With all the focus on the aftermath of the presidential elections, you might have missed an important victory in the courts recently. As reported November 20 by Liberty Counsel, which litigated the case successfully, “A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down laws that ban counselors from providing minor clients with help to reduce or eliminate unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, or gender confusion.”

This was a victory for freedom, for tolerance, for individual rights, and for therapist-client privilege. Above all, it was a victory for minors.

Liberty Counsel, led by Mat Staver, represented “Dr. Robert Otto, LMFT and Dr. Julie Hamilton, LMFT and their minor clients who challenged the constitutionality of ordinances enacted by the City of Boca Raton and Palm Beach County which prohibit minors from voluntary counseling from licensed professionals.”

These local, Florida ordinances were part of a disturbing national trend that prohibits minors with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion from seeking professional help.

Of course, under these same ordinances, had these minors wanted help to reinforce their same-sex attraction or gender confusion, that would have been allowed. By all means, let professionals help minors embrace their homosexual desires or their transgender identity.

But God forbid that a 15-year-old male should not want to be attracted to another male. Or an 8-year-old should not want to feel like a boy trapped in the wrong body. No professional help could be offered to them. This is how LGBTQ activists have turned our society upside down.

Let’s say, then, that this 15-year-old male had been raped repeatedly by an older, male neighbor from the ages of 7 to 9, unbeknownst to his parents. As he came into puberty, he felt confused about his sexuality, ultimately realizing he was attracted to males, not females.

He had always dreamed about getting married (meaning, to a woman!) and having children, and he was repulsed by his same-sex attraction, now sharing everything with his parents.

They say to him, “We will get you all the help you need,” and they find a highly-recommended family therapist. But when they share their situation with the therapist, the therapist replies, “Oh, I would love to help you, but it’s against the law. However, I’d be glad to help your son embrace his same-sex attractions. That is perfectly legal.”

What a perversion of fairness, of freedom, and of personal dignity. What an unrighteous and oppressive imposition of the state. Really now, what on earth gives them the right to make rulings like this?

Or consider the case of the 8-year-old girl who is troubled by feelings that she’s actually a boy in a girl’s body. This makes her very uncomfortable, causing confusion for her and her siblings. So her parents reach out to a well-trained professional, feeling they are at their wits end and unable to provide adequate help.

But when they sit down with the family counselor, the counselor says to them, “I would love to help your daughter embrace her girlhood, but I’m strictly prohibited by the law. However, here’s how I can help.

“We’ll work with your daughter to embrace the fact that she’s really a boy, sending her back to school with a new name and dressed like a boy. The school will allow her – actually him – to use the boy’s bathroom. Then, in two years, we’ll start him on hormone blockers to stop the onset of puberty, then have his breasts removed when he’s 18, then schedule him for full-scale gender confirmation surgery at 20, supplemented by male hormones for life. Isn’t that a wonderful option?”

And remember: under these oppressive ordinances, to sit and talk with the child was forbidden by law if that child wanted to feel at home in her own body. But to put her on puberty-blocking hormones as a child, then remove total healthy parts of her body, then put her on hormones for life, was allowed by the law.

To call this perverse is an understatement. Child abuse would be more accurate.

Outrageously, 20 states now ban such counseling, which they label “conversion therapy,” alleging that such therapy is harmful to minors. And last year, California almost passed a ban on such counseling for people of all ages. It would have even prohibited religious leaders from offering such counseling.

Yet this is where things are going unless believers, in particular, joined by all freedom-loving people, push back.

The LGBTQ tyranny must be challenged. The assault on individual rights must be resisted.

No one has the right to tell a young person (or any person), “You must be gay” or “You must be trans.”

Absolutely, categorically not. And that’s why this Florida victory is so important.

As to the notion that sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are harmful, Peter Sprigg and the FRC just released a 37-page report titled, “No Proof of Harm. 79 Key Studies Provide No Scientific Proof That Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) Are Usually Harmful.”

In short, “While these 79 studies do provide anecdotal evidence that some SOCE clients report the experience was harmful, they do not provide scientific proof that SOCE is more harmful than other forms of therapy, more harmful than other courses of action for those with SSA, or more likely to be harmful than helpful for the average client. If alleged ‘critical health risks’ of SOCE cannot be found in these 79 studies, then it is safe to conclude that they cannot be found anywhere.”

Old lies die hard, but for those seeking the truth, the data is undeniable.

Last year, in New York City, an Orthodox Jewish therapist challenged the city’s prohibition of SOCE counseling for people of any age “for violating his freedom of speech and infringing on his religious faith and that of his patients.”

With the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the city quickly reversed course, leading to this exuberant announcement from Tony Perkins and the FRC in September, 2019: “The last place anyone would expect liberals to rethink their extremism is New York City. But, thanks to a new lawsuit, even the Big Apple seems to understand when it’s vulnerable. ‘Pinch yourself,’ FRC’s Cathy Ruse says. One of the most radical cities on earth is about to walk back its LGBT counseling ban. All because one courageous psychotherapist fought back.”

In Florida, in the 2-1 opinion, Judge Britt C. Grant wrote that, “We hold that the challenged ordinances violate the First Amendment because they are content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny.”

Precisely. These ordinances represent a fundamental assault on freedom of speech, among other things. May this be the beginning of a national trend.

In fact, as Liberty Counsel noted,

The 11th Circuit decision was foreshadowed by comments in a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision, NIFLA v. Becerra, dealing with California’s efforts to regulate speech by pro-life pregnancy centers. In the course of rejecting the argument that governments can regulate ‘professional speech’ without offending the First Amendment, the Supreme Court directly criticized earlier appeals court decisions that had made the same argument in upholding state therapy bans. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that ‘this Court has not recognized “professional speech” as a separate category of speech. Speech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by “professionals.

There is reason for real hope. May the righteous pushback continue unless freedom of self-determination is restored for minors across America.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.

Written by Peter Sprigg

“Puberty blockers” are hormones originally intended to deal with “precocious puberty,” in which a child experiences the physical signs of puberty prematurely. Now, however, puberty blockers are being used as a treatment for “gender dysphoria.” The theory is that a child who is already unhappy with his or her biological sex may become even more unhappy when his or her body begins to develop.

The most extreme claim is that transgender children forced to undergo normal puberty will kill themselves. Into this debate came a new academic study published in the Pediatrics medical journal that resulted in headlines like these:

• “Puberty blockers could save the lives of trans teens, study shows” – The Hill
• “Puberty blockers linked to lower suicide risk for transgender people” – NBC News

There’s only one problem. These headlines are wrong.

The word “suicide” implies a fatality. The Pediatrics study was not a study of suicide—because none of its subjects were dead. It was based upon answers given in the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.

The key outcome referenced in the article was “lifetime suicidal ideation.” This means thinking about committing suicide. The finding that those who received puberty blockers had lower “lifetime suicidal ideation” than those who wanted them but did not receive them got the attention because it was the only one that reached the level of “statistical significance.”

However, “lifetime suicidal ideation” was only one of nine mental health outcomes that were listed in the study.

On four of the nine outcome measures—nearly half—the outcomes for those who received puberty blockers were worse than for those who did not. Most of these differences were small, but one figure jumped off the page. Those who received puberty blockers were twice as likely to have had a suicide attempt resulting in inpatient care (i.e., hospitalization) in the last 12 months as those who did not (45.5 percent vs. 22.8 percent). While we cannot reach definitive conclusions because of the small numbers involved, this raises important questions that are at least worthy of further research.

Also, the lifetime rate of suicidal ideation for those who received puberty blockers were lower than for those who didn’t—but it was still astonishingly high, at 75 percent. This hardly suggests that administering puberty blockers makes most children with gender dysphoria mentally healthy.

The authors acknowledge the study’s design “does not allow for determination of causation.” But they go further, raising doubt that puberty blockers cause lower rates of suicidal ideation—because it may be that people with suicidal ideation were simply considered poor candidates to receive puberty blockers.

Let’s be clear—we cannot conclude from this study that children who take puberty blockers are more likely to commit suicide than those who don’t.

But we also cannot conclude that they are less likely to commit suicide—notwithstanding the breathless media coverage.

Legislators considering restrictions on radical gender transition procedures for minors should make those decisions based on the harmful physical effects and risks of those interventions, many of which are well-known—not based upon the misinterpretation of psychological studies whose implications are far from clear.

This article was originally published at FRC.org.

Yet another high profile “gay” activist has been arrested for homosexual assault on a child. This time authorities caught one of the big fish (a rainbow trout?). Terrance Patrick Bean founded the “Human Rights Campaign” (HRC), which is one of the world’s largest, wealthiest and most powerful anti-Christian organizations. To this day he remains on the board of directors. HRC was developed for the sole purpose of pushing the extremist homosexual political agenda. Bean is also a major player for the DNC and a big Obama supporter.

The Oregonian reports:

Detectives from the Portland police Sex Crimes Unit arrested Portland developer Terrence Patrick Bean on Wednesday on a Lane County indictment stemming from alleged sex abuse involving a teenage boy in 2013.

Bean, 66, a prominent gay rights activist and major Democratic Party fundraiser, was arrested at his home in Southwest Portland and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center at 10:12 a.m.

The indictment charges Bean with two counts of third-degree sodomy, a felony, and one count of third-degree sex abuse, a misdemeanor, police said.

Bean, who bailed out of jail by late Wednesday afternoon, will be arraigned on the indictment in Lane County. …

The alleged incident involved a sexual encounter in Eugene with a 15-year-old boy. …

Bean has been one of the state’s biggest Democratic donors and an influential figure in gay rights circles in the state. He helped found two major national political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, and has been a major contributor for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama. He’s also a close friend of former Gov. Barbara Roberts. …

Bean’s Flickr account shows him talking with Obama at several events, posing with first lady Michelle Obama and numerous other political figures, including former President Bill Clinton.  A blog post from his sister, Sue Surdam Bean, detailed her brother’s work on a July 24, 2012 Obama fundraiser in Portland.  She included three photos of Terry Bean’s ride on Air Force One with Obama to a subsequent event in Seattle.

Just two years ago 68 year old Larry Brinkin, another high profile and similarly respected (at least among Democrats) homosexual activist, was arrested in San Francisco for possessing and distributing reams of child pornography.

CNS News Reported at the time:

Police said that Brinkin, a former city employee, apparently had photos of children, as young as 1- or  2-years-old, performing sexual acts and being sodomized by adult men in attachments linked to the email address, reported The Chronicle. The email account was also linked to Yahoo discussion groups involving sexual exploitation of young people.

Concerning Brinkin, Theresa Sparks, director of the Human Rights Commission, told the Huffington Post, “It’s almost incredulous, there’s no way I could believe such a thing.”

“He’s always been one of my heroes, and he’s the epitome of human rights activist,” she said. “This is [the] man who coined phrases we use in our daily language. I support Larry 100 percent; hopefully it will all come out in the investigation.”

Brinkin later plead guilty to the charges.

Yep – These monsters are “heroes” to the HRC and the larger “gay” activist community.

Ever wonder why?

The cases of Bean and Brinkin follow a long-established pattern as old as the ancient Greek bathhouse. Of course, not every “gay” man – self-identified or otherwise – is a pedophile, but studies indicate demonstrably that homosexual assaults against boys occur at an alarmingly disproportionate rate when compared to heterosexual assaults. The very act of a man molesting a boy unquestionably involves both same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior (a “gay” by any other name…).

Consider, for instance, a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, of over 200 convicted pedophiles. It found that “86 percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.” This demonstrates, as noted by Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, that “homosexual or bisexual men are approximately 10 times more likely to molest children than heterosexual men.”

But don’t repeat these facts out loud or you might find yourself on the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) “hate group” smear list.

Let the HRC damage control begin…

This article was originally posted at the BarbWire.com website.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that President Barack Obama invited the obscene, Christian-hating, homosexual, manboy Dan Savage to the White House. After all, President Obama’s  “Safe School Czar” was the homosexual founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Kevin Jennings; and Obama awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to the infamous homosexual Harvey Milk who was deified in the Hollywood film Milk.

And why am I bringing this up? I’m bringing it up because May 22 is “Harvey Milk Day” in California–yet another abuse of public schools to advance the moral beliefs of homosexuals and their ideological allies. There are few reasons to be thankful to live in Illinois, but this is one: We don’t yet have a law proclaiming a day of commemoration for Harvey Milk in our public schools.

I’m also bringing it up because many have seen or heard of the eponymous film about Harvey Milk and starring Sean Penn but may not know how far from reality the film’s depiction of Milk is.

In 2009, then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 572 into law. This law, introduced by openly homosexual Senator Mark Leno, designates May 22 “as having special significance in public schools and educational institutions and would encourage those entities to conduct suitable commemorative exercises on that date.”

And why do liberal California lawmakers consider May 22 significant in public schools? They believe that children in grade K-12 should commemorate annually the birthday of the “first openly gay man to be elected to public office in a major city of the United States,” who was murdered by a disgruntled colleague.

The law states that “all public schools and educational institutions are encouraged to observe…and to conduct suitable commemorative exercises as follows: On Harvey Milk Day, exercises remembering the life of Harvey Milk, recognizing his accomplishments, and familiarizing pupils with the contributions he made to this state.”

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council says this about the man whom Obama and Schwarzenegger think should be honored: “Milk is famous only for winning one election, being murdered – and having sex with men.”

And it wasn’t just adult men with whom Milk had sex. Sprigg recounts that Milk was also fond of teenage boys. In fact, one of his live-in relationships was a pederastic relationship with a 16-year-old boy when Milk was 33.  Yes, I can understand why Obama wanted to honor him and Schwarzenegger thinks children should commemorate him.

According to Daniel Flynn, “the real Harvey Milk was a short-tempered demagogue who cynically invented stories of victimhood to advance his political career.” And contrary to the implication in the film, Milk was not murdered because of his homosexuality, but rather because he was instrumental in preventing a board of supervisors member from regaining his seat.

The most shocking omission from the film and likely from the tall tales California public school teachers tell their young students is that Harvey Milk was a huge supporter of Reverend Jim Jones:

Nine days prior to Milk’s death, more than 900 followers of Jim Jones — many of them campaign workers for Milk — perished in the most ghastly set of murder-suicides in modern history. Before the congregants of the Peoples Temple drank Jim Jones’s deadly Kool-Aid, Harvey Milk and much of San Francisco’s ruling class had already figuratively imbibed. Milk occasionally spoke at Jones’s San Francisco–based headquarters, promoted Jones through his newspaper columns, and defended the Peoples Temple from its growing legion of critics. Jones provided conscripted “volunteers” for Milk’s campaigns to distribute leaflets by the tens of thousands. Milk returned the favor by abusing his position of public trust on behalf of Jones’s criminal endeavors.

“Rev. Jones is widely known in the minority communities here and elsewhere as a man of the highest character, who has undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness,” Supervisor Milk wrote President Jimmy Carter seven months before the Jonestown carnage. The purpose of Milk’s letter was to aid and abet his powerful supporter’s abduction of a six-year-old boy. Milk’s missive to the president prophetically continued: “Not only is the life of a child at stake, who currently has loving and protective parents in the Rev. and Mrs. Jones, but our official relations with Guyana could stand to be jeopardized, to the potentially great embarrassment of our State Department.” John Stoen, the boy whose actual parents Milk libeled to the president as purveyors of “bold-faced lies” and blackmail attempts, perished at Jonestown. This, the only remarkable episode in Milk’s brief tenure on the San Francisco board of supervisors, is swept under the rug by his hagiographers.

This is the man that homosexuals and their allies celebrate and seek to promote as a hero in our taxpayer-subsidized schools. In their effort to exalt Milk as a civil rights hero in public schools to young, naive students,  the truth about him is concealed. There’s even a children’s picture book designed to indoctrinate little ones, titled The Harvey Milk Story. It’s been positively reviewed by Kirkus Reviews and by K.T. Horning, children’s librarian, author, and educator who has served on numerous influential literary boards, and “many book award and evaluation committees, including the American Library Association’s “Rainbow List.”

Public schools are one of the central battlegrounds for the war on moral truth regarding homosexuality. Specious “civil rights” arguments, like the ones promoted by worshippers of Harvey Milk, based on an absurd, untenable comparison of homosexuality to race, and media-fomented hysteria about bullying are driving the exploitation of public education.

Unless and until parents become willing to tell administrators and teachers preemptively that under no circumstances are their children to be exposed to any resources or activities that mention homosexuality or gender confusion, the exploitation will not merely continue, it will increase.

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An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruling that gender identity is covered by Title VII’s prohibition against discrimination based on sex is being hailed as a ”sea change’‘ by transgender activist organizations. But an attorney for Liberty Counsel Action notes that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was never intended to cover gender identity and the ruling “basically says that a Bible bookstore owner, for instance, could not turn away a homosexual, cross-dressing man, a man who likes to wear a miniskirt and lipstick….”

You may remember Laurie Higgins’ articles identifying Georgetown law professor Chai Feldblum, a lesbian activist who became President Obama’s appointee to lead the EEOC.  Laurie pointed out that Feldblum sees the battle between “gay rights” and moral opposition to homosexuality as a zero sum game.  One side will win, and the other will lose.   Feldblum is on record saying: 

“Sexual liberty should win in most cases.  There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.”  And yet when push comes to shove, when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict, she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

Of course, Feldblum is correct.  Religious freedom and special homosexual so-called “rights” cannot co-exist. 

Passage of nondiscrimination legislation – specific to sexual orientation – has been attempted since 1974 in the U.S. Congress. Currently, several bills promoting ENDA are circulating in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives promoting ENDA.  Homosexual activist and U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) is the chief sponsor in the U.S. House. 

by Malcolm A. Kline –Accuracy in Academia

Now that the President is poised to sign the repeal of the ban on homosexuals serving in the U. S. military, academics are prepared to welcome the armed forces they have banned from their campuses with open arms, at least metaphorically. San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin will actually be at the White House signing ceremony, according to Renna Communications.

Meanwhile, Harvard is letting the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) come back to Cambridge. Harvard deans evicted ROTC during the Vietnam War.

“In the meantime,” the Center for Military Readiness(CMR) notes, “Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos drew criticism from a gay activist group, sparked by his statement expressing concern for his Marines if the current law is repealed:

-“Fox News: Marine Corps Chief: ‘Distraction’ of Gays Serving Openly Could Cost Marines Limbs

“Aubrey Sarvis of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) who was recently seen sponsoring a rally with Lady Gaga in Maine, issued a statement demanding that Gen. Amos resign. Sarvis’ attitude demonstrates ‘zero tolerance’ of dissent-a strategy of intolerance recommended to make the new LGBT Law or policy ‘work.’ Marines who have a problem with the “New Gender Order” will have no recourse but to leave the Corps.”

As CMR discovered, many will choose to do just that:

1.) “Defense Secretary Robert Gates has repeatedly denied that the survey was a ‘referendum.’ He has nevertheless allowed the media to keep trumpeting the Working Group’s misleading claim that 70% of service members predicted that repeal of the current law would have a ‘positive, mixed, or no effect.’ The carefully crafted money quote, spun up from an innocuous inquiry asking personnel whether they knew or liked someone at work who is gay, quickly morphed into the false claim that 70% of military people surveyed favored repeal of the law.

“To the contrary, as Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council has reported, the highlighted question included ‘mixed’ results indicating that 62% of respondents also believed that repeal would have at least some negative effects:

–Pentagon Report on Homosexuality Buries the Lead: The Majority of Views Expressed Are Opposed to Repeal

“Furthermore, the views of military people on repeal or retention of the current law cannot be stated with certainty because the question was not even asked in any of the Working Group’s survey instruments and focus groups. Nevertheless, the administration is trying to use calculated misrepresentation of the survey results in order to switch sufficient votes to win in the Senate.

2.) “Secretary Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, Co-Chairman of the Working Group, also have claimed that risks associated with repeal would be ‘low.’

-“The claim is belied by specific findings about the strong opposition of combat soldiers and Marines. On page 74 of the DoD Working Group Report available here,and Implementation Plan posted here, we read that ‘Nearly 60% of respondents in the Marine Corps and in Army combat arms said they believed there would be a negative impact on their unit’s effectiveness in this context; among Marine combat arms the number was 67%.’

-“Question 81 of the ‘2010 DADT Survey,’ asking active-duty and reserve troops whether repeal of the current law would affect future career plans, found that 12.6% of personnel in the Military Services Overall said they would leave sooner than planned-a percentage that potentially equates to 264,600 of the 2.1 million active-duty/reserve force. Another 11.1% said they would think about leaving sooner than planned, and potential losses for the Army and Marine Corps would be even higher. (p. 210, DoD Report)

-“Cross-tabbed data displayed in the 2010 DADT Survey indicate that potential losses would be highest among troops described as ‘combat arms.’ Among Army combat arms personnel, 21.4% would leave sooner than planned, and 14.6 would think about leaving the Army.

-“Marine combat arms would be weakened even more, with 32% of Marines leaving sooner than planned, and 16.2% considering an early end to their Marine Corps careers. (See 2010 DADT Survey data, available here, Appendix J, p. 53, for Army figures, and Appendix L, p. 47, for Marine Corps figures.)”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.