Gay ‘Conversion Therapy’ Faces Test in Courts

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: November 27, 2012 

(c) 2012, The New York Times

Gay “conversion therapy,” which claims to help men overcome unwanted same-sex attractions but has been widely attacked as unscientific and harmful, is facing its first tests in the courtroom.

“Saying the abuse made you gay is terrible. Once I accepted that I was gay, I was able to focus on the more serious problem of a history of sex abuse.” 

“I was encouraged to develop anger and rage toward my parents. The notion that your parents caused this is a horrible lie.” 

In New Jersey on Tuesday, four gay men who tried the therapy filed a civil suit against a prominent counseling group, charging it with deceptive practices under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act. 

The former clients said they were emotionally scarred by false promises of inner transformation and humiliating techniques that included stripping naked in front of the counselor and beating effigies of their mothers. They paid thousands of dollars in fees over time, they said, only to be told that the lack of change in their sexual feelings was their own fault. 

In California, so-called ex-gay therapists have gone to court to argue for the other side. They are seeking to block a new state law, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September and celebrated as a milestone by advocates for gay rights, that bans conversion therapy for minors. 

In Sacramento on Friday, a federal judge will hear the first of two legal challenges brought by conservative law groups claiming that the ban is an unconstitutional infringement on speech, religion and privacy. 

Since the 1970s, when mainstream mental health associations stopped branding homosexuality as a disorder, a small network of renegade therapists, conservative religious leaders and self-identified “life coaches” has continued to argue that it is not inborn, but an aberration rooted in childhood trauma. Homosexuality is caused, these therapists say, by a stifling of normal masculine development, often by distant fathers and overbearing mothers or by early sexual abuse. 

An industry of “reparative therapy” clinics and men's weekend retreats has drawn thousands of teenagers and adults who hope to rid themselves of homosexual urges, whether because of religious beliefs or family pressures. 

But leading scientific and medical groups say that the theories of sexuality are unfounded and that there is no evidence that core sexual urges can be changed. They also warn that the therapy can, in the words of the American Psychiatric Association, cause “depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior” and “reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient.” 

Those conclusions will be at the center of the coming legal fights in the state and federal courts.

In the spotlight in New Jersey are a counseling center called Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, or Jonah; its co-founder Arthur Goldberg; and an affiliated “life coach,” Alan Downing. 

Mr. Goldberg helped found Jonah in 1999, after he finished serving a prison sentence and probation for financial fraud he committed in the 1980s. The group describes itself as “dedicated to educating the worldwide Jewish community about the social, cultural and emotional factors that lead to same-sex attractions,” and says it “works directly with those struggling with unwanted same-sex attractions,” including non-Jews. 

While many Orthodox Jews consider homosexual relations to be a violation of divine law, Mr. Goldberg’s group has no official standing within Judaism, and many Jews accept homosexuality.

Neither Mr. Goldberg nor Mr. Downing is licensed as a therapist, so they are not subject to censure by professional associations. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a rights group based in Montgomery, Ala., is bringing the suit on behalf of four former patients and two of their mothers, who say they paid thousands of dollars not only for useless therapy for their sons but also for more counseling to undo the damage. 

“The defendants peddled anti-gay pseudoscience, defaming gay people as loathsome and deranged,” said Sam Wolfe, a lawyer with the group. 

The suit, filed in Superior Court in Hudson County, calls for monetary compensation and for a shutdown of Jonah. 

Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Downing did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.

  One former patient in the suit, Michael Ferguson, 30, who is now a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of Utah, sought help from Jonah in 2008. He tried to battle his homosexuality, he said, when he was a practicing Mormon who believed that only those in a heterosexual marriage could achieve eternal bliss.

Mr. Ferguson attended a retreat called Journey Into Manhood, where he shared what he called his “dark secret” with 40 other men. To be accepted among men who were also struggling with homosexuality was euphoric, he said, but that temporary high was not the promised first step toward becoming heterosexual.

After months of $100 therapy sessions with Mr. Downing at Jonah’s offices in Jersey City, and after suffering from depression that led him to see a licensed psychotherapist elsewhere, Mr. Ferguson said, he realized that he was not changing. 

“It becomes fraudulent, even cruel,” he said in an interview. “To say that if you really want to change you could — that’s an awful thing to tell somebody.” 

“I was encouraged to develop anger and rage toward my parents,” he added. “The notion that your parents caused this is a horrible lie. They ask you to blame your mother for being loving and wonderful.”

Another former patient in the suit, Chaim Levin, 23, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn where, he said, being gay seemed unthinkable. 

Referred to Jonah by a rabbi when he was 18, Mr. Levin began attending weekend retreats at $650 each. For a year and a half, he had weekly private sessions with Mr. Downing as well as weekly group sessions.

He quit, he said, after Mr. Downing had him remove his clothes and touch himself, saying it would help him reconnect with his masculinity. Mr. Goldberg has defended Mr. Downing’s methods as sometimes appropriate for men dealing with body image problems. 

But Mr. Levin called the episode “degrading and humiliating.” 

Mr. Levin said that he was sexually abused by a relative between the ages of 6 and 10 and that Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Downing blamed the abuse for his homosexual attractions. “Saying the abuse made you gay is terrible,” Mr. Levin said. “Once I accepted that I was gay, I was able to focus on the more serious problem of a history of sex abuse.” 

Many of the same issues surrounding conversion therapy will be argued before federal judges in California as therapists, some represented by Liberty Counsel and others by the Pacific Justice Institute, seek to prevent the state ban from taking effect in January. 

Responding to the accusations of constitutional violations, a brief by the California attorney general’s office cited the extensive professional literature that discredits conversion therapy and said the new law barred harmful conduct but not speech or religion. Since the ban applies only to licensed therapists, religious counselors will not be affected. 

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional expert and dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, said, “The law is clear that the government can prohibit health care practices that are harmful or ineffective.”

If the court accepts the scientific evaluation put forward by the state, he said, “the government is likely to prevail in the end.”

Bloggers Comments: This article I posted here was in response to a multiple court cases now coming to the court room dealing with reparative therapies. I am always amazed at how people on the religious right can think that I decided one day to wake up and choose to be a member of one of the most hated minorities on the planet. It just totally blows my mind when they say that God hates me because of who I am. How do they really know God's thoughts on the matter. It is not really mentioned in the bible in the way these people would want us to believe. And on top of all this, they claim that they can "change" a person back to being heterosexual as if the person ever started out that way. I think Governor Brown's law in California protecting teenage gays and lesbians in not a violation of the Constitution. Those are just my opinions. Nobody elses.

Rev. Gary Meier, Gay Catholic Priest, Comes Out To An Uncertain Future

Posted: 05/29/2013 1:59 pm EDT
(c) 2013 The Huffington Post 

 

Reverend Gary Meir

By Tim Townsend
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS (RNS) On the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the Rev. Gary Meier addressed a congregation of sorts – people who wanted to hear what the Roman Catholic priest had been thinking since, nearly a year ago, he last stood before a flock.

That was last June, when Meier told his parishioners at Saints Teresa and Bridget Church in north St. Louis that he would take a leave of absence “to discern what ministry God was calling me to do.”

Meier, 49, had told his archbishop that he could no longer teach the Catholic church’s stance on homosexuality.

“I have tried over the years to reconcile my silence as a gay priest with that of the Church’s increasingly anti-gay stance. I have been unsuccessful,” Meier writes in his book “Hidden Voices: Reflections of a Gay, Catholic Priest.”

“I was hopeful that I could find a way to have integrity while remaining part of a hierarchy that is anti-gay — I was unsuccessful.”

Meier originally published the book anonymously in 2011. But last week, he republished it with his own name on the cover. He’s now studying for a master’s degree in counseling at UMSL.

Since his public declaration of his sexual orientation, he has received much support on his Facebook page, Meier told his UMSL audience of 80 or so parishioners, priests, former priests and gay-rights activists. One woman, though, scolded him for accusing the church of a “lack of love.”

“That’s not at all what I’m saying,” said Meier. “But I am accusing the church of a lack of tolerance and acceptance.”

In doing so, he is risking his priesthood, while also drawing attention to the church’s stance on homosexuality and gay priests.

Priests in active ministry rarely state their sexual orientation, in part because it’s supposed to be beside the point for men who have taken lifetime vows of celibacy. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America magazine, says there are only two or three priests in the U.S. who have said publicly that they are homosexual.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of celibate gay priests working in the Catholic church today who are beloved by their parishioners,” Martin said. “And there are a number of reasons why almost all of them feel unable to be honest. They are either uncomfortable themselves, or they’re told specifically by their superiors not to talk about it.”

Meier’s decision to go public came, he said, after watching the church’s position harden over the last decade.

“My position is that our teaching is causing harm,” he said in an interview.

The church does not have an official position on gay priests, but bishops in the past have mostly argued that celibacy is celibacy and a good priest is a good priest.

In 2005, the Vatican issued new guidelines barring men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from being considered for the priesthood. In 2009, a Vatican probe of U.S. seminaries that was ordered after the clergy sex abuse scandal concluded that “difficulties” related to “homosexual behavior” have been largely “overcome.”

The catechism of the Roman Catholic Church calls homosexual acts “acts of grave depravity” and “intrinsically disordered” because they “close the sexual act to the gift of life.” But the catechism also says that homosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.”

Speaking at UMSL, he said he believed the bishops’ teaching on homosexuality had been a contributing factor in growing suicide rates among gay teenagers.

“We ought to own some of that,” he said. “The church’s hard line against homosexuality causes that kind of damage.”

The St. Louis Archdiocese did not respond to a request for comment about Meier’s book, but Archbishop Robert Carlson released a statement saying that Meier, “as a man who experiences same-sex attraction,” had “an opportunity to be an example and mentor to Catholics in the archdiocese who struggle with the same feelings.”

“Whether he will seize this opportunity to proclaim the Gospel of Life, which offers the truth about the beauty and sanctity of human sexuality, is entirely within his control,” Carlson said.

Meier, who recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of his ordination, said his sexuality had never been a secret to his family and friends. He said that when he was interviewed during the screening process at Kenrick Seminary, he answered truthfully to the six interviewers (of nine, total) who asked about his sexual orientation and history. When they asked him if he believed he could be celibate, he answered, “I think so.”

The priest now says that his only relationship is “with the people of God,” and that he’s been faithful to his vows. “Celibacy is a rule the church imposes on its clergy. It’s always part of the package,” he said. “This is not about celibacy.”

The question for Meier — the question all his friends and family have been asking since he put his name on the book’s cover — is, “What now?”

Meier said he would like to remain a priest, but he knows that’s unlikely.

“To be a priest and active in ministry, you can’t say what I’m saying,” he said in answer to a question at the UMSL event. “I don’t think I’ll be getting any more paychecks from the archdiocese.”

The Rev. John Beal, a professor of canon law at the Catholic University of America, said that if a priest rejected the idea that “homosexual acts are gravely immoral, that would be a reason they can’t continue in ministry, because they’re dissenting from the teaching of the church.”

If Carlson finds anything in Meier’s book that contradicts church teaching, Meier could be suspended from ministry, and his license to act as a Catholic priest could be removed.

Meier already has, in essence, removed himself from ministry. In an act of solidarity with gay Catholics against the church’s teaching, he has refrained from administering the sacraments since taking a leave of absence. Recently he elected not to celebrate his aunt’s funeral Mass.

In his book, Meier said he had to go public as a matter of personal integrity.

“I see my speaking out as an act of love toward a community which was born of God’s radical inclusivity,” he wrote.

11-Year-Old vs. Anti-Gay Politician

Eleven-year-old Marcel has had enough of the anti-gay politicians in his state. The queer youngster from Tennessee wrote an op-ed for Huffington Post railing against John Ragan, a  state house representative. He is the co-sponsor of a bill requiring teachers to out gay students to parents.

“John Ragan’s Classroom Protection Act will do harm to LGBT students across the state,” Marcel writes. “It promotes a system that does not educate students about gays, because no one but counselors, nurses and principals can talk about being gay. This also means that if a student were to talk to a teacher about being bullied because he or she is gay or possibly gay, the teacher would be required to say something like, "That subject is inappropriate for your age group."’ He wonders how such a politician can be considered an advocate for school children. About a year ago a nonprofit called StudentsFirst named Ragan a ‘reformer of the year.’

“I am against a man receiving an award for trying to destroy all safe places for LGBT students,” Marcel maintains. “John Ragan is receiving his honor from StudentsFirst, whose actions are contrary to their name.”  Marcel is sponsoring a petition asking StudentsFirst to withdraw the award.

This academic year Marcel was taught at home due to the severe bullying he sustained the year before. “During my first year in middle school, I experienced severe bullying,” the middle-schooler writes. “I was called terrible names that were quite hurtful. At that time, I had just realized that I’m gay, and the bullies used the word "gay" as an insult. This made me feel like being gay was horrible, but my parents told me otherwise. Their support was tremendous. But as powerful as their love was, it couldn’t fight off all the bullying.”

Bloggers Comments: This was orginally published in the Huffington Post  website. I have left the links in tact if you want to go to the petition or the original posting. Please consider signing the petition. It just amazes me that it takes an 11 year old gay boy to bring this to the forefront. And a child shall lead us....