Ex Gay Therapy in CA. Running Scared
It's been a good few weeks to be gay in America. We went four for four at the ballot box this month, legalizing gay marriage in three states and blocking a homophobic constitutional amendment in another. Gays can now marry in nine states plus Washington, DC, and seven more states look promising.
Just as significantly, in New York last month, the second circuit court of appeals became the latest tribunal to rule against the Defense of Marriage Act, the law denying federal benefits to married gay couples. And it did so in sweeping fashion: the court's chief judge, a Federalist Society member appointed by the first President Bush, wrote that the constitution's equal protection clause applies to gay people, something the US supreme court has never yet held. If the justices in Washington do the same as the judges in New York, the repercussions will be massive.
And this September, California became the first state in the nation to outlaw "conversion therapy" – basically, trying to make gay people straight – for children and teenagers. Jerry Brown, the governor, calls ex-gay therapy "quackery", but it's actually worse than that. The American Psychological Association, in a 2009 report, found that not only does conversion therapy have no effect on a patient's sexual orientation, but it can also lead to depression, if not suicide. And while it's harmful enough for adults, for more vulnerable teenagers the inculcation of inferiority and sinfulness that conversion therapy relies on can have lifelong effects.
Of all these victories, the prohibition of ex-gay therapy may be the sweetest. California's new law is quite literally a life-saver, and several other states, notably New Jersey, are working on similar statutes. And at a moment when the mainstream equality movement seems to care only about a privileged subset of gays, California has stepped in to protect those who are truly powerless.
There's been a predictable backlash. On Monday, an organization called Liberty Counsel, a Christian advocacy group that's tight with the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent the act from going into effect on 1 January. Liberty Counsel is arguing on behalf of several organizations, including the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality – which you might remember as the anti-gay organization whose avowedly straight leader flew all around Europe with a rentboy, and then claimed that the hooker was there to carry his luggage.
The anti-gay crowd is calling California's law "an astounding violation of the right to free speech and religious liberty". Which is a revealing freak-out. Not too long ago, homophobes would insist that gay people were biological deviants, and that science and psychology were on their side. But the evidence that homosexuality is a normal and unalterable part of human life has become so overwhelming, so incontestable, that anti-gay advocates have been reduced to arguing from free speech grounds. Hence, Liberty Counsel complains that California is preventing people from receiving "information that aligns with their values" – and if that information is inaccurate or even damaging to a young person's health, so be it.
You can only conclude that the anti-gay right is fighting a few last battles but knows it has lost the war. Still, gay blogs and buzz-chasing soft news sites love these homophobes, and the more outrageous the rhetoric, the more hits they rack up. Some pastor recently had a small viral hit when he claimed that if you want to defeat your gay demons, an exorcism might do the trick.
It's best, I find, not to get too worked up about these wingnuts, especially now that their influence had waned so thoroughly. When a pressure group equates gays to the convicted child-rapist Jerry Sandusky, as the Liberty Counsel did when filing its suit, the best response is a pitying silence.
This autumn's victories have been delightful, but gay people face major struggles in the years to come – and the struggles are not with the hard right, but with the institutions of society and, indeed, with ourselves. We are at a crossroads. The gay rights movement is calcifying into a mere marriage equality movement, while far too many gays and lesbians still face inequities and discrimination. So, wrestling with the real problems that gay people still face – and passing laws like California's to remedy them – is a far better use of our time and effort than lodging our disgust with these also-rans.
We have momentum; what we need is direction. Because it is the homophobes, not we, who are on the back foot, and outrage is no longer needed. We'd be far more sensible if we stayed focused on our work, and treated them like the losers they are.
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