From The Guardian UK: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/21/new-jersey-outlaw-gay-conversion-therapy
It’s unconscionable that parents can allow their children to die or force them to convert because of extreme religious beliefs
Jill Filipovic
theguardian.com, Wednesday 21 August 2013
As of this week, gay conversion therapy is outlawed in the state of New Jersey. Kids who are either gay or suspected of being gay cannot be forced by their parents to endure homophobic corrective therapy, which assemblyman and bill sponsor Tim Eustice correctly calls “an insidious form of child abuse”.
Not only does conversion therapy fail to actually “convert” gay kids into straight ones, but, according to the American Psychological Association (which disavows the practice), it often leaves lasting scars, leading to mental health issues and substance abuse. California is the only other state in the nation that has attempted to ban conversion therapy, but that ban is caught up in ongoing legal battles.
Conversion therapists argue that their practice helps young people who are struggling with their sexuality, and that choosing the therapy is a First Amendment issue. Outlawing conversion therapy, they say, is one step on the “slippery slope of government infringing upon the First Amendment rights of counselors to provide, and patients to receive, counseling consistent with their religious beliefs”.
Religious freedom is a constitutional right. But it’s not the only one. Too often, the religious “freedom” of a parent comes at the expense of their children‘s basic human rights and rights to equal protection under the law. Kids are not simply extensions of their parents. They are individual people, and while they should be guided and directed and for the most part under the legal authority of their parents, their own rights to personal safety, health care and freedom from abuse should not be subsumed in some bizarro-world version of religious liberty.
Parents in the United States have remarkable latitude when it comes to determining how they will raise their children. There’s often good reason behind that: The state doesn’t actually know what’s best for every family, and a diversity of individuals are going to have a diversity of needs. The overwhelming majority of parents want what’s best for their kids and are in the best position to assess their own child’s interests. And state interference with parenting practices has historically targeted minority groups and often violated the rights of children. Generations of Native American youth, for example, were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools, often run by churches, which were explicitly purposed to impart Christian European-American ideals onto the students and strip them of their heritage and traditions. The “education” of these children went on for centuries, and was part of a broader concerted effort to culturally annihilate Native Americans. Missionaries played a handy role, and the US government also got on board, opening schools of its own and funding the cultural genocide.
Continue reading at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/21/new-jersey-outlaw-gay-conversion-therapy
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