From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2012/11/28/gay_healers_youre_quacks/?source=newsletter
A groundbreaking case accuses a “healing” organization of fraud. Suddenly, the haters are on the run
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012
It’s really hard to gain ground for acceptance and equality when so many people still think there’s a reverse switch on human sexual orientation. It’s just too helpful to bigots to believe that gay people are somehow misguided, or they’re just being stubborn in their refusal to pair off with an appropriately opposite sex partner. That they can be talked into a whole other identity like it’s a timeshare in Boca.
That’s why it’s significant that earlier this fall, California became the first state to ban gay “conversion” therapy on minors, because, as Gov. Jerry Brown explained, they have “driven young people to depression and suicide… These practices have no basis in science or medicine, and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”
And that’s why what’s unfolding in New Jersey right now represents a similar blow against the absurd – and ridiculously lucrative — industry of “healing” gay men and women. In a groundbreaking suit the Southern Poverty Law Center filed on their behalf Tuesday, four New Jersey men and two of their mothers charged a gay counseling group with deceptive practices under the Consumer Fraud Act. SPLC attorney Samuel Wolfe said Tuesday, “This is the first time that plaintiffs have sought to hold conversion therapists liable in a court of law.”
The target of the suit is Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (known as JONAH), its co-founder Arthur Goldberg and self-proclaimed life coach Alan Downing. JONAH describes itself as “dedicated to educating the world-wide Jewish community about the social, cultural and emotional factors which lead to same-sex attractions … [and working] directly with those struggling with unwanted same-sex sexual attractions.” But as one of the men involved in the suit told the New York Times this week, he went through months of sessions – at $100 a clip – before plunging into depression. “It becomes fraudulent, even cruel,” Michael Ferguson said. “To say that if you really want to change you could — that’s an awful thing to tell somebody.”
But it’s not just the warped premise of the endeavor that’s so problematic for these former clients. It’s what happened when they went there. According to a Reuters report, “The plaintiffs charge that during therapy sessions they were sometimes ordered to remove all of their clothing; in other sessions they were told to beat effigies of their mothers with tennis rackets or were subjected to homosexual slurs … Another JONAH client was instructed to break through a human barricade to retrieve a pair of oranges, drink the juice from them and place them down his pants to symbolize the recovery of his testicles and, by extension, his heterosexuality.”
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2012/11/28/gay_healers_youre_quacks/?source=newsletter
