under the age of 21 years old" and "Child" is defined as "Any person under the age of 13 years of age" big difference. In Louisiana men have gotten 10 years in prison for consensual sex with a 17 to 20 year old and treated as pedophiles. Same applies with this subject as the whole point and purpose of the subject of sexual orientation is who do you what to have sexual relationship with? Otherwise what's the point in bringing it up at all? Growing up as a child I was teased and bullied because I wasn't "manly enough" I was a scrawny white Steve Erkle the jocks picked on and called "fag", "queer", "gay", "homo", "girlyboy" because I didn't meet the image of what a manly-man was and I didn't act the way a manly-man supposed to. I took home Economics in school a class reserved for Girls only, and proved my mother right "girls want a boy that can help around the house not treat them as slaves" the next year after seeing girls all over me boys flocked to the class. The parents complained to the school board and suddenly the shop class was boys only and home Economics girls only as official policy. 1980s version of "conversation therapy" in action. Hell, for that matter the ones that criticize me pushed me into experimenting with my sexuality, my lesbian sister pretends to hate it when I tease her with "I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body". My family sent my brother that thinks he's a woman to a mental hospital and they were pissed they released him as normal. From Minister point of view Scripturaly "YHWH made Adamah and Lilith/Eve not Adamah and Steve". Scientifically "nature only made two genders for the purpose of reproduction and two creatures of the same gender can't reproduce, it is a scientific impossibility ." "There are only two species of mammals on the planet that have sex with other mammals of the same gender... humans and dogs." - Charles Darwin.
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Reverend Paula Copp
Conversion therapy is barbaric and evil. Those who practice this on impressionable people should be subject to the same treatment!
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ServantOfJudgement
Yes! Ban lgbtq2qia++P from allllllll schools!!! Conversation therapy is EvIL!
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Michael Hunt
I'm assuming you mean conversion therapy not "conversation therapy." Conversion therapy, the process of trying to convert someone's sexuality from gay to straight, has no basis in science and has been found to be extremely harmful to those subjected to it.
https://www.aacap.org/aacap/Policy_Statements/2018/Conversion_Therapy.aspx
https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/evidence-against-conversion-therapy
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Dr. Zerpersande, NSC
Religion has no place in, uh…. well at…. perhaps when….
Okay, it doesn’t really belong anywhere in the modern world but especially in a setting involving impressionable children.
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ServantOfJudgement
No, we wouldn't want kids thinking it's wrong to burn down neighborhoods to honor violent criminals who died on the job. We definitely don't want them thinking it's wrong to shoot up schools either. Can you imagine how life would be if we had kids that respected life? Oh my amoeba!
Toys in the attic....
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Dr. Zerpersande, NSC
I have kids. Neither are religious. At all. Neither have ever been arrested. All neighborhoods they have been associated with are intact. No schools destroyed. They ‘respect life’ more than myself.
All without religious belief. Americans prisons are chock full of ‘god believers’. Those criminals that stormed the capitol? Want to bet every single one is a god believer?
Religion has no place in the modern world. It’s like a cancer that kids are born into.
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Patricia Ann Gross
SOJ,
None of what you are saying is exclusive to Christian morals or religion in schools. This teaching should start in the homes, and the morality repeated in the churches, synogogues, mosques and any other places of worship, and in the public schools without the religious twist to it. I don't know of any schools who is advocating for any of this nonsence or ignoring it when it happens. That's why there are "active shooter" drills not, just like we had fire drills when we were kids.
And to be honest, there are a lot of kids, I dare say most of them that DO respect life. I don't know if you lived through the 1960s, but the parents of kids coming of age in that era thought that ALL of the kids were doing drugs and having sex parties when that was only a very small percentage. Your "mole hill" is becoming a mountain, and it's time to get the bulldozer out. My grandkids are not like the ones you characterize, are yours? If no grandkids, how about your kids?
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Keoni Ronald May
There are very few children, who can truly understand the long term consequences, of their actions. The training and life experiences of an adult, can not be trumped by a child.
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Douglas Robert Spindler
Same can be said for adults. Just look at all of the Christian ministers who rape and molest women and children. They just arrested 2 more in California.
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ServantOfJudgement
You'll find that where children congregate, so do molesters. That's why so many public school teachers and coaches get busted.
The solution is very simple.
Public execution immediately if found guilty. Hold the trial near a sturdy oak tree to save gas money.
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ServantOfJudgement
That's pure wisdom Keoni.
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ServantOfJudgement
Its weird how kids in clicks all jump in the gender identity rubbish together at the same time. Weird how schools encourage (convert) the new genders.
If conversion from this to that through social pressure is conversation therapy, then conversion from that to this is conversion therapy.
Ban all gender politics and discussion from school other than biology.
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Michael Hunt
No one is converting people to be gay or transgender; they already are from birth and people are now accepting them instead of demonizing and ostracizing them. There's not societal pressure on people to be homosexual or transgender, just acceptance.
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ServantOfJudgement
Nope. Social pressure creates that which it demands.
Find a chart that shows lgbtq3qia++ skyrocketing as it became cool
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Matthew Evan Baker
Left handedness went up when people stopped being whipped and beaten for it, what's your point?
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Michael Hunt
When, in many places in this country, being LGBTQ+ means experiencing discrimination and hate from bigots in the person's community, how are they being pressured to be LGBTQ+? There are still places in the country where being queer might get you lynched. Thankfully, these types of places are becoming more and more rare as people accept the LGBTQ+ community.
There's a much more simple explanation as to why more people are identifying as LGBTQ+: because society has generally become more accepting of the LGBTQ+ community, people are no longer afraid to admit to being LGBTQ+. That's it. It's that simple. When you live in a society that no longer criminalizes your existence or discriminates against you for being who you are, you don't have to hide who you really are.
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James Richard Munro
Bovine Excrement. Maybe some people in your part of the world except this. Again, there has been many studies on this subject. Results, what you are born with is what you are. You can't change it. You can cut it off or cover it up, but you are still the same gender. Alphabet people live in a fantasy world and get upset when people in the real world don't want to play their game and live in their fantasy world.
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Michael Hunt
Could you please share those studies you're referring to? All of the studies I have found when researching this topic indicate that sexuality is a biological imperative ingrained in our genes. In fact, there is extensive research showing how sexuality, and even gender presentation, are controlled by our biology, not by social pressures alone.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat7693
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Ari Joseph Bertine
Not any studies that were scientifically conducted or medically approved. Those studies showed that it is indeed biological. Which is why the entire medical profession agrees.
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David A Foreman
Just keep ranting about issues on which you are completely ignorant. No, seriously. It helps everyone to identify the ones like you who are an insult to the human race.
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Ari Joseph Bertine
It's weird how kids who are drawn to each other through shared experience and views form cliques...oh wait, no it isn't, that's how cliques form.
No school has EVER converted a kid to any type of sexuality or gender identity. It simply does not happen. Also, cats don't suck the breath out of infants, snakes don't nurse the milk out of cows, and eagles don't shed their beaks, talons and feathers when they turn 50 years old.
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James Riggle-Johnson
Conversion therapy may no longer advocate for electroshock or physical abuse in their practice, but they still teach shame, fear, degradation, and humiliation. Children should not be subjected to that kind of treatment just because their parents want it. And physical abuse may be coming from the parents at home.
Before anyone says this is all about boys not being able to become girls, let's look at the facts. Of these patients, only 1 percent suffer from gender dysphoria. The rest are simply homosexual or bisexual. And these therapists are basing their counseling on religious texts. It has nothing to do with what they learned in school about therapy.
These therapists are relying on a book written by men who claimed to be speaking for God. In most of those cases, they were listening to their own egos rather than to God. The first thing these therapists should think before treating a patient is “Do No Harm.”
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shiningwolf7
A Counselor is supposed to do just that, COUNSEL. They are NOT to impress upon their Clients their own personal, private beliefs about a matter. That is called CONTROL, and is illegal.
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Douglas Robert Spindler
Sounds like you think it’s OKAY for Christian counselors to sexually abuse and rape children when they perform their conversion therapy.
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ServantOfJudgement
Impossible.
We aren't robots, at least some of us aren't. A standard off the shelf human is incapable of interacting with society WITHOUT injecting its own beliefs.
Anyone who disagrees with me is a robot or a codlege programmed bioid.
Codlege programmed Bioids will inject their programmers personal public beliefs. Never their own. That would be wrong.
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Patricia Ann Gross
SOJ,
His answer should have been, "My personal blessing is beyond the scope of what I am allowed to provide in these sessions, and by doing so it would violate the code of ethics I am bound to uphold, but if it means that much to you, I would suggest you talk to a priest or pastor about it, because I am not qualified in spiritual matters" and let it go at that. To me, it sounds like the client was asking a loaded question, that no matter how he responded it would never go right. If he provided the blessing, since it was a Catholic agency depending on the archdiocese he belonged to, the client could have reported him, and if he didn't he could end up in court like he did. His only "out" was to blame it on the code of ethics, which is managed and adjudicated by the state. When all else fails, blame the boss.
When I served as a Chaplain, I wasn't allowed to pray with a patient or family unless they requested it, or I asked permission first, and had to respect their answer. If the patient was Catholic and wanted communion or last rites, I was required to call in a Catholic Priest or chaplain, since I am not authorized by the Catholic church to do either. If they were Jewish, Muslim, or some other faith I was not familiar with, I was required to do the same for them. It didn't matter what I thought or believed, it was all about what the patient needed or wanted that mattered, and since each belief system is different, mine didn't [matter]. I didn't coddle a patient who was dying by telling them they could still get to heaven without last rites, I called in someone who could. This counselor could have done the same. If the priest couldn't, he should have sent him to a progressive church pastor who could. I have often asked questions about personal views of therapists and doctors are, and this was always their answer, and rightfully so. Their personal views don't matter, only what they are there to treat me for does.
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Douglas Robert Spindler
You have alway come across as a robot. Spawning out the hate you have been programed to repeat.
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Najah P Tamargo
Najah Tamargo-USA
I totally agree with Doggod. Our children have enough to deal with. THEY should be allowed to be who they want to be. Not pressured or shamed for that!!!
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James Richard Munro
As a child, there are some things they must learn to except. NO, you don't get to choose your gender. You need to except what you were born with. This is not Whataburger. You can't have it your way. I raised too daughters by myself. I received custody when they were two, and four. They learned sometimes, the answer is NO. Now, They are adults with children of their own and doing a good job of it. Proud Grampaw
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Ari Joseph Bertine
What you are saying is not medically correct and is not based in reality. It is based in personal opinion and knee-jerk emotion and those are not criteria by which children should be required to live. We don't let kids live with the flu because giving them cough syrup would be "coddling them", we treat their medical conditions so as not to be abusive.
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ServantOfJudgement
When the coddled kids find out they can't be who they told they could be, they respond with bullets Najah.
Bleeding heart adults cause bleeding people.
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Michael Hunt
There's zero evidence to support that absurd claim. I can't think of a single school shooter who acted because they were coddled and told they could be something they can't actually be. Often times, shooters live in homes with inattentive parents, they experience bullying at school, they are radicalized by people on the internet, or they have severe, often undiagnosed mental illness.
So tell me, which shooter acted because they were a coddled kid who found out they couldn't be who they were told they could be?
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Doggod
No child should be subjected to gender ID confusion, they have enough to worry about no need to put extra burden on their developing minds. Any school partaking in this behavior should be closed and those adults should be fired and never allowed in a classroom with children again.
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Dr Dennis Chevalier, MDiv, PhD, DDvin, ULC honorary DD
Agreed
Dr. D
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Douglas Robert Spindler
I know of 5 family members/co-workers who as minors were FORCED to go through conversion therapy by their parents and church. The women who were forced were sexually abused by the “Christian experts” in conversion therapy. With one of the young girls being sexually abused by her Christian mother for years.
How Christians leader and Christians can attack one type of conversation therapy and endorse one that supports sexual abuse and torture of minors sure says something about Christians.
I would sure like to hear from Christians to explain this.
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ServantOfJudgement
Wait Doggod,
Are you saying schools shouldn't convince kids they're gay or shouldn't convince kids they're not gay?
Right now they're convincing kids they're gay as the standard. No school in my state convinces kid's they're straight that I know of. They all convince kids they're gay. Kids'll believe anything ya know.
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Michael Hunt
What? Provide me with one example of children being convinced at school that they are gay. Since this is apparently the standard across the country, it should be easy to find examples I'm sure.
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Douglas Robert Spindler
There has not been one case of this ever happening, EVER. These lies being told by Christians have tracked back to the 1980s as part of a political agenda to scare Americans.
The Christians are at it again spreading more lies. At the same time they fail to mention the child molestations and raping of women Christians leaders are found doing all the time. There more Christians have recently been arrested for raping and molesting children.
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Rev. Miche'al Yosef Dixon
I read several articles on LGBT+ group with their own "conversation therapy" going on. And the stick up their butt so-called Christians have now watered down version of the same old bully tactics "conversation therapy".
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Michael Hunt
Could you share some of those articles with me? I'm very curious and interested in reading them.
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Clara Ries
Our entire society is rooted in a very traditional male/female, colonial worldview. Accepting LGBTQ+ people is something we all need to do. Gay people are created in God's image as well. The entire story started with God creating man, the separating a piece of the man to make a woman, who then had two boys. Who went on to have more children with Eve (she was the only women, kinda like Smurfette).
David and Jonathan most certainly had a gay relationship. Jonathan makes his covenant to David by immediately disrobing because he loved David so much (1 Samuel 18:1-4) Later on David states “Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Jonathan lies slain on your heights. How I grieve for you, Jonathan. You were so very dear to me. Your love for me was wondrous, more beautiful than that of a woman.” - 2 Samuel 1:25-26
Life is complicted and we live in a diverse world. has always been this way.
The reason there is a black lives matter movement is because so many people treat them as a lower class. The same is true for LGBT+ people. They deserve to he treated with all of the love, justice, and rights bestowed upon any person.
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I believe it belongs to the family. Seek counsel in prayer, but it solely belongs to the parents, or legal guardians.