Trans rights are colliding with gay rights again, and guess which survives? The UK Daily Mail ran a story yesterday headlined, “
Plans for a ban on gay conversion therapy are set to be ditched amid concerns about unintended consequences.”
“Gay conversion therapy” is a hysterical, made-up, liberal fund-raising bogeyman. Woke donors have been taught that dark Christian conservatives run covert camps deep in the forest where kidnapped gay teenagers are waterboarded and brainwashed, violently transforming them into self-loathing heterosexuals, or something.
It’s sort of like a liberal version of the MK-Ultra conspiracy theory, except with less evidence.
The funniest part of their theory is that liberals
also believe that gay sexual preferences are immutable biological characteristics than cannot possibly be changed. Except by Christian conservatives, apparently. That inherent contradiction is also the rationale for their suspicion and disgust: they say nobody should even
try to change an immutable characteristic like an atypical sexual preference.
You see,
sexual preference is not like your
gender, for instance, which you can easily change by just amputating all your sex organs and taking powerful hormones for the rest of your life. But you
can’t change sexual preference, no way, no how.
Anyway, the hysteria over “gay conversion therapy” fully blossomed, as these things always do, into woke censorship in the form of angry accusations the instant anyone questions whether sexual preference is an immutable characteristic or not.
You’re trying to convert gay people! Fascist!
So starting with Boris Johnson, the UK government has long promised the British people a law to “ban” such odious conversion practices, to protect delicate gay folks from being exposed to any alternative ideas, by outlawing things like gentle spiritual counseling aimed at helping someone figure out whether their sexual preference is something they actually
want or whether it might really be a harmful, tragic artifact left over from some childhood trauma.
Conversion therapy has been a hot topic lately, albeit somewhat under the radar. For example, back in July Michigan banned “gay conversion therapy,” joining 21 other blue states:
Suicide! Again. Suddenly, liberals have discovered kids are killing themselves in droves over their sex choices, which they previously didn’t even know about until they were older. Even with those high stakes, Michigan’s law was not quite as fulsome as proponents would have you believe. Excluding the enforcement language, Michigan’s new anti-ban law is only one short sentence:
A mental health professional shall not engage in conversion therapy with a minor.
So first of all … were Michigan’s “mental health professionals” driving lots of kids into suicide or something? Was that the problem Michigan’s democrats just fixed? Anyway. Obviously, the law doesn’t ban secret, deep-woods religious conversion camps. Or even the “conversion” of adults.
One suspects that the Constitution’s protection of religious liberties and free speech had a lot to do with them leaving the church completely out of it. And, even boiled down to that one line, Michigan’s new law remains susceptible to a First Amendment challenge, in my view. But that’s for another post.
Back to the Mail article. The news was the UK has now chucked its effort to enact a national ‘conversion’ ban right into the bin. The problem was, unlike Michigan, Britain was shooting for the Full Monte; they wanted to outlaw
all conversations about people’s atypical lifestyle choices. But they just couldn’t figure out how to word the law without also roping in, get this,
gender conversations.
Some ministers are said to be concerned that the ban could have 'unintended consequences' for parents and teachers dealing with trans children.
In other words, the pro-gay contingent crashed right into the pro-trans contingent: they worried that all the new “affirming” conversations with kids could be prosecuted as “conversion” under a broadly-defined law. Of course, most officials expressed it the opposing way, claiming they didn’t want to punish parents who question their child’s sudden new gender “decision.”
Bottom line, this is progress. Apart from some leftover virtue-signaling, so-called “gay conversion bans” seem to have run their course, now eclipsed by the faltering trans debate.
Lost F35 fighter updates; two on-stage SADS and two SADS from the same show; breast milk study finds mRNA all over; Britain shutters gay conversion ban plans; Vivek spars with Andrea Mitchell; more.
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