Suppressing Reparative Therapy Is Suppressing Freedom

American Thinker ^ | 11/24/2012 | James M. Arlandson

[SeekAndFind]

I saw the crawler go across the screen on a news broadcast recently, and it said, with an incredulous tone, that "praying away the gay" was still being done. From the context, it was clear the news editor did not think much of it.

Recently, California banned reparative or "conversion" therapy for homosexuality. Signing the bill into law, Gov. Jerry Brown called the therapy "quackery." Lawsuits have been filed.

Neither a counselor nor a lawyer, I can come at this issue only as a straight citizen concerned about freedom. It is not difficult to imagine the following scenarios. You're a registered marriage and family therapist in California. You're counseling a 16-year-old boy who says he's being recruited into the gay lifestyle at high school. (Yes, aggressive recruitment really does happen.) He recently had a bad breakup with a girl. With their ongoing recruitment playing over and over in his mind, he's now confused. Are these feelings natural? You tell him that they are unnatural and that reparative therapy can help him stay straight.

If he's already experimented sexually, you tell him that he can return to heterosexuality. He's not necessarily gay for having experimented. Or if he's had same-sex feelings for a while, you tell him he can be restored to heterosexuality. The youth just needs to get reparative therapy. It will be a long journey, but he can do it, if he's open and willing to change. He's willing, and now you lead him through the therapy.

However, you, as a mental health provider, practicing your beliefs, are breaking the law and could get "disciplined."

[sakic]

The law is a joke and an affront to personal freedom but I have never seen this organized recruitment. I have seen lots of guys try and have sex with women and a few with men.

[kristinn]

It’s been going on in the culture since the 70s. They first went through pop culture(Three’s Company, Soap, destroying Anita Bryant), then the schools (Heather Has Two Mommies), now they are codifying it in law.

[SeekAndFind]

Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus is going to get into lots of trouble if this law becomes the norm nationwide.

Michele and her husband own a Christian counseling practice named Bachmann & Associates.

The clinic is run by her husband, who has a PhD with “a concentration in clinical psychology” from Union Graduate School.

Marcus Bachmann is not a licensed clinical psychologist in Minnesota. The clinic received nearly $30,000 from Minnesota government agencies between 2006 and 2010 in addition to at least $137,000 in federal payments and $24,000 in government grants for counselor training.

When asked about the subject in an interview, Michele indicated that she and her husband had not benefited at taxpayers’ expense, saying that “the money that went to the clinic was actually training money for employees”.

Marcus Bachmann has denied allegations that Bachmann & Associates provides conversion therapy, a controversial psychological treatment repudiated by the American Psychological Association, which attempts to transform homosexuals into heterosexuals.

A former client of Bachmann’s clinic and a hidden camera investigator with the activist group Truth Wins Out have said that therapists at the clinic do engage in such practices, although columnist Mariah Blake of The Nation has suggested the hidden camera investigator may have been intentionally baiting the therapist to say something controversial.

In a subsequent interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune, Marcus Bachmann did not deny that he or other counselors at his clinic used the technique but said they did so only at the request of a client.

[Psycho_Bunny]

This is a law specifically designed to create empty lives.

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

Therapy itself - even the Reparative type designed to deprogram homosexuals - is prima facia BS. Understand where it comes from and what it is: a State Sanctioned bludgeon which opens the door to psychiatric labeling, drugs, and the illegal deprivation of the Mark’s entire Bill of Rights.

Mental Health?
http://psychquotes.com/

“In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness.”

Mental Health Drugs: Antidepressants:
http://ssristories.com/index.php

And the knowledge base underlying that treatment?

Carl Jung is their current Guru.

http://home.earthlink.net/~thetabus/eugenics/eutt-6.htm

“1939 An interview with psychiatrist Carl Jung is published in Hearst’s International- Cosmopolitan. In it, he calls Mussolini a man of style and good taste who was “warm and human.” About Hitler, he says, “There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nuremberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler’s is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious and unreasonable...So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a form of a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.”

This anti-semitic Hitler worshipper, and his science, were researching seances.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3847/the_occult_world_of_cg_jung.html

Want to know who Freud really was? English Prof. Frederick Crews is the go to guy.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=96726&sectioncode=26

How about Alfred Adler?

http://www.lifecourseinstitute.com/Adler.htm

These 3 scumbags are the founders of the art of Depth Psychology, upon which all the other subdivisions of psych/mental health are based or derived.

[SeekAndFind]

Let’s assume that it is BS.

Here’s an even more fundamental question -— Should people in a society based on liberty be allowed to believe and pay for foolish things? Or should we require laws PREVENTING them from paying for what lawmakers deem are foolish?

What if enough lawmakers believe that believing that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross redeems you from your sins is foolish?

Let’s chew upon that for a moment...

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

But it’s for the betterment of people who’ve been deceived into thinking that they’re homosexuals, it’s actually helping them. We are talking the Bill of Rights here. If we make exceptions for it when it suits our purposes, then we also make exceptions for it when it works Against our purposes.

Homosexuality is Not an Official Psychiatric Illness
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313144952AACXBBj

If it’s Normal according to Psychiatry’s Billing Experts, charging Medicare or Medicaid one Dime to even recognize it as a stand alone problem or any other issues arising from it is Health Care Fraud.

And Anyone Billing the Treasury to counsel it, treat it, whatever it, going Either way, [it’s Not a sickness/it Is a sickness] deserves to be arrested and prosecuted for Health Care Fraud.

Homosexuals are either Crazy, or Off the Public Dime for Counseling, One or the Other.

[SeekAndFind]

People should realize We’re not talking COERCION here.

Nobody is coercing these people to undergo reperative therapy, they go of their own volition.

If it doesn’t work, eventually people will realize it and the business will close.

If we ban this, we should also ban everything we deem are scams — fortune telling, seances, even scientology....

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

“Should people in a society based on liberty be allowed to believe and pay for foolish things?”

This is the knowledge base upon which Therapy is founded. There isn’t a Different knowledge base of Therapy which is intended for Christians and Conservatives. Therapy, as it were, is a manifestation of Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions”

http://psychquotes.com/

Psychiatry’s Views on Religion

“Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.”
Sigmund Freud, defining spiritual belief

“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
Sigmund Freud

“The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such...”
Sigmund Freud

“Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.”
Sigmund Freud

“In short, the nature of the hallucinations of Jesus, as they are described in the orthodox Gospels, permits us to conclude that the founder of the Christian religion was afflicted with religious paranoia.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Charles Binet-Sangle: La Folie de Jesus (The Madness of Jesus), 1910

“…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern psychiatric treatments.”
William Sargant, British psychiatrist, 1974

“No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started… It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind.”
John B. Watson, behavioral psychologist

“This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.”
John B. Watson, behavioral psychologist

“I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion”
Sigmund Freud

“The soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain. Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them.”
Statement delivered at the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard University

“…humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith.” “Traditional moral codes… fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow…” “Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful… The total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body.”
The Humanist Manifesto 2, 1973

“All neurotics seek the religious”
Psychologist Carl Jung

“It should be recognized that an acceptance of the mental health viewpoint… carries an obligation to examine critically some of the teaching of the churches in the light of present-day insight into what seems to be essential to wholesome personality development and into what is now known to be detrimental to the growing personality of the child.”
Psychiatrist at World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH) Conference

“Pastoral psychology understands itself as a help for the communities in view of ‘group dynamic’ proceedings –e.g., the processes of rivalization, or the search for scapegoats, harmonization or shifting guilt, which… can determine life in a community so strongly that the succession of Jesus Christ is no longer paid heed”
The German Association for Pastoral Psychology Magazine – Ways To Man

“What is the relationship between wholeness and holiness?… What does personal responsibility mean in the light of the findings or psychoanalysis? Do the words right and wrong, have any further usefulness in the light of our new knowledge of compulsive behavior patterns? I believe it’s one of the tragedies of Christianity that it has got itself all mixed up with morality…”
Canon Sydney Evans, National Association for Mental Health, 1967

“The word soul has lost its meaning and even its plausibility…. Faith, hope and love can no longer be seen simply as virtues or graces; they are processes in flesh and blood… (the clergyman) will find that whether he wants it or not, he is also a front-line mental health worker or he will be so regarded by the specialists in mental health. It is on the pastoral role and the tasks of shepherding that the psychological disciples have the greatest impact in theological work.”
Paul Pruyser, psychologist, author: “The Seamy Side of Current Religious Beliefs”

“In recent years pastoral counselors have separated from their parishes and emerged as a psychotherapy profession…. This professionalization process includes a shift away from parish-based counseling to counseling centers or medical settings, declining interest in religious practices and convictions, increased interest in psychological practices and theories, the charging of fees, and increased institutional and professional barriers to those individuals perceived as poor counseling clients or unable to pay…. There is also… growing deviation from a religious orientation to a pseudopsychiatric orientation.”
American Journal of Psychiatry, March 1986

“We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.”
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, “Strategic Planning for Mental Health”, June 18, 1940

“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...”
G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health

“The danger is that these psychologies may, to one degree or another, replace Christianity without most people even noticing that any substitution has taken place.”
Christianity Today, 1994

[Flick Lives]

So now in California it’s ok to think you’re gay if you were straight, but it’s not ok to think you’re straight if you’re gay. I guess that makes being gay a lot like Islam; a one way conversion.

[SeekAndFind]

You keep quoting scientific papers when that IS NOT the issue I am driving at.

You might as well show me scientific papers showing why scientology and fortune telling are BS.

Let me repeat — SHOULD PEOPLE IN A FREE SOCIETY BE FREE TO PURSUE AND PAY FOR THINGS THAT ARE FOOLISH?

Should it be the government’s business to disallow people from pursuing such things?

And please, no more scientific journals ... that is not what concerns me.

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

“What if enough lawmakers believe that believing that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross redeems you from your sins is foolish?

Let’s chew upon that for a moment...”

OK. The 1st Amendment prohibits us, through Government, from funding the support of Christianity out of each other’s pockets, but FAR more Importantly, it prohibits anyone, through Govt. from funding the Suppression of Christianity.

2 way street. Hands Off going Both ways.

And there is Nothing Voluntary about Therapy. It is Not Science. It is BS, and as such it is Fraud. It is a legal impossibility to Volunteer to be Defrauded. It goes Way beyond just being Foolish because there are Legal Consequences attached to it: Deprivation of Civil Rights in perpetuity masquerading as Medical — which it’s Not — help.

Currently our Military is Drowning in psychiatric drugs — Which schlep their way in through Therapy — and the more of that Therapeutic meddling our Military dispenses, the Higher the Suicide Numbers rise.

The Higher the Suicide Numbers, the Greater the Racket Raised by the Sellers of Therapy/mental realignment/Voluntary/Non-Voluntary (because it’s fraud) Intervention becomes.

The drugs are garbage. Everyone in the industry knows it, and lies about it or issues a “No Comment”.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/

http://alert.psychiatricnews.org/2012/06/military-suicides-continue-troubling.html

http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/newsarticle.aspx?articleid=1096602

http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/newsarticle.aspx?articleid=108552

http://www.opednews.com/articles/5/genera_evelyn_p_080122_jury_trials_in_2008_.htm 70% driving impaired

http://www.ssristories.com/show.php?item=3991
suicide, mania

http://alert.psychiatricnews.org/2012/05/facebook-joins-fight-against-military.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-bobrow/military-suicides-stigma-_b_1677798.html

http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/06/08/lagging-indicator/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaWrf8OISlg
John Breeding on youtube

http://psychrights.org/states/Texas/100209JBreedingLtr2TxLegislature.pdf
Breeding Letter

http://themilitarysuicidereport.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/militarys-rising-psychiatric-drug-prescriptions-may-be-linked-to-suicides-homicides/

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-06-07/military-troops-suicide/55453990/1
w/video

http://www.frontiersin.org/Evolutionary_Psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00117/full
Antidepressants do more harm than good

http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/68229
tardive dysphoria/chronic ssri use

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect
rebound effect

http://truthman30.wordpress.com/
check his blogroll

http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychotics/neuroleptic-brain-damage
Brain Damage neuroleptics

http://breggin.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=53&dir=DESC&order=date&Itemid=37&limit=10&limitstart=40
Peter Breggin

Brain damage, dementia and persistent cognitive dysfunction associated with neuroleptics (1990)
01/01/1990
“Brain damage, dementia and persistent cognitive dysfunction associated with neuroleptics: Evidence, Etiology, Implications.”

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

“SHOULD PEOPLE IN A FREE SOCIETY BE FREE TO PURSUE AND PAY FOR THINGS THAT ARE FOOLISH?”

Yes. And I haven’t raised scientology or fortune telling. And I’m not opposed to people voluntarily pursuing Foolishness on their own dime at all. However: The Issue is not Foolishness.

The Issue is Fraud being peddled in trade for Civil Rights.

It is not only BS, It’s Illegal.

http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/18C13.txt

See Sections 241 & 242

[SeekAndFind]

RE: And there is Nothing Voluntary about Therapy. It is Not Science. It is BS, and as such it is Fraud.

Not voluntary? Hey, I know of gays who are not happy with their current state who ask an organization called NARTH to help them.

See here: http://narth.com/

THEY GO VOLUNTARILY. THEY WANT IT.

Regardless or not whether you believe it is a fraud, these people WANT IT.

A free society should now prevent them from voluntarily doing so?

In other words, you believe that government should decide for people what is and isn’t foolish?

As I said, if reparative therapy is a fraud, PEOPLE WHO VOLUNTARILY (EMPHASIS) GO THROUGH IT, WILL SOON REALIZE IT AND IT WILL SOON BECOME OBSOLETE.

You believe that bureaucrats should decide that for us instead of us deciding it for ourselves?

WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE?

[SeekAndFind]

RE: The Issue is Fraud being peddled in trade for Civil Rights.

On this issue we part ways. Thee are thousands upon thousands of people who believe that such therapies helped them.

See here: http://pfox.org/default.html

You might believe that it does not and they are only fooling themselves, that’s OK with me.

We can disagree on an issue like this.

But I’ll be darned if I allow some bureaucrat from passing a law preventing such people from pursuing the help they THINK they need ( even if it does not help them ).

You also said you have not raised scientology or fortune telling... WHY NOT? Same principle applies -— FRAUD.

If you are for the law criminalizing one, why not the other? Where’s the consistency in your thinking?

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

The line has already been drawn. Read the Federal Civil Rights Statutes.

I have No trouble with people who’ve been hoodwinked into thinking that they’re gay seeking a way out of it: NONE.

My point is that we as a nation have unknowingly invited a poisonous viper into our midst under the erroneous assumption that it is harmless. It is no more simply harmless through being Foolish — to saying nothing of it being illegal — than as PJ O’Rourke put it, “Giving Whiskey and Car Keys to Teen Age Boys”.

Therapy is a gateway which opens onto a road many have never glimpsed. But those who Have carry scars, psychological damage, and tales of physical violence perpetrated against them which rival a Nightmare on Elm Street movie.

http://www.mindfreedom.org/

Robert Whitaker is a journalist whose spent the last 25 years covering the mental health field. This is excerpted from his latest book, Anatomy of an Epidemic.

http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452425/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353777508&sr=8-1&keywords=robert+whitaker

Pg 245
The Disability Numbers

There are no good studies yet on the percentage of “early onset” bipolar patients when they reach adulthood, end up on the SSI and SSDI disability rolls. However, the astonishing jump in the number of “severely mentally ill” children receiving SSI speaks volumes about the havoc that is being wreaked. There were 16,200 Psychiatrically disabled youth under 18 years old on the SSI rolls in 1987, and they comprised less than 6 percent of the total number of disabled children. Twenty years later, there were 561,569 disabled mentally ill children on the SSI rolls, and they comprised 50 percent of the total. This epidemic is even hitting preschool children. The prescribing of psychotropic drugs to two-year-olds and three-year-olds began to become more commonplace about a decade ago, and sure enough, the number of severely mentally ill children under 6 years of age receiving SSI has tripled since then, rising from 22,453 in 2000 to 65,928 in 2007 (98)

Moreover, the SSI numbers only begin to hint at the scope of the harm being done. Everywhere there is evidence of a worsening of the mental health of children and teenagers. From 1995 to 1999, psychiatric-related Emergency Room visits by children increased 59 percent. (99)

The deteriorating mental health of the nation’s children, declared U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2001, constituted a “health crisis.” (100) Next, colleges were suddenly wondering why so many of their students were suffering manic episodes or behaving in disturbed ways; a 2007 survey discovered that one in six college students had deliberately “cut or burned self” in the prior year. (101) All of this led the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate what was going on, and it reported in 2008 that one in every fifteen young adults, eighteen to twenty-six years old, is now “seriously mentally ill”. There are 680,000 in that age group with bipolar disorder and another 800,000 ill with major depression, and, the GAO noted, this was in fact an undercount of the problem, as it didn’t include young adults who were homeless, incarcerated, or institutionalized.

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a “serious mental illness.” That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness.

98: Social Security Administration, annual statistical reports on the SSI program, 1996-2008, Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement, 1988-1992

99: Pediatric Academic Societies, Pediatric Psychiatric admissions on the rise,” May 16, 2000 press release

100: D. Satcher, Report of Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2001).

101: B. Whitford: “Depression, eating disorders and other mental illnesses are on the rise, Newsweek, August 27, 2008

“A free society should now prevent them from voluntarily doing so?

In other words, you believe that government should decide for people what is and isn’t foolish?”

Foolish isn’t the issue. If Therapy carried no greater risk than the consumer walking away feeling they’d wasted their time and money, I’d be Fine with it.

But in way too many cases, it Doesn’t. The consumer gets shuffled off to a psychiatrist and bamboozled into a nightmare of junk drugs and debilitating labels.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: The line has already been drawn. Read the Federal Civil Rights Statutes.

Heck the line is still being drawn in the case of Obamacare.

Just because a line is drawn doesn’t mean we as a free people can’t fight to have the line erased.

Are we going to give up because some law suppresses our liberty? Obamacare for instance is the law of the land, WHAT FOLLOWS?

That we allow government to further erode our freedoms? They force us to purchase healthcare under penalty of law, we lie down and die?

Same principle applies to this statute on reparative therapy.

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

“Are we going to give up because some law suppresses our liberty? Obamacare for instance is the law of the land, WHAT FOLLOWS?”

SCOTUS got it wrong. ObamaCare is still being contested under numerous headings which will be headed to Court.

Re your comment #8: “We’re not talking COERCION here.”

Yes we are. Fraud is coercion because if the truth were known by Both parties the transaction could Not be consummated without Coercing one of the parties.

When a used car salesman talks you out of your money under the false pretense that he’s selling you a mechanically sound vehicle/equal value for your money, rather than a cripple needing a new motor or transmission, we have Lemon Laws demanding he refund your money.

Do you object to Those laws?

Therapy sells paperwork identifying the consumer as needing the new motor or transmission which Therapy Can NOT provide. Therapy does not, and can not, Legally, Permanently Cure, Anything.

The Defrauded/unknowingly Coerced consumer will later go through all Kinds of Buyer’s Remorse and Hell trying to get rid of that Paperwork because, ….. that Paperwork -— without which the Therapist can Not submit a Bill for services rendered to the consumer’s Insurer/Medicare/Medicaid -— will Cause the consumer Legal Problems.

“If we ban this, we should also ban everything we deem are scams — fortune telling, seances, even scientology....”

Fortune Tellers:

Many localities have Gypsy Laws addressing fortune tellers who want to just “Hold the Money”.

Do you object to Those laws?

Therapy Illegally Holds the consumer’s Civil Rights in perpetuity, and then the Courts allow the Therapeutic scumbags to testify as if their Therapeutic nonsense were a matter of established Science, which it is Anything but.

Scientologists:

When people who identify as Scientologists commit acts of Theft and/or Violence, we have laws to prosecute them under. So long as Scientology sticks to its Dianetics and preachiness, (even including Hubbard’s idiotic Operating Thetans) it’s nobody’s business but their own, BECAUSE, they are Not Violating US Civil Rights Statutes in the commission of Federally prohibited Health Care Fraud.

YOUR Comment at #10:

“You keep quoting scientific papers when that IS NOT the issue I am driving at.”

“And please, no more scientific journals ... that is not what concerns me.”

Up to That Point in our exchange not a Single link or reference of mine was a Scientific paper.

What your ‘not wanting to concern yourself with my non-existent scientific journals’ (up to that point) tells me, is that you don’t want Facts entered into the discussion which would contradict your FEELINGS on the subject.

Your comment #13

“Not voluntary? Hey, I know of gays who are not happy with their current state who ask an organization called NARTH to help them.
See here: http://narth.com/
THEY GO VOLUNTARILY. THEY WANT IT.”

Volunteering to be Defrauded is an oxymoron.

You know OF gays. Do you Personally know any of them, or have you only read/heard about them?

I ask because I Do know people who’ve been through Therapy, and the entire mental realignment system. I’ve made it my business to find them and get to know them. And I’ve yet to meet any who’d characterize what was perpetrated on them as Voluntary in any way, shape, or form.

“As I said, if reparative therapy is a fraud, PEOPLE WHO VOLUNTARILY (EMPHASIS) GO THROUGH IT, WILL SOON REALIZE IT AND IT WILL SOON BECOME OBSOLETE.”

The Same argument can be applied to fortune telling and scientology.

However, in contradistinction what will Not become Obsolete with Therapy is the Paperwork Stench that Therapy covers its consumers in. Without considerable time and expense in Court challenges which are not guaranteed to succeed, cleaning Therapy out of their lives will Never become “Obsolete” for consumers of Therapy.

No matter How Foolish fortune telling and scientology both appear to people who reject them as scams, yet, a certain proportion of people still indulge in them and will for some time to come. And that is Why we allow Government to pass Laws. Any pursuit no matter How seemingly Foolish it appears is either Legal, or it is Not.

Fortune Tellers and Scientologists are Not (with rare exceptions) Violating Civil Rights and Health Care Fraud Statutes. Therapists do nothing But Violate Both. If you find those Statutes an inconvenience to your purposes (and Your desire to help people who’ve been defrauded into believing they are gay IS a noble motive: I’m not disputing that) then repeal or change those Statutes. The ends justify the means because Our motives are noble whereas Theirs are not is the road to ruin.

We got ObamaCare because Fraud like Therapy being charged to the public made Health Care so expensive that a complete Govt. takeover became a much easier sell to the “My FEELINGS tell me it’s the right thing to do so I’ll Ignore the Science of Economics which prove it’s the Wrong thing to do.”

Your comment #14:

“You also said you have not raised scientology or fortune telling... WHY NOT? Same principle applies -— FRAUD.
If you are for the law criminalizing one, why not the other? Where’s the consistency in your thinking?”

You dragged those cats in, Not Me. You’re telling Me that My thinking is inconsistent because Your feelings about fortune tellers and scientology trump Scientific Papers I hadn’t even introduced at that point.

And I said Nothing about supporting any new law criminalizing Reparative Therapy. Although, now that I think about it, Yes, I favor getting rid of Reparative Therapy as a Legal Hook to hang getting rid of the Rest of it on.

But my original argument lies in and Remains enforcing Existing Law which already criminalizes Fraudulent transactions.

Your article has Marcus Bachmann billing the State and Federal Treasury. Should You, I or anyone else have to Pay for some third party’s Therapeutic de-programming so that they will FEEL better about themselves? That’s not only completely unprovided for in our Constitution, but runs counter to everything our Constitution embodies.

Govt. paid for Mind and Mood management, Thought Control in trade for Civil Rights?

Your comment #14:

“But I’ll be darned if I allow some bureaucrat from passing a law preventing such people from pursuing the help they THINK they need ( even if it does not help them ).”

But you’re OK with Marcus Bachmann spending Govt money to change people’s thoughts and feelings in open despite of our Founder’s bedrock laws which insure that we Remain a Free People?

People are welcome to pursue whatever help/happiness they want as far as they wish, but Not at the hidden cost/Fraud of being Screwed out of their Civil Rights and having it paid for out of Other people’s pockets.

Since your FEELINGS trump Science Papers I hadn’t even introduced, I don’t quite know Where to send you next, but perhaps you could read James Madison’s Veto of a Public Works Bill for perspective.

http://www.constitution.org/jm/18170303_veto.htm

If Madison understood that Congress couldn’t buy something as concretely visible and beneficial as canals and public waterways, then How can Govt. buy Thoughts for people on an individual by individual basis?