Scared Straight
No one forced Mathew Shurka to do it, but he was too afraid to say no. In front of him was an opportunity to change his sexuality forever. At least, that’s what he was told.
Just a month before, Shurka, who was 16 at the time and living in Great Neck, N.Y., had revealed to his father, through tears filled with dread, that he was gay. When Shurka’s father embraced him and said he’d love him no matter what, a weight was lifted. However, in the weeks that followed, Shurka’s father began to worry that his gay son would not flourish in a world that often oppresses people who are different. So he did some research and found someone who offered therapy that would change his son’s sexual orientation.
Shurka, now 25, tells Newsweek that at the time he was afraid of coming out to his conservative Jewish community and losing his friends. “It was a horrifying nightmare to think that anyone knew I was gay,” he recalls. So when his father offered the prospect of conversion therapy, Shurka decided “if I can really change this, let’s do it.” He thought suppressing his feelings would make his life easier. But it didn’t work that way. Instead, the path he was led down resulted in years of confusion about his identity, emotional scarring and more mental health problems than he knew what to do with.
Teens like Shurka—not quite old enough to make informed decisions for themselves, yet old enough to know what peer and parental pressure feels like—are in the middle of a growing movement in both the U.S. and abroad. Where bunk psychology is failing children, legislatures are swooping in to protect them.
Both California and New Jersey have officially banned gay conversion therapy for minors. However, in both states, the laws have yet to see widespread implementation. In New Jersey, the state is facing a lawsuit by parents who want to send their child to a conversion camp; a ruling is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. In California, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law after challenges by conversion therapy advocates. But in February the appeals court agreed to a temporary hold on the ban, so that opponents (led by the Liberty Counsel, the same nonprofit Christian legal-advocacy group representing the opposition in New Jersey) could bring their challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will address the question of whether conversion therapy infringes upon the First Amendment’s free speech clause.
In the meantime, legislation banning conversion therapy for minors has been introduced in several other states. In Washington, a bill has already passed in the House by a 94-4 vote and awaits approval by the state Senate. A similar bill was introduced earlier this year in both houses of the New York state Legislature, where it still awaits a vote. And lawmakers have announced they will be pushing anti-conversion-therapy laws in Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Similar changes are afoot in the U.K. Despite the country’s reputation for progressive health policies, a 2009 survey found that 15 percent of U.K. mental health professionals had tried to help patients change their sexual orientation—many within a National Health Service practice. The findings led to impassioned debate in the House of Commons last year, during which Norman Lamb, the country’s health minister, stated that “the practice is abhorrent” and “has no place in modern society.” Recently, 15 members of the British Parliament petitioned Lamb to enact “tougher measures” to ban conversion therapy. In response, Lamb promised change was on the way. “[Conversion therapy] is based on the completely false premise that there is something wrong with you if you happen to be gay,” he told The Guardian.
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