If doctors are allowed to surgically change the bodies of people who want to live as the opposite sex, shouldn’t therapists be allowed to help change the minds of people who want to be attracted to the opposite sex? Not according to the homosexual lobby, the powerful Southern Poverty Law Center, and a likeminded judge, they’re not.
A New Jersey-based organization called JONAH, “Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing,” has found this out the hard way. JONAH offers what is known as “reparative therapy,” which seeks to help people struggling with unwanted feelings of same-sex attraction (SSA). Unfortunately for people with unwanted SSA, however, those providing such services are unwanted by the homosexual lobby. And this fact was punctuated June 25 — a day before the Supreme Court’s infamous faux-marriage ruling — when a jury found that JONAH had supposedly violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.
JONAH’s mission statement makes clear that theirs is a service only for those who genuinely want to experience normal sexual desire and also states, “Through psychological and spiritual counseling, peer support, and self-empowerment, JONAH seeks to reunify families, to heal the wounds surrounding homosexuality, and to provide hope.” And as I related when reporting on the story last year, many ex-patients attest to the efficacy of the organization’s reparative therapy. But as American Thinker’s Janet Tassel wrote on Monday, “JONAH has never guaranteed change; like all forms of therapy, it offers hope, not an ironclad promise.” She then explained the origin of the case against the group:
And like other therapies, it has its adherents and its detractors. The detractors include two young men, Benjamin Unger and Chaim Levin, both from Orthodox Jewish families. About five years ago, Unger and Levin, who had been working with counselors referred by JONAH, made contact with a gay-affirmative group called Jewish Queer Youth, for whom they agreed to make YouTube videos. This led to a meeting with gay activist Wayne Besen, for whose website www.truthwinsout.org, the two also made videos. Besen played a significant role in hooking these disappointed young men up with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which, despite its name, specializes in left-wing activism, and whose endowment is in the neighborhood of $340 million.
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The SPLC then filed a lawsuit on behalf of “the aforesaid Benjamin Unger and Chaim Levin, Chaim Levin’s mother, someone named Sheldon Bruck and his mother, and another young man, a lapsed Mormon, Michael Ferguson,” claiming that “JONAH’s business practices violate the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act … by misrepresenting that homosexuality is a mental illness or disorder and that JONAH’s therapy program is effective in changing the sexual orientation of clients,” writes Tassel.
But while JONAH was sued, it never really had its day in court. Never mind that Levin was so taken with the therapy at the time of treatment that he even volunteered to become a JONAH spokesman. Never mind that the SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, is reputed to be one of the world’s most notorious snake-oil salesmen and civil-rights hustlers (read here). Never mind that homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 for political, not medical, reasons and that the science on its origin is far from settled. Never mind that an expert witness for the SPLC actually conceded that sexual inclination is fluid and can change. Truly striking is that Vicinage 6 Superior Court judge Peter F. Bariso, Jr. ruled that five of JONAH’s six expert witnesses could not even testify because, as he put it, “the theory that homosexuality is a disorder is not novel but — like the notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it — instead is outdated and refuted.”
One of these expert witnesses, counselor Christopher Doyle, wrote that this was just part of a “judicial liberal bias” that forced the “jury to convict JONAH.” This is no overstatement. The judge’s ruling turned the JONAH trial into something approximating a kangaroo court, a show trial that merely added an illusory veneer of legitimacy to what would appear an outcome orchestrated by the judge. How can a person possibly combat the charge of violating a “consumer fraud act” if he’s not allowed to present experts who can testify that his services aren’t fraudulent?
So now the homosexual lobby has accomplished what the global-warming alarmists still only dream of: punishing those who disagree with them under the pretext that the “science is settled.” But how settled is it? It’s not just that no “gay gene” has ever been found and that theories pertaining to intrauterine hormonal abnormalities are inconclusive. As I wrote last year, there is also this to consider:
Homosexuality was institutionalized in Spartan military camps — which all boys were conscripted into at age seven — during the city state’s mid and late periods. And homosexual behavior was common in much of ancient Greece. For example, we understand that the Sacred Band of Thebes warrior group comprised pederastic man-youth pairings. This raises a question: did all, or most, ancient Greeks have a “gay gene” or some other inborn cause of SSA? Logic dictates that their homosexuality was a purely psychological phenomenon (in many cases, if not most) that was culturally promoted and approved.
Now, has the human mind undergone some great transformation since the Hellenic period that would account for how SSA could never, ever be a purely psychological phenomenon today? Is it reasonable to say that it couldn’t be purely psychological in even 1 out of 1000 cases? That would be a radical position.
But if it can be so, then it could be psychological in 2 out of 1000 cases, or 30, 50, or 50 percent of them, correct? So at this point — even if we accept, for argument’s sake, that SSA could be inborn or at least have inborn factors — you’d have to admit that you really can’t know which cases are congenital and which are purely psychological.
And just generally speaking, one might also ask: Does something have to be a “disease” or “disorder” for a person to want it changed? Normal aging and having a large nose aren’t classified as disorders, yet millions of Americans have sought cosmetic surgery to alter a completely normal state of being. Nor is it abnormal to get nervous in sporting competitions, yet athletes sometimes visit sports psychologists in an attempt to purge those unwanted feelings.
And “unwanted” is the word. The whole idea behind the homosexual movement — and the “Sexual Revolution” in general — was that people should be able to be what they want to be; why, today we’re even supposed to respect it when a boy says he “feels” like a girl and wants on that basis to change his body. But what about when someone who experiences same-sex attraction wants to change his mind? The person’s motivation may be that he wants to enjoy fulfillment in normal married life, or it may be something else. But isn’t that his business? The Left has oft preached that a person’s desires aren’t to be questioned or judged, and its arguments have always dripped with relativism. But now leftists are quite absolutist in their conviction that homosexuality is like an organized-crime syndicate: Once you’re in, it’s for life.
Governor Chris Christie had already signed a law in 2013 that made New Jersey one of several states to prohibit reparative therapy for minors; this means that while a 16-year-old girl can obtain an IUD in Seattle without parental consent, she couldn’t see a counselor for reparative therapy in New Jersey even with parental consent. And now, via the courts, the Left seeks to deny this service to adults as well.
JONAH, a non-profit organization, has already spent three million dollars defending itself, and now may have to pay four million in legal fees and restitution to the plaintiffs. And while the organization intends to appeal the June 25 ruling, it will need another one million just to keep fighting. Meanwhile, the Left marches on doing very much what Islamic jihadist-advocacy organizations do: manipulating the system as it uses our freedoms to destroy our freedoms.
