1./ A thread on what we should do about Conversion Therapy. We know the govt is rushing to present a ban as a rainbow-wrapped gift for next year's LGBTQ+ gobal jamboree. Despite that are there some things we can salvage from its mess of a proposed Bill?👇gov.uk/government/new…
2./ Anything that protects vulnerable Brits from charlatans like this disgusting creep 👇is to be applauded. As President of the Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard promoted "reparative" therapy claiming the Bible says gay sex or gay desire are inherently sinful.
3./ 30 million evangelicals worldwide took Haggard at his word until he admitted he'd been shagging a rent boy for 3 years; often while smoking methamphetamine. Maybe the drugs explains how dumb he appeared when tackled by @RichardDawkins on evolution.
4./ Haggard and other leading evangelicals both in the US and here promoted the work of psychologist James Reker who was a key figure in NARTH, an umbrella organisation pushing the notion being gay was a cureable condition. Guess what happened to him? 👇😂christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/mayweb…
5./ British kids have been sent to the US and pastors have visited here. It'll be great if we can stop these religious nutjobs preying on troubled LGB people. @PaulBrandITV has been doing sterling work exposing home grown sects too. 👇itv.com/news/2018-11-1…
6./ Most people will also agree it shouldn't be possible to profit from exploiting people's confusion and shame about their sexuality. Before his death in 2017, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi made a healthy living doing just that. His legacy lives on. 👇newrepublic.com/article/141294…
7./ When confronted about his treatment of a 13 year old boy whose parents sent their unwilling son to be "treated" by Nicolosi, he argued his approach wasn't about "getting rid of the the gay" but about bringing out the heterosexuality. Yeah right. 🙄👇
8./ Rekers and Nicolosi's work is often cited by the few irregular "practitioners" of conversion therapy in this country and we should obviously make it as difficult as possible for them to offer their homophobic voodoo. Criminalise it? Sure. bbc.co.uk/news/stories-4…
9./ @ALLIANCELGB has been exposing the pernicious influence of right wing evangelicals in Uganda and elsewhere. The govt needs to ensure that no British aid money unintentionally ends up funding conversion therapy in hospitals in the likes of Uganda. 👇theguardian.com/global-develop…
10./ For atheists like me there's a problem tho with policing religion. As far as I'm concerned ALL religion is harmful. Jayne Ozanne and her ilk effectively want the govt to stipulate different categories of religious harm. But surely there are no good exorcisms? Ban them all?
11./ If we only ban prayers or exorcisms that attempt to change your sexuality doesn't that imply that all the other laying on of hands, group prayers, exorcisms, speaking in tongues, rituals, money grubbing, tithing and who knows what else are somehow harmless. They're not.
12./ If we pass a law saying adults cannot consent to having a gay demon exorcised aren't we saying we think they can consent to exorcisms of non gay demons? We've to ban prayers that aim to change your sexuality but leave prayers that try to make you rich or live forever? Nah.
13./Promoters of religious belief like Ozanne or Stonewall's Ruth Hunt (who claimed to hear the voice of Jesus on a dance floor) want US to help police their faiths. It's not our job to police -and thereby validate- your delusions. Hitchens summed up my view.👇
14./ So there ARE things to welcome in the proposed Bill. It'll help cripple ghastly US evangelicals and their wannabes here yet it resists the minefield of policing prayer. There is tho a flaw in the govt's approach: it bolts together sexual orientation and gender Identity.
15./ The UK is the most secular nation in the world. This ludicrous pantomime of Manson, Beiber and Ye praying in their wellies could never happen here.👇But belief in gender identity is every bit as irrational and silly and this Bill will enshrine it in law for the first time.👇
16./ There are many reasons to decouple sexual orientation in the proposed bill from gender identity. But the strongest argument is that there's vastly more conversion of young LGB people going on in Gender Identity clinics than there is in churches or anywhere else.
17./ The proposed Bill will make it harder for clinicians to resist the rush to affirmation and medicalisation of young gays. Ironically, even the most disgusting evangelical homophobes didn't suggest castrating young gay men or sterilising lesbians and removing their breasts.
18./ That's why the Bill has been embraced by puberty blocker pushers and the self-hating fools who argue gay should mean same-gender attracted not same-sex even though that erases gays altogether and consigns us to history in a way the late Larry Kramer would have despised. 👇
19./ So what's our justification for demanding gender identity and sexual orientation be decoupled and two different bills introduced instead? For one thing, it's the appalling inadequacy of the research the govt commissioned in support of its Bill. 👇gov.uk/government/pub…
20./ Forget for a moment the public display of unashamed bias shown by Chief Researcher @DrAdamJowett in which he misrepresents both myself and @ALLIANCELGB. More worryingly, he imputes views to the victims of Conversion Therapy he interviewed which he can't possibly know.👇 
21./ Forget too Adam's endorsements of tweets that rubbish a BBC article on the sexual harassment of lesbians. It was slammed by Owen Jones etc for citing a self-selecting survey of 80 lesbians even though Adam's study is an....err.. self-selecting survey of just 30 people.👇
22./ How many trans people do you think this less than massive study interviewed to arrive at its pompously authoritative conclusions on so-called gender identity "conversion therapy"? Unbelievably, the govt is proposing to legislate based on interviews of just SIX people.👇
23./ To be precise the govt's study interviewed 6 trans OR non binary people (non binary is never defined) THREE of whom experienced a mix of sexual orientation AND gender identity conversion therapy. In the last 20 years. It isn't so much evidence as a pub crawl.
24./ There is therefore a perfectly legitimate argument for asking the govt to delay the gender identity part of its Bill not just to find proper independent researchers but to find more than 3 people who experienced attempts exclusively to change their gender identity.
25./ Here's the thing @ALLIANCELGB could find you a LOT more than 3 young people who were pushed into a "gender identity" to try to escape their shame at being LGB.If this Bill passes without massive change it won't prevent gay conversion therapy. It will enable and promote it.
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