The Washington Times reports, “Legislation banning gay conversion therapy for minors has narrowly passed the New Hampshire House of Representatives.”

The bill prohibits “counseling services to children under 18 ‘relative to conversion therapy seeking to change a person’s sexual orientation.'”

The bill must still pass the state Senate and be signed by governor Chris Sununu (R). New Hampshire would join nine other states and Washington DC which “currently have laws or regulations protecting youths from conversion therapy.”  This is “according to a report released last month by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.”

Enter the Activists

The Williams Institute is a pro-non-reproductive-sexuality think tank “dedicated to conducting rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.”

A press release announced the Williams Institute report. It warned that “teens … will be subjected to conversion therapy.”

An estimated 20,000 LGBT youth ages 13 to 17 will undergo conversion therapy from a licensed health care professional before the age of 18, according to a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

Also, approximately 57,000 youth will receive the treatment from a religious or spiritual advisor. These are the first estimates of U.S. youth at risk of undergoing conversion therapy before they reach adulthood.

The researchers also found that approximately 698,000 LGBT adults in the U.S have received conversion therapy at some point in their lives, including about 350,000 who received it as adolescents.

Poor Choice of Words

The numbers are debatable. But worse is the choice of highly charged words: subjected to, risk of undergoing, conversion therapy. This makes it sounds as if therapy itself were a disease.

The report itself says that some, but certainly not all, health groups, such as the American Medical Association, are against “conversion therapy.” Why? Because (they claim) “the use of conversion therapy is harmful and ineffective.” And thus any such therapies should be banned.

Conversion therapy is an in-apt name, contributing in part to the dislike of its goal. It implies the unwilling change of a person into something that he is into something that he is not.

Seeing Double

Yet people are not “gay,” “straight,” “transgender,” or “cis.”  Neither are they any of the many other categories invented to classify sexual desires or dysphoria. There are only men and women. (With, of course, very rare exceptions due to genetic abnormality. Even these do not stop majority of afflicted from acting as men or women.)

Twin studies prove same-sex desire is not an innate trait. “Identical twins have the same genes or DNA. … If homosexuality is caused by genetics or prenatal conditions and one twin is gay, the co-twin should also be gay.”

Yet, “If an identical twin has same-sex attraction the chances the co-twin has it are only about 11% for men and 14% for women.”

Same-sex attraction is thus not something (most or all) people are born with but is developed later in life. It is thus theoretically possible for some to lose or ameliorate their attraction.

Repairing Conversions

And indeed the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi boasted great success with what he called reparative therapy for those with unwanted same-sex attraction. To repair of course indicates what occurs in such therapy. There is no conversion and no coercion.

His client stories are proof positive that reparative therapy works for at least some men.

One seventeen year-old was four when he “was molested by my neighbor.” That same year he himself  molested his cousin.  He identifies these molestations as being partly responsible for his becoming “gay.”

But, he said, “after therapy and just everything that I’ve learned and gone through, now I can look at a guy and think ‘Oh, he’s handsome’ but I don’t find that sexual attraction. … The therapy changed my whole mentality for the better. … I just decided that I don’t want to be gay for the rest of my life.”

This young man’s story is interesting because it is relevant to proposed “conversion” therapy bans:

There is now this law in California regarding minors that is about to start, that would have made it illegal for me, as someone under 18, to get help. I think it’s ridiculous. It’s just like saying Alcohol Anonymous should be cancelled, all the rehabilitation programs in the United States should be stopped. In this new law, they say that getting help to understand the SSA feelings I had, which started through bad experiences in my childhood, does harm to me. But through therapy, I was healed from those memories and the harm they caused.

Now New Hampshire, like California, may mandate that young men like this keep suffering that harm.