The Torture of Conversion Therapy Must Be Banned Across the Country

[NeoGreen]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/01/27/the-torture-of-conversion-therapy-must-be-banned-across-the-country-2/

The Torture of “Conversion Therapy” Must Be Banned Across the Country
January 27, 2018 by Hemant Mehta

This is a guest post by Rick Snedeker. He writes at the Apostate Apostle blog.

A Florida man says he was tortured in middle school in the early 2000s during “conversion therapy” to “cure” his homosexuality.

It didn’t work.

Sam Brinton recalled being forced to undergo the deeply traumatic sessions because his devout Southern Baptist missionary parents “wanted to erase my existence as a newly out bisexual,” he wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday in the New York Times. It probably doesn’t need repeating, but fundamentalist Protestants, including Baptists, believe the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a grave sin, as do many other Christians.

For over two years, I sat on a couch and endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor. I was told that my faith community rejected my sexuality; that I was the abomination we had heard about in Sunday school; that I was the only gay person in the world; that it was inevitable I would get H.I.V. and AIDS.

To rid him of the “abomination,” Brinton said he was restrained on a table while the counselor applied ice, searing heat, and electric shocks to his body. While being tormented in these ways, he wrote, he was forced to watch videos of gay men hugging, holding hands and having sex — theoretically using aversion to affect a conversion, akin to making a child smoke a whole bunch of cigarettes to make him sick of ever even seeing another cigarette again.

[AtheistCrusader]

1. Torture is already illegal.

I'd just start prosecuting people nationwide for administering it.

It's fucking torture. Pure and simple.