Written by Carlos D. Flores

We should make public policy and encourage social norms that reflect the truth about the human person and sexuality, not obfuscate the truth about such matters and sow the seeds of sexual confusion in future generations for years to come.

By now we are all undoubtedly familiar with the tragic suicide of Joshua Alcorn, the transgender teenage boy who, in late December, walked onto a freeway with the intention of ending his life. In an apparent suicide note, Joshua cites a host of reasons for why he was led to end his life, most prominent of which were his parents’ attempts to discourage his identifying as a girl and his being sent to therapists in an attempt to relieve these feelings. All of the problems that ultimately culminated in his suicide, writes Joshua, stem from the fact that, from the time he was a small child, he felt like a “girl trapped in a boy’s body.”

No sooner had Joshua’s heart stopped beating than the story of his suicide was seized by LGBT activists and pruned to advance a familiar narrative of a sexual minority fighting cultural oppression. Joshua’s parents immediately began to be chided as “repressive” and “bigoted” and even began to receive various threats from LGBT internet crusader-activists.

Transgenderism and Gender Identity

I have not referred to Joshua by using female pronouns or by using his self-invented female name of “Leelah.” The reason I am not doing this is simple: Joshua was not a girl—he was a boy—and to address males with female pronouns or females with male pronouns is to contribute to our culture’s confusion about sexuality and the nature of the human person, which is literally leaving casualties in its wake. No amount of surgical mutilation of body parts, effeminate behaviors, or artificial female appearances can make a man a woman.

LGBT activists will respond in various ways to this. They might first respond by saying: “Okay, true enough: Joshua was biologically a male. But you have misunderstood our claim: we contend that his sex was male, yes, but his gender was female because he ‘identified’ as female.” The idea here is that people have a sex, which is either female or male and which one cannot choose. In addition to this, however, there is “gender,” or what sex one is more comfortable “identifying” as. The response to this is simple: Why think that what one “identifies as” is significant at all, especially to the extent that others should actively recognize or cater to such an identity, and especially when the identity one adopts is contrary to reality?

Consider the following analogies. Suppose that a Caucasian man from Finland—call him Gunther—suddenly decided that he identifies as being of Sub-Saharan African descent. Suppose further that, in light of this, Gunther undergoes unusual procedures to have his skin darkened and his skull’s bone structure re-shaped so as to resemble that of individuals of Sub-Saharan descent. Would we think that such a person has suddenly become of Sub-Saharan descent through such procedures? Of course not, and his identifying as such does nothing to change this. His appearance as someone of Sub-Saharan descent might be very convincing. But, again, this doesn’t change the fact that he is not of Sub-Saharan descent.

Similarly, suppose that a seventy-year-old man—call him Bob—comes to identify as a sixteen-year-old. Wouldn’t we think it absurd if people considered it “rude” or “bigoted” to tell the man: “You are not sixteen years old. Your identifying as such doesn’t change this fact, and we will not indulge you in your strange delusions by not calling attention to your old age and by pretending that you really are sixteen years old”?

The cases of Gunther and Bob and the situations of individuals who believe themselves to be transgender are perfectly analogous. In the case of the transgender individual, he identifies as something he is not—someone of the opposite sex—and seeks to undergo harmful surgeries and hormonal treatments in order to have his physical state match his identity of himself as someone of the opposite sex.

Our mental faculties, like our physical ones, are ordered toward various ends. Among these ends is the attainment of truth. To this extent, it is perfective of our mental faculties to recognize how we truly are (and thus apprehend a truth). It is for this reason that we can make sense of mental disorders such as anorexia nervosa as disorders: they involve persons’ having persistent, false beliefs about their identity or how they really are. In the case of the anorexic, someone who is dangerously underweight believes falsely (but tenaciously) that he is really overweight. It would be a proper procedure of medicine, then, for a therapist to help an anorexic individual to do away with his anorexia, restoring the individual’s mental faculties to their properly functioning state.

Gender Reassignment Surgery Is Not Medicine

Those in favor of transgenderism also (naturally) support gender-reassignment surgery as a perfectly legitimate medical procedure for individuals (including children) with gender dysphoria. Now, put to one side the fact that 70-80 percent of children who report having transgender feelings come to lose such feelings. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that individuals who undergo gender reassignment surgery are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Instead consider the following question: Can we reasonably categorize gender reassignment surgery as a medical procedure in the first place?

Before we answer this question, we might venture to ask: what is medicine? Here is a plausible answer: medicine is the enterprise of restoring bodily faculties to their proper function. Our bodily faculties are ordered toward certain ends. This seems impossible to deny. Eyes, for example, are ordered toward (i.e., their function is) seeing, the stomach is ordered toward breaking down food, the heart is ordered toward pumping blood, etc. So if, say, someone’s eyes were not able to achieve their end of sight well, it would be rightly considered a medicalprocedure to seek to restore this individual’s eyes to their proper function. Similarly, it would be a medical endeavor to seek to restore an individual’s defective heart (one that has arrhythmia, say) to its proper function. All well and good.

But what are we to make of this “gender reassignment” surgery? Insofar as such a surgical procedure involves the intentional damaging and mutilating of otherwise perfectly functioning bodily faculties by twisting them to an end toward which they are not ordered, such a thing cannot, in principle, possibly be considered a medical procedure. And because love compels us to seek the good for another, it is thus a grave evil to condone such surgical procedures.

On Gender Identity Disorder Therapy

A similar point can be made about gender identity disorder therapy. Transgenderism activists are seizing Joshua’s tragic death to insist that such therapy ought to be criminalized. A petition is floating around the internet to ban so-called “transgender conversion therapy,” a procedure that involves, presumably, an attempt by a professional to help a person who is experiencing a gender identity disorder (also known as gender dysphoria). If the progress of the homosexual movement is a guide to what will come next, we can expect that laws will soon be passed criminalizing individuals’ receiving therapy to help them do away with transgender identities or desires—even for those who want to relieve themselves of such identities and desires.

Recall our earlier discussion of anorexia. Like the anorexic, the transgendered individual tenaciously holds to false beliefs about his identity or how or what he truly is: he believes that he is a sex that he is not. Dr. Paul McHugh’s words here are particularly incisive:

The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.

It would thus be a perfectly proper procedure of medicine for the transgendered individual to visit a therapist to seek his professional help to relieve himself of his disordered transgender identity insofar as this would amount to a restoring of the transgendered individual’s mental faculties to their properly functioning state. The suggestion, then, that gender identity disorder therapy should be criminalized is as absurd as the suggestion that therapy to eliminate anorexia should be criminalized.

Some Common Objections

Now, an apologist for transgenderism might retort in the following way: “You’re missing a key point: the brains of, say, men who ‘identify’ as women have been shown to resemble those of women. This shows that there is a biological basis to their identifying as such.” In response, we might begin by asking for empirical evidence that this dubious claim really is true. But even if this were the case, this doesn’t show that men whose brains “resemble that of a woman’s” (whatever that means) are truly women after all. If we are to say that the person simply is the brain, as the one who espouses this objection seems to suggest, then, because presumably even males who identify as women have brains with male DNA, it follows that they are men after all.

But we don’t even need to grant that the presence of such-and-such brain states is relevant at all. For example, we may suppose that, through habitually behaving as a sixteen- year-old, the brain activity of the seventy-year-old mentioned above “resembles” that of a sixteen-year-old’s. Does it follow, then, that the seventy-year-old really is sixteen years old? Or that he is really a sixteen-year-old trapped inside a seventy-year-old’s body? Of course not. The most rational conclusion is that such an individual has some sort of cognitive or psychological defect associated with identity and self-perception. The same can be said for the transgender individual.

Indeed, it should not come as a surprise to find out that our daily activities shape our brain-states or alter the way our brains behave. After all, it is more or less common knowledge that, say, the process of learning to play an instrument has the effect of establishing new neural pathways, thus causing a change in brain-states. Thus Dr. Norman Doidge comments: “Now we know the brain is ‘neuroplastic,’ and not only can it change, but that it works by changing its structure in response to repeated mental experience.”

On the topic of sexuality more specifically, consider the fact that habitual porn use seems to result in (or correlate with) decreased gray matter in the brain, and that habitual porn use changes the sexual tastes of men. If habitually watching pornography can change a man’s brain so significantly, then it should hardly be surprising that through intentionally and habitually behaving like a woman a man’s brain would too change to some extent. But again, this does not thereby show that such a man is a woman after all; all it shows is that through habituated action of some sort, the man’s brain behavior has changed.

Another response might be to ask rhetorically: “Well, what about intersex individuals?” The implication is that the existence of intersex individuals somehow shows that the nature of sex is up for grabs for everyone, intersex or not. But this doesn’t follow at all. In the genuine case of intersex individuals, it may very well be appropriate to express puzzlement or ignorance as to what to make of such an attribute, metaphysically speaking, and perhaps leave it as an open question whether such individuals are either male or female or whether they should be encouraged to undergo surgical procedures in the interest of their health. Cases in which an individual is intersex, however, are exceedingly rare. Indeed, even granting the point, it would not be unfair to say that in 99.99 percent of cases (and even this might be too low a percentage), a person is either male or female. And unsurprisingly, most of the individuals who believe themselves to be transgender have perfectly functioning male or female reproductive systems. This question is both irrelevant and fruitless.

Finally, the LGBT activist might retort by asking: “but how will a man identifying as a woman affect you?” If these were simply private issues, this might be a valid point (though a concern for the physical and mental well-being of individuals struggling with their gender might obligate us to reach out to them in such a case). But, alas, LGBT activists are actively working to make it the case that the state and private businesses cover “gender-reassignment” surgeries, that men who identify as women be able to use women’s restrooms, that girls who identify as boys be able to play on male sports teams, that we consider it immoral to refer to infants as male or female lest we insidiously impose upon them a “gender” they might not identify with, that we ban therapy to treat gender dysphoria, and that we generally co-opt language and social norms to reflect pernicious falsehoods about the human body.

How a man’s identifying as a woman will personally affect me, you, or John Doe is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether we will make public policy and encourage social norms that reflect the truth about the human person and sexuality, or whether we will obfuscate the truth about such matters and sow the seeds of sexual confusion in future generations for years to come.

Carlos D. Flores studies philosophy at UC Santa Barbara. He is the president of the UC Santa Barbara Anscombe Society and has written for Ethika Politika. Originally published at ThePublicDiscourse.com.

 The Truth Project

First Annual IFI Worldview Conference
featuring Dr. Del Tackett
April 10-11, 2015

CLICK HERE for Details

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”
~Isaiah 5:20

On Saturday, Feb. 28 Yvette Cormier entered her Midland, Michigan Planet Fitness gym to work out. To her surprise, she found a man just inside the locker room entrance. She reported the incident to the front desk and was told that the man “identifies” as a woman and that Planet Fitness gyms—including their locker rooms—are “no judgment zones.” It should be noted that girls as young as 13 can join Planet Fitness and enjoy their “no judgment zones.”

When working out the next week, Cormier warned other women that a man is permitted to use the women’s locker room. For that grave cultural sin, the gym has revoked her membership, asserting that Cormier had violated their “no judgment” policy. Oh, the ironies…

Before expelling her from the club for being “inappropriate and disruptive,” the Planet Fitness corporate office asked Ms. Cormier if she would stop telling other women about the man in the locker room. She properly said “no,” she would not stop. They then judged her behavior to be unacceptable and canceled her membership, issuing this absurdist public statement:

Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members. Our gender identity non-discrimination policy states that members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their sincere self-reported gender identity. The manner in which this member expressed her concerns about the policy exhibited behavior that management at the Midland club deemed inappropriate and disruptive to other members, which is a violation of the membership agreement and as a result her membership was cancelled.

In the service of maintaining a “non-intimidating, welcoming environment,” corporate bigwigs allow a man in a women’s locker room and expel a woman from the gym because she doesn’t want to get naked in front of a strange man. Yes, the man in question was an actual man—you know, the kind born with anatomically correct penises. Even “transactivists” know humans can’t change their sex.

How, pray tell, do club managers verify the “sincerity” of a male member’s or guest’s claim that he wishes to be a woman? And why does sincerity of desire about one’s sex trump the objective state of one’s sex?

How will gym staff know with certainty that a male member or guest is not suffering from a disorder different from gender dysphoria? Perhaps instead of gender dysphoria, the member or guest is suffering from the paraphilia of voyeurism or exhibitionism. Come to think of it, why should Planet Fitness privilege gender dysphoria over other sexuality-related disorders?

How very judgmental and unwelcoming of Planet Fitness to prohibit those who identify as exhibitionists and voyeurs from accessing women’s locker rooms. If gender-confused men are permitted to be in the presence of naked women, why shouldn’t voyeurs be permitted to be in the presence of naked women?

Why shouldn’t exhibitionists be permitted to expose themselves to women? If women are forced to see the exposed members of gender-confused members, why shouldn’t they be compelled to see the exposed members of those who experience unwanted, unchosen exhibitionist desires?

And why can’t those who experience apodysophilia exercise in the nude or “diaper fetishists” parade around in Pampers?

Many people are rightly concerned about the possibility that men who don’t suffer from gender-confusion will exploit this inanity in order to access women’s private facilities with permission and peep with impunity. Others worry about assaults by both genuinely gender-confused men or wicked men who have the appearance of sincerely gender-confused men.

I oppose this kind of pernicious “trans” policy because actual women and girls should not have to be seen naked by strange men. Do husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and fathers want the women they love to be seen naked by strange men who may themselves be naked?

Discussions with our children about “private parts,” privacy, and modesty become meaningless if men (or boys) are permitted to use women’s (or girls) restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms? Gender-specific restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms become irrelevant once objective physical embodiment is declared a meaningless, irrelevant social construct.

But physical embodiment is neither meaningless, nor irrelevant. Physical embodiment matters. Maleness and femaleness matter. Modesty and privacy matter. And objective biological sex matters more than the anti-social construct “gender identity.”

The Left is trying to say without saying too audibly that biological sex is meaningless or at least subordinate to personal desire. In the inverted, perverted world of Leftist sexuality, neither pronouns nor locker rooms can be allowed to correspond to objective biological sex. Language and locker rooms must submit to the totalitarian dictates of sexual revolutionaries.

By now, sane and honest people should be able to see that these sexual anarchists are really emperors wearing no clothes. And without their clothes, everyone in the locker room, including children, can see their penises.

UPDATE:  Read more about this situation HERE.

“Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.”
~Habakkuk 1:4

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Much metaphorical ink has been spilt over the un-American assault on the religious liberty of elderly Washington florist Barronelle Stutzman, who has withstood withering personal attacks and repressive government action with grace, courage, and steadfastness.

I’m reluctant to beat dead horses, but this ain’t a horse and it ain’t dead. It’s a donkey and it’s alive and kicking. Or maybe it’s a Dolos—the mythical Greek spirit of deception. Either way, it’s kicking the heck out of Barronelle Stutzman.

Despite what the mainstream press and homosexual activists claim, Ms. Stutzman did not refuse to serve homosexuals. In fact, she serves not only homosexuals in general but the specific homosexual man who sought her services for his faux-wedding.

Further, Ms. Stutzman serves all manner of sinners and serves only sinners because there exists no other kind of humans.

Ms. Stutzman refused to use her gifts and labor to produce a product that she has never produced before and which would be used for a celebration of that which Jesus says does not exist and which God condemns.

A homosexual union is ontologically different from a heterosexual marriage. A homosexual union is as different from a heterosexual union as men are from women. A homosexual union is, in reality, the anti-thesis of a marriage between a man and a woman.

Marriage has a nature—an ontology—which neither society nor the government that represents it creates. As the Left likes to point out, throughout history, marriage conventions and legal regulations have changed. But what the Left doesn’t like to point out is that throughout these tinkerings, one constant has remained: Marriage was recognized as a sexually differentiated union.

If marriage is something, if it has a nature that predates government, then government can jettison only so many constituent features from the legal definition of marriage before it becomes a meaningless, nonsensical, or empty legal definition with no relation to reality.

Virtually everyone, including liberals, believes marriage has a nature. Liberals would reject the fanciful notion that lawmakers create marriage out of whole cloth. For example, liberals argue that marriage is the union of two unrelated people who experience erotic/romantic (concept) love. They would disagree if someone were to argue that marriage is the union of three brothers who experience “storge” love or five friends who experience “philia” love. Liberals believe that the type of love family members or five good buddies feel for each other is not marital love.

In other words, liberals argue that marriage has a nature central to which is romantic/erotic love (as opposed to agape, philia, or storge love) and without which a union is not a marriage. Therefore, liberals implicitly argue that marriage has a nature which government recognizes and regulates but does not create.

Similarly, conservatives argue that marriage has a nature that governments don’t create. Conservatives believe that the central constituent feature of marriage is sexual differentiation, without which a union is not in reality a marriage.

It is no more hateful to argue that marriage is by nature a sexually differentiated union than it is to argue that marriage is by nature a union constituted by romantic/erotic love rather than storge love. And it is no more hateful to define marriage as a biologically complementary union than it is to define it as binary, which necessarily excludes polyamorists.

Barronelle Stutzman was not asked by a homosexual couple to create and sell a product to them that she creates and sells to other couples. She was asked to create and sell something she had never created or sold to anyone: an anti-wedding floral arrangement.

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Homosexual activists, intent on using every cultural institution—including public schools, the courts, and legislatures—to advance their non-factual beliefs, have been successful in their efforts in large measure because they have lied to Americans. How have they lied to Americans? Let us enumerate just a few of the ways:

• They have said that moral disapproval of homoerotic activity and relationships constitutes hatred of same-sex attracted persons.

• They have said that those who experience homoerotic attraction are “born that way,” meaning that homoerotic attraction is 100 percent heritable, like skin color.

• They have said that homoerotic attraction is in all cases immutable, like skin color.

• They have said that because same-sex attraction is 100 percent heritable in and in all cases immutable, it must be affirmed as central to identity in order for those who experience it to be happy.

• They have said that because a homosexual “orientation” is 100 percent heritable and in all cases immutable, any efforts to help same-sex attracted persons change their “orientation,” diminish same-sex attraction, or construct an identity that doesn’t include affirming same-sex attraction, activity, or relationships are cruel, harmful, and futile.

What’s remarkable about these claims is not just that they are patently false but that they are rejected by “LGBTQ” academicians.

The Conversion Therapy Prohibition Act (HB 217 and SB 111) sponsored by lesbian activist State Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) and State Senator Daniel Biss (D-Skokie) relies on gullible acceptance of these beliefs. When considering Cassidy’s ill-conceived anti-identity-choice bill, lawmakers should take into account the following comments that our anti-intellectual mainstream press commonly overlooks. These are not outlier views but commonly held views among scholars, including homosexual scholars and devotees of Queer Theory.

Author, feminist scholar, social critic, and lesbian Camille Paglia writes this in her book Vamps & Tramps:

Responsible scholarship is impossible when rational discourse is being policed by storm troopers . . . who have the absolutism of all fanatics.

…

Is gay identity so fragile that it cannot bear the thought that some people may not wish to be gay? The difficulties in changing sexual orientation do not spring from its genetic innateness. Sexuality is highly fluid, and reversals are theoretically possible. However, habit is refractory, once the sensory pathways have been blazed and deepened by repetition….

…[H]elping gays learn how to function heterosexually if they so wish, is a perfectly worthy aim. We should be honest enough to consider whether homosexuality may not indeed be a pausing at the prepubescent stage when children anxiously band together by gender.

John D’Emilio, homosexual professor of history and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago explained in an interview what many—perhaps most—homosexual academicians think about homoerotic attraction and biological determinism:

What’s most amazing to me about the “born gay” phenomenon is that the scientific evidence for it is thin as a reed, yet it doesn’t matter. It’s an idea with such social utility that one doesn’t need much evidence in order to make it attractive and credible…. queer theory asks us…to be skeptical of seeing both gender and sexuality as fixed categories. Who can argue with that?

In a post on the website Social (In)Queery, Jane Ward, who admits to being voluntarily homosexual, disputes the entire pseudo-intellectual edifice upon which Cassidy has built her teetering bill:

But the fact that the “born this way” hypothesis has resulted in greater political returns for gay and lesbian people doesn’t have anything to do with whether it is true.  Maybe, as gay people, we want to get together and pretend it is true because it is politically strategic….But still, it wouldn’t make the idea true.

…

People like to cite “the overwhelming scientific evidence” that sexual orientation is biological in nature.  But show me a study that claims to have proven this, and I will show you a flawed research design.

…

People like to use the failure of “gay conversion” therapies as evidence that homosexuality is innate.  First of all, these conversions do not always fail….the point is that we can and do change.  For instance, in high school and early in college, my sexual desires were deeply bound up with sexism.  I wanted to be a hot girl, and I wanted powerful men to desire me. I was as authentically heterosexual as any woman I knew.  But later, several years into my exploration of feminist politics, what I once found desirable (heterosexuality and sexism) became utterly unappealing. I became critical of homophobia and sexism in ways that allowed these forces far less power to determine the shape of my desires.  If this had not happened, no doubt I’d be married to a man….But instead, I was drawn to queerness for various political and emotional reasons, and from my vantage point today, I believe it to be one of the best desires I ever cultivated. [emphasis added]

Trudy Ring, writer for the homosexual magazine The Advocate  openly admits the flawed nature of the central argument that homosexual activists have used to insist on special treatment based on their mutable erotic desires and volitional erotic activity—something which other groups similarly constituted do not enjoy:

For years, much of the case for LGBT rights has been based on the argument that sexual orientation is fixed and immutable…..

But an increasing body of social science research posits that a sizable number of people experience some degree of fluidity in their sexual and romantic attractions: being drawn to the same gender at one point in their life, the opposite gender at another.

David Benkof explores the common view of homosexual scholars that the notion of an immutable “gay identity” is false and a-historical, a social construct of the last 150 years:

Are gays indeed born that way? The question has immense political, social, and cultural repercussions. For example, some of the debate over applying the Constitution’s equal protection clause to gays and lesbians focuses on whether gayness is an inborn characteristic….

Thus, if it’s proven sexual orientations are not innate, much of the scaffolding upon which today’s LGBT movement has been built would begin to crumble.

…

According to the experts on homosexuality across centuries and continents, being gay is a relatively recent social construction. Few scholars with advanced degrees in anthropology or history who concentrate on homosexuality believe gays have existed in any cultures before or outside ours, much less in all cultures. These professors work closely with an ever-growing body of knowledge that directly contradicts “born that way” ideology.

Journalists trumpet every biological study that even hints that gayness and straightness might be hard-wired, but they show little interest in the abundant social-science research showing that sexual orientation cannot be innate….

[H]istorian Dr. Martin Duberman, founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, said “no good scientific work establishes that people are born gay or straight.” And cultural anthropologist Dr. Esther Newton (University of Michigan) called one study linking sexual orientation to biological traits ludicrous: “Any anthropologist who has looked cross-culturally (knows) it’s impossible that that’s true, because sexuality is structured in such different ways in different cultures.”

…

Gay and lesbian historians aren’t just claiming that before the 19th century nobody was called “gay.” They’re saying nobody was gay (or straight). While various societies had different ways of thinking about and expressing gender, love, and desire, homosexuality was generally something one could do, not something one could be.

Nicholas Cummings, a former president of the American Psychological Association, shared his experiences in a USA Today column:

When I was chief psychologist for Kaiser Permanente from 1959 to 1979, San Francisco’s gay and lesbian population burgeoned. I personally saw more than 2,000 patients with same-sex attraction, and my staff saw thousands more. We worked hard to develop approaches to meeting the needs of these patients.

…With clinical experience, my staff and I learned to assess the probability of change in those who wished to become heterosexual.

…Of the patients I oversaw who sought to change their orientation, hundreds were successful.

…

Since then, the role of psychotherapy in sexual orientation change efforts has been politicized. Gay and lesbian rights activists appear to be convincing the public that homosexuality is one identical inherited characteristic. To my dismay, some in the organized mental health community seem to agree, including the American Psychological Association, though I don’t believe that view is supported by scientific evidence.

Gays and lesbians have the right to be affirmed in their homosexuality. That’s why, as a member of the APA Council of Representatives in 1975, I sponsored the resolution by which the APA stated that homosexuality is not a mental disorder and, in 1976, the resolution, which passed the council unanimously, that gays and lesbians should not be discriminated against in the workplace.

But contending that all same-sex attraction is immutable is a distortion of reality. Attempting to characterize all sexual reorientation therapy as “unethical” violates patient choice and gives an outside party a veto over patients’ goals for their own treatment. A political agenda shouldn’t prevent gays and lesbians who desire to change from making their own decisions.

Whatever the situation at an individual clinic, accusing professionals from across the country who provide treatment for fully informed persons seeking to change their sexual orientation of perpetrating a fraud serves only to stigmatize the professional and shame the patient.

Lisa Diamond, lesbian professor of psychology and gender at the University of Utah believes that both men and women experience sexual fluidity. Sexual fluidity means a change in “sexual orientation” from being sexually and romantically attracted to persons of one’s same sex to being attracted to persons of the opposite sex or vice versa.

While Diamond believes that “sexual orientation” can and does change, she bristles at any suggestion that humans may have any capacity to participate in their own “sexual orientation” change. Oddly, however, she also argues that “‘Either we are a society that protects people’s rights to sexual expression…or we’re not.’” Does protecting “people’s rights to sexual expression” include protecting minors’ “rights to sexual expression”? If so, wouldn’t Kelly Cassidy’s bill violate the rights of those teens who desire help from mental health providers in constructing a sexual identity that does not affirm unchosen and unwanted same-sex attraction?

Dr. Howard Fradkin, homosexual psychologist who treats adult victims of childhood molestation, stated on The Oprah Show that childhood molestation can result in “sexual orientation confusion.”

Even the American Psychological Association was forced to admit this about the hypothetical causes of “sexual orientation”:

There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles…

When groups as disparate as homosexual scholars and conservatives agree that same-sex attraction is not biologically determined; that it can and does change; that environmental factors—including molestation—can contribute to the development of same-sex attraction; and that in some cases “conversion therapies” do work, it would be intellectually and ethically indefensible to use the law to ban forms of counseling that some homosexual activists don’t like.

The central motivation of this sloppily written, politically driven, dishonest bill is not to help children, but to advance the pernicious goal of mainstreaming Leftist beliefs about homosexuality even if that means undermining autonomy and liberty for families and mental health providers, and harming children and teens.

Stephen Black of the Restored Hope Network changed his sexual orientation as a young man and believes others should have the right to do the same. Not so for the all-knowing legislators in Springfield who are currently looking to pass HB 217 that will ban conversion therapy for minors. See video below:

TAKE ACTION: CLICK HERE to contact your State Representative and urge them to protect the rights of minors to seek help for their unwanted attractions. Urge a “No” vote on HB 217.

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I’m pleased to see that the Southern Poverty Law Center has come to its senses and apologized to Dr. Ben Carson, removing him from their “extremist” list. But they need to apologize to me too, since I’m still on their list, along with a number of other Christian leaders whom they have branded anti-gay extremists.

To be sure, I have considered it a badge of honor to be on the SPLC’s list, actually writing an article in 2012 thanking them for placing me in their elite category of “30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right.”

And, needless to say, I am not a famed children’s neuro-surgeon and potential presidential candidate. In other words, I am not Dr. Ben Carson.

But if the SPLC is truly wanting to do the right thing and this is not simply an embarrassing moment of their own extremism coming to light, then this would be a good time to start apologizing some more.

Several years ago, I received a letter from Mark Potok, spokesman and director of the SPLC, offering to enlighten me in the error of my ways if I, along with others receiving the letter, had been duped by various pro-family organizations.

I immediately reached out to Mr. Potok and the SPLC, but never received a reply.

Subsequently, I wrote a strong open letter to him, once again without receiving a reply.

Perhaps honest dialogue and interaction is not what the SPLC is looking for? Perhaps their radical agenda is based on labeling and defaming their ideological opponents?

The problem, of course, is that the SPLC did lots of wonderful work in the past, exposing hate groups that are worthy of the hate name, such as White Supremacists and Black Supremacists and Neo-Nazis.

Now, tragically, they have added conservative Christian organizations and individuals to their “hate” lists, and many people continue to take their listings seriously.

One man even tried to carry out an act of mass murder at the headquarters of a Christian organization placed on the SPLC’s “hate group” list, finding their location by way of SPLC’s “hate map.”

What makes this all the more disturbing is the specious nature of the evidence they offer in branding conservative Christians “extremists” and labelling their organizations “hate groups.”

I’ll use myself as a case in point.

On their page devoted to me, they write that, “Michael Brown is not typical of most who push the idea that a cabal of liberal media elites have orchestrated a so-called ‘homosexual agenda’ to indoctrinate children into a lifestyle that makes a mockery of Christian values.”

Yet I’m still labelled an “extremist” and listed as one of the “30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right.” (Also on this list were men like David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Malik Zulu Shabbaz, former leader of the New Black Panthers.)

They also write, “Unlike many other voices on the religious right, Brown generally has avoided the kind of slashing rhetoric that often devolves into rank defamation. His work is heavily footnoted and avoids the blanket pronouncements that have gotten others in trouble. But he still can sound conspiratorial.”

I guess you can be careful and nuanced in your wording as well as painstakingly thorough in documenting every statement, yet you can still make it onto their “extremist” list if your viewpoints smack of conservative moral values.

It seems, then, that it is one’s beliefs and values, not the accuracy of one’s claims, that make one an “extremist.”

What, then, is the evidence they cite out of more than 1,000 pages I have written addressing the issue of homosexuality, more than 20 other books on other subjects, and multiplied thousands of hours of radio broadcasts, sermons, and lectures devoted to a wide range of biblical, theological, and social topics?

First, they cite my statement that gay activists deny there is a gay agenda. (I kid you not.)

But this, of course, is a commonly known fact and even forms part of the written semantic strategy of gay activists. In other words, don’t use the term “homosexual agenda” but say, “gay and lesbian civil rights.” (For those who actually deny there’s such a thing as a gay agenda, please tell it to the pantheon of gay activist organizations, such as the HRC, NGLTF, Lamda Legal, GLSEN, GLAAD, and many others. All these organizations have clearly articulated goals and they have helped bring about numerous social changes in recent years, pointing to the success of their agenda.)

Second, the SPLC cites my statement that, “[I]t is not good that homosexual behavior is presented as just another alternative to heterosexual behavior, that bisexuality is celebrated, that transgenderism [sic] is normalized, that sex-change surgery is presented as the thing to do, that ex-gays are ridiculed and their very existence denied.”

Yes, this is part of their evidence that I am a dangerous, radical right, extremist.

Third, they state that, “Brown has also been known to make spurious claims linking homosexuality and pedophilia.”

Actually, in my book A Queer Thing Happened to America, which they cite and quote in their article, I wrote this: MICHAEL BROWN IS NOT EQUATING HOMOSEXUAL PRACTICE WITH PEDOPHILIA. MICHAEL BROWN IS NOT CALLING ALL HOMOSEXUALS PEDOPHILES. (Bold caps in the original.)

How could they possibly miss this?

What I have compared is the arguments used by pederast activists and gay activists (such as, I was born this way; I can’t change; this is about love; this is found in all cultures; etc.). I have not compared the acts.

As for the article they reference regarding Jerry Sandusky, I stated there that “the great majority of homosexual men also deplore Sandusky’s alleged acts,” explaining, though, that almost no one wanted to talk about the fact that the acts were homosexual in nature. (Having sex with teenage boys and young men is not the same as raping a baby.)

The SPLC claims that pedophiles who prey on boys are not homosexual predators, but that flies in the face of the history of homosexual “man-boy love,” not to mention ignoring the legal and scientific documents that speak of “homosexual pedophiles” and “heterosexual pedophiles.”

As for the rest of the SPLC’s evidence – well, there is none, aside from taking issue with my call to, “Speak now or forever hold your peace,” by which I mean that we need to speak up now since gay activists and their allies increasingly want to silence people like me. (They do this, for example, by labelling us haters and extremists!)

All that being said, I’m truly honored to be on the hit lists of groups like the SPLC, the HRC, and GLAAD, and I do wear these listings as a badge of honor (see Matthew 5:10-12).

But if the SPLC is truly wanting to make amends for their dangerous and misleading listings, I will gladly accept their apologies and encourage them to apologize to others as well.

If not, I’d love to debate the relevant issues publicly, be it on my radio show or in a neutral, moderated setting, discussing facts rather than allegations. With the vast resources of the SPLC, they should have no problem finding an adequate opponent to take me on.

So, Mr. Potok and other SPLC leaders, what do you say? Will it be an apology or a civil debate?

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

In October 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) put Dr. Benjamin Carson on its “Extremist Watch List.” Why? Because Dr. Carson holds the traditional, historical, and true belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and has the courage to express that belief.

Who else is on this “Extremist Watch List”? In addition to a host of unsavory Neo-Nazis, KKK members, and skinheads, the SPLC lists the following as “extremists”:

• Dr. Michael Brown, Bible scholar, author, and radio host
• Cliff Kincaid, director of Accuracy in Media
• Charles Murray, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of The Bell Curve and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
• Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council

The depth of the ignorance and malignity of the SPLC’s leaders is exposed through their defamation of a man of such unquestioned integrity as Dr. Carson.

After being exposed by Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News Channel program this week (video here), and receiving “intense criticism” from the public, the far Left SPLC decided to reverse their decision and issue an apology to Dr. Carson—well, an apology of sorts. You know, the sort that’s not really an apology. Here’s an excerpt from their deeply contrite apology:

In October 2014, we posted an “Extremist File” of Dr. Ben Carson. This week, as we’ve come under intense criticism for doing so, we’ve reviewed our profile and have concluded that it did not meet our standards, so we have taken it down and apologize to Dr. Carson for having posted it. 

We’ve also come to the conclusion that the question of whether a better-researched profile of Dr. Carson should or should not be included in our “Extremist Files” is taking attention from the fact that Dr. Carson has, in fact, made a number of statements that express views that we believe most people would conclude are extreme….We laud Dr. Carson for his many contributions to medicine and his philanthropic work, and we, like so many others, are inspired by his personal story. Nevertheless…because Dr. Carson is such a prominent person, we believe that his views should be closely examined.

I wouldn’t want to go so far as to claim that the SPLC is a racist organization, but we can’t help but wonder if Dr. Carson’s skin color may have factored into the SPLC’s decision to remove him from their fear-mongering, money-making “Extremist Watch List” while leaving Dr. Brown, Cliff Kincaid, Charles Murray, and Tony Perkins on the list.

One brief word about “extremism”: “Extremist” is a free-floating term with no fixed meaning relative to truth or goodness. Being an “extremist” can be either good or bad depending on the activity or belief from which one has become distanced. In the midst of a culture so corrupt and decadent that citizens cheer when men legally wed men and women flock to a movie that extols the pleasures of sadomasochistic sex, we should thank God that for our “extremist” status.

If having a public forum and expressing the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman warrant inclusion on a list of hateful extremists, then the SPLC must be either short-staffed, which seems unlikely given the millions of dollars they suck from a gullible public, or they’re slackers.

There are countless Jews and Christians from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant faith traditions who believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. And many of these men and women have access to public forums in which they express their beliefs. They express their beliefs in college, university, and seminary classrooms; podcasts; sermons; scholarly journals, magazines; newspapers; websites; speaking engagements; and news programs. So, why are they not on the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center’s “extremist” list?

Perhaps the reasons for the SPLC’s oddly truncated list are twofold:

1.) A common tactic of homosexual activists is to exploit the natural sheep-like human tendency to desire membership in the cool group and the natural human tendency to avoid pain and conflict. The Left maligns leaders who tell the truth about homoeroticism so that others who also hold these same true beliefs will not want to be associated with them. The Left thereby effectively marginalizes truth-tellers.

2.) The SPLC leaders surely know that if they included every public person who affirms the truth that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual complementarity, the SPLC would discredit itself—further.

We should learn three lessons from this newest unforced error from the SPLC.

Christians need to speak the truth in love about homosexuality and gender confusion with the perseverance and boldness that the Left speaks lies.

Second, Christians need to publicly come alongside those who are speaking the truth about homosexuality, gender confusion, marriage, and children’s rights.

Finally, Christians need to be willing to be persecuted for expressing biblical truth—which is to say, truth—about homosexuality and gender confusion.

Temporal and eternal lives are at stake.

Written By Gina Miller

As we continue to watch insanity reign in our nation on far too many levels, yet another activist federal judge, an Obama appointee who apparently does not know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, has overruled the will of the people in the State of Virginia and declared its ban on same-sex “marriage” to be “unconstitutional.” So continues the warped, vicious assault on truth, reason, the family and our freedoms.

We also have an example of what a Godless, morally relativistic university system produces. A third-year law student at Yale has written an opinion piece published on Wednesday in the New York Times. Jacob Victor’s column titled, “Ending ‘Gay Conversion’ for Good,” demonstrates the standard, leftist talking-point lies used against those who help people overcome unwanted same-sex attraction.

His piece begins:

Therapy programs that purport to “convert” lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kids have caused immeasurable harm since they became prominent in the 1970s. Rigorous studies have shown again and again that efforts to change young people’s sexual orientation not only fail, but are also linked to suicidal behavior, depression, anxiety, drug use and risky sexual behavior.

These are lies. I am not aware of any therapists who guarantee conversion, any kind of therapists. When sin has a powerful hold on someone, it’s never easy to let it go, but it is possible. Countless people have escaped the grip of homosexuality and have gone on to live normal lives. To say that change from homosexuality is not possible is to lie.

As for Victor’s contention that “rigorous studies” have shown that reparative therapy causes suicidal behavior, depression, anxiety, drug use and promiscuity, the truth is that any time we embrace sin, which is behavior that contradicts God’s commands and His design for mankind, we are subjecting ourselves to all kinds of self-destructive potential. Homosexual behavior is particularly destructive, because of the special, sacred and spiritual nature of human sexuality, which is meant to be expressed between husband and wife. When that act is perverted, debased and abused, it becomes a monstrous force in the lives of the people who engage in it. It can be no other way, because homosexuality turns God-designed sexuality on its head, and it then becomes an evil, destructive force, and all those rotten things routinely manifest themselves in the lives of homosexuals at much higher rates than in heterosexuals.

These “rigorous studies” to which Victor refers are nothing more than politically motivated tripe. The truth is that if it becomes widely understood that homosexuality is not an immutable characteristic but a chosen behavior, then the entire homosexual agenda collapses upon the lies on which it was built. That is why we are seeing a hyper-aggressive assault on therapists who offer help for people who want to be free of homosexual attraction. While same-sex attraction itself may not be consciously chosen, due to various influences, including childhood sexual abuse, it most certainly is a choice when someone decides to act upon the attraction by engaging in the behavior.

In his deceit-laden column, Victor goes on to mention the November 2012 lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) against a small, nonprofit group in New Jersey, Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH). The angle taken by the radical leftists at the SPLC is that JONAH has engaged in “consumer fraud” by claiming to be able to “cure” homosexuality, which is a flat-out lie, something JONAH has never done. The SPLC is using this lie in an attempt to shut down JONAH and discredit the legitimate efforts of others like them in helping people reduce or eliminate their homosexual attraction.

This is an evil, detestable attack on the God-given rights of the members of JONAH and those who seek their help. From JONAH’s website:

JONAH has been unjustly sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who claims that homosexuality is permanently fixed and that people cannot be helped in overcoming their unwanted same-sex attractions.

SPLC ‘s position is inconsistent with numerous scientific and medical opinions and studies, finding that sexual attraction is influenced by many factors, both environmental and biological. Even certain gay activist groups claim that sexual attractions can be fluid and change throughout people’s lives. SPLC’s allegations also ignore the thousands of people who have already benefited from programs, such as those offered by JONAH and others, many of whom are now living their life long dreams, including traditional marriage and children.

Charles LiMandri, the President and Chief Counsel of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, stated, “The SPLC lawsuit is ill-conceived and legally untenable for multiple reasons. It seeks to violate the First Amendment freedoms of speech, religion and association not only of JONAH and the other defendants, but also untold numbers of people in need that stand to benefit from their services.”

… JONAH has never been the target of a lawsuit until now, and this lawsuit is apparently the result of SPLC advertising in the media for people willing to be named as plaintiffs against JONAH. SPLC’s lawsuit seeks to deprive men and women who experience unwanted same sex attractions of the opportunity to explore and resolve these attractions so that they can live healthier and happier lives consistent with their own personal values.

“It is the height of intolerance and arrogance for the SPLC to dictate to individuals who experience unwanted same sex attraction and who are seeking help, that they are not entitled to receive such help nor support in a way that respects their personal values,” LiMandri stated: “JONAH and the other defendants will be vigorously defended against these baseless claims to protect not only their Constitutional rights, but also the right of self-determination of all those who wish to resolve their unwanted same sex attractions.”

Do not underestimate the seriousness of this case and the horrible legal precedent implications to reparative therapists, counselors and other such groups across the nation if JONAH were to lose. Just because JONAH is clearly innocent of these accusations does not mean that a leftist court won’t rule unjustly against them.

Charles LiMandri and the other God-sent lawyers from the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF) have stood up to defend JONAH from this un-American lawsuit. Both JONAH and the FCDF are non-profit groups that rely on generous donations to continue their work. I spoke on the phone today with Arthur Goldberg, the Co-Director of JONAH, and he expressed his deep gratitude to Mr. LiMandri and the FCDF for their invaluable assistance with this case. Without their help, JONAH could never afford a defense against the super-wealthy SPLC.

I ask that you please pray for JONAH and the FCDF that the Lord would protect them and give them the victory over this unjust legal assault at the hands of the radical leftist, hate-mongering SPLC. I also ask that if you’re able, to consider donating what you can to one or both groups. You can give to JONAH here, and to the FCDF here.

Originally published at RenewAmerica.com.

Lesbian activist State Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) is trying to rush out of committee her ill-conceived, poorly written mess of a bill that would prohibit any counseling efforts that may help minors construct an identity that does not include affirmation of unwanted same-sex attraction. Perhaps these minors should be considered a “sexual minority.”

Cassidy’s bill is titled the “Conversion Therapy Prohibition Act,” but oddly this bill fails to define precisely what is prohibited, which matters not to Cassidy and her legislative accomplices. Just get the bill passed in a New York minute, and then let likeminded ideologues from homosexuality-affirming law firms and in the courts will sue the pants off any mental health providers who say anything homosexual activists don’t like.

The Left has relied heavily on dubious tactics for transforming cultural views of homoerotic activity and relationships. These tactics include hurling epithets at anyone who holds moral views they don’t like; using the false analogy that compares homoerotic desire and activity to behaviorally neutral skin color; conflating forms of love (i.e., erotic and platonic); censoring resources they don’t like in public schools; deceitfully manipulating already politicized and unstable social “science” research; and cherry-picking “narratives” that promote only their beliefs about sexuality.

In addition to the criticisms of this preposterous bill that I outlined in my first article, there are other aspects of this issue on which lawmakers should ruminate. For example, on the website Public Discourse, happily married mother of two, Jean Lloyd, PhD., tells the story of her own gender confusion and same-sex attraction when she was a teen. Further, she outlines with painful clarity what the trajectory of her life might have been if “conversion therapy” bans had been in place in 1985:

Teens struggling with their sexual identity may seem to have more options than they did in the 1980s—but one important option is increasingly denied to them.

I came across a photo the other day of a fifteen-year-old girl dressed in a tuxedo, complete with red bow tie and tails, standing in front of a Christmas tree. She was heading for her high school’s Christmas dance, and her parents had taken pictures beforehand.

Why the tux? She had recently heard of a “gender bending” prom at a nearby school, one where all the girls had worn tuxes along with their dates. She was immediately drawn to the idea. However, at her school, she was the only one in on the twist. In the photo, she is attempting to look cool and smug, but her eyes betray sadness. The sexual identity struggles and confusion that had been quietly welling up within her since middle school were finally emerging for all to see.

The photo is from many years ago. I know because I am the girl in the picture. As I think back to that night, I can’t help but wonder how that girl’s life—my life—would have been different if the dance had taken place in 2015 instead of 1985.

I can’t help imagining the scenario that teenagers struggling with their sexuality face today…

2015: The Girl in the Tuxedo Goes to the Dance

After the pictures at home are taken, it’s time to head to the dance. Once she arrives, the girl in the tuxedo attracts attention for her bold choice to subvert gender stereotypes through her choice of attire. Members of her high school’s LGBTQ-Straight Alliance applaud her. Later, when she opens up about the confusion she’s been wrestling with surrounding her feelings toward other girls and her own identity, the “Q” (for “Questioning”) component of such clubs is happy to welcome her and inform her about gay sex and identity.

If she resists embracing a lesbian identity, she is encouraged to come out of denial and accept herself for who she is. If she seeks counseling, her therapist hews to a strict, professionally mandated protocol to affirm and validate her identity as homosexual. The counselor tells her that being lesbian is an unchangeable and good part of who she is, even though the girl is experiencing significant distress over the intense emotional and physical draw she feels toward other girls and women.

While she is in therapy, if she mentions wishing to resist these attractions and wonders whether she might develop heterosexually—or at least not identify as gay—it is considered unethical for the counselor to discuss this possibility with her. In some states, such as California and New Jersey, it is even against the law.

If she speaks of her religion and says there are faith convictions at stake that matter deeply to her, the therapist tries to help her overcome her “homophobic” values and free her from the “false consciousness” and oppression to which she is clearly subject.

And if she finally discusses the still unrevealed secret of sexual abuse—the fifty-year-old uncle and the summer six years ago? Exploring its possible connection with her same-sex attraction is forbidden. Any such discussion or treatment must still affirm her same-sex orientation and disassociate the abuse from her sexual development. She is, after all, only fifteen, and must be protected from dangerous ideas that might depress her further and chip away at her fragile self-esteem.

Through social and therapeutic efforts, our fifteen-year-old’s same-sex attractions are reified as central to her very being and personhood. Alleviating her distress about them and encouraging her to accept herself as lesbian is the only option presented to her. She may even be told that she was “born this way,” evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Since she wore the tux to the dance and is seeking a more masculine gender expression, a discussion of possible transgenderism is in order. If she is interested or agrees, a conversation about public restrooms and her right to privilege her “inner sense of gender” may be needed. With her consent, her therapist is legally permitted and professionally encouraged to help her begin socially transitioning from female to male. Eventual sex reassignment surgery is an option, depending on insurance coverage and personal resources.

Now there is no therapeutic imperative to help her accept herself as she is because she was “born this way,” as there would be regarding her same-sex attraction. For biological sex is not sacrosanct, as inner sensibilities or attractions are (faith or moral sensibilities excepted, of course). The subjective trumps the objective.

In 2015, sexual orientation redirection efforts are precluded from discussion, even if she explicitly asks for them. However, if she senses she is transgender, her right to redirection must be honored. If she wishes, she can quickly begin the process of “transitioning” to become a male. This path will involve intensive gender re-socialization, hormone therapy, and if she wants, irreversible amputative and reconstructive surgeries. This is and arduous and painful journey, with many risks and harms, irremediable loss and regret among them. But it is considered worth these risks and pain. She is, after all, only fifteen, and it would be unfair at such an age to limit the horizon of her possible identity paths and the options available to her.

All except one option, that is.

Should she one day desire children—as a lifestyle choice—they can be obtained through adoption or third-party reproduction. Whether the child ever has another social parent is up to her. It’s her child, after all.

And at long last, she—become he—will have what she wanted. Or, if not exactly what she wanted, at least what those initial counselors, affirmations, and “freedoms” had left open to her younger self, in flagrant disregard of the long-term possibilities and options they had foreclosed.

1985: The Girl in the Tuxedo Begins a Journey

I was that fifteen-year-old girl in the tuxedo, but my experience was very different from the one promoted by the social values of 2015. What ensued thereafter was a long and sometimes arduous and painful journey of becoming, working out my sexual identity from the cauldron of confusion that surrounded my development.

I have written a little about this journey, wherein I embraced and then renounced an active lesbian life to follow the God who made me and called me by name into His love. I began to trust the One who knew the truth of my identity more than I did, who wrote His image into my being and body as female, and who designed sexuality and set boundaries upon it for my good. I spent well over a decade as a celibate single person. During this time, I felt a wholeness in body, a growing wholeness in my soul, and a greater peace than I could ever have imagined at the age of fifteen. This was more than enough transformation for me, and I was deeply content. However, fifteen years after my tuxedo debut, to my utter surprise, a flicker of heterosexual desire emerged. As I approached forty, I certainly never dreamed I would marry. But now, as I write, I struggle to finish because my youngest child is tugging at my arm. My beloved husband, my children’s father, will soon be home from work.

How grateful I am that the photograph is from 1985, not 2015.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Cassidy’s bill is its inconsistency with other claims of the Left. While homosexuality and gender-confusion advocates believe that minors should be able to access medical assistance to help them change their unwanted gender—which, of course, is biologically determined (i.e., they were “born that way”)—these same activists believe minors should be prohibited by law from accessing medical help to change their unwanted “sexual orientation”—for which there is no proof of biological causation. Stunning hypocrisy.

Jean Lloyd’s story exposes the politically-infused narrow-mindedness, callousness, and restriction of liberties of Cassidy’s ambiguous, hypocritical “Conversion Therapy Prohibition Act.” Those lawmakers inclined toward the path of least political resistance ought to spend time researching and thinking deeply on this issue. They should ask themselves what if Jean Lloyd had been their daughter? Nothing less than the welfare and rights of children, teens, and the parents who love them most deeply are at stake.

TAKE ACTION: CLICK HERE to contact your State Representative and urge them to protect the rights of minors to seek help for their unwanted attractions. Urge a “No” vote on HB 217.

Sometimes we’re able to float through life blissfully unaware of the offal that the television, movie, cable, and video-streaming industries feed the culture. Often, we have a remarkable capacity for ingesting it and ignoring the vomit that results from ingesting offal. Other times, the stench from the offal and the vomit are just too much. That’s what’s happened to me.

The first outrage was hearing that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams regularly watches his own daughter, Allison Williams, who is an actress on the vulgar HBO program Girls. In a recent episode, there was a brief scene in which a young man performs a sex act on her which I can’t describe in even general terms in this article. When questioned, her father offered this silly dismissal of his peculiar TV viewing habit:

She’s always been an actress. For us, watching her is the family occupation and everybody has to remember it’s acting, no animals were harmed during the filming, and ideally nobody gets hurt.

Then, last week, I learned that ABC is producing a sitcom based on the life of nasty, brutish, obscene sex columnist (and Chicago native) Dan Savage. This is the man who at a journalism conference for high school students insulted Christians and then, like a middle-school bully, hurled the anti-“gay” epithet “pansies” at those students who walked out. At a college speaking engagement, the savage Savage described conservative Christians as bat sh*t, a*sh*le, dou**ebags. And in his columns and on college tours, he cheerfully endorses threesomes and sexual practices that involve excrement.

The proverbial last straw that led to this article came yesterday when I was made aware that the puerile hosts of the Today Show are spending two entire weeks tittering about and promoting Fifty Shades of Grey, the softcore porn movie based on the hardcore porn novel. Yes, some will argue that because everything is relative and there are far more sexually explicit novels, Fifty Shades of Grey is not hardcore porn. But I joyfully reject the false belief that everything is relative and, therefore, I feel no compunction about describing Fifty Shades of Grey as hardcore porn.

For those who have been living on a compound in a cave on a remote island, Fifty Shades of Grey is the novelistic offal that extols the wonders of “bondage and discipline,” sadism, and masochism (BDSM) that child-women have been devouring. The stars are Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and Jamie Dornan, a married Irish actor and father of a baby girl.

Here are some of the profoundly sad comments Dakota Johnson made in a CNN interview:

It’s stressful enough to be tied to a bed naked in a scene. But then they call cut, and you’re still tied to the bed, naked. Jamie would be the first one to throw a blanket over me….I don’t want my family to see [the movie], because it’s inappropriate. Or my brothers’ friends, who I grew up with.

Dakota Johnson’s response reveals the incoherence of her belief system: While recognizing the truth that there are things regarding her body that her family shouldn’t see, she fails to recognize that the world should not see these things either.

Whether actors realize it or not, the belief that the profession of acting renders nudity and erotic interactions with acquaintances morally justifiable reflects the human tendency toward Gnosticism. Gnosticism holds a dim view of materiality including physical embodiment and seeks to sever the inseverable link between body and spirit. Peter Burfeind explains how Gnostic thought shapes the prevailing cultural view of the body:

[T]he Gnostic reading of humanity…says the Self has nothing to do with the physical body, but rather the body is nothing more than vesture to be tailored any way one wants.

It’s all rooted in the narrative of one’s “Self” being liberated from the stifling oppression of the body and its various determinations…, rooted in the Gnostic notion that life is the story of the Self’s liberation from (or reconstituting of)…bodily realities in order to pursue the heroic journey of Self-divinization.

Nudity and erotic interactions always have meaning, which is why nudity and erotic interactions in theatrical performances are wrong. The body cannot be separated from the spirit. One can portray  another character through language, costuming, and movement, but one cannot be so wholly transformed that nudity and erotic interactions become the acts of someone else. In Dakota Johnson’s desire to be covered immediately after filming a sex scene and her desire that her family and brothers’ friends not see her movie, she apprehends something true that evidently escapes Brian Williams.

In the CNN interview, Jamie Dornan revealed the challenges of doing the BDSM scenes:

Some of the Red Room stuff was uncomfortable. There were times when Dakota was not wearing much, and I had to do stuff to her that I’d never choose to do to a woman.

A man of integrity would refuse to be in a room with an unclothed woman, doing dishonorable things to her. Claiming the mantle of actor does not render Dornan’s actions honorable. Dakota Johnson, the young woman, was in reality unclothed and Dornan did dishonorable things to her—not to a character—but to her. And worse still, he did them so that the whole world could see.

If nudity is morally defensible as long as one is acting, and if touching what we tell our children are “private parts” of someone with whom you have no intimate relationship is morally defensible as long as one is acting, then would it be morally defensible for Don Johnson to have acted with his daughter in the Jamie Dornan role? If not, why not?

Dakota Johnson reveals too an impoverished view of female empowerment:

[I]f I can be an advocate for women to do what they want with their bodies and not be ashamed of what they want, then I’m all for that.

Female flourishing and freedom do not come from unfettered bodily autonomy but from knowing and doing the will of God. And God does not desire that women engage in sexual acts that degrade and inflict pain on them with men to whom they are not married. Nor does God desire that actresses perform in movies or plays that call for them to be unclothed or touched intimately by men. While Fifty Shades of Grey seeks to depict liberation through titillating, boundary-pushing imagery, in reality, it serves to enslave women in the same sexual grip that has historically enslaved only men.

The Today Show is contributing to the cultural hyperventilation about this tacky movie made from a poorly written, tacky book by showing clips from the movie every day this week, having an advance showing for fans, hosting a contest in which fans are asked to write captions for different scenes, and inviting actors to the show to discuss the movie.

So far, not one guest has been invited to discuss seriously the meaning and effect of this cultural phenomenon on an understanding of sexuality and human flourishing. No discussion thus far of the gnostic aspects that appearing in such a movie signifies. No expressions of sadness about the debasement of women that the movie both reflects and encourages. No shame that teens may be ingesting this offal.

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Thomas Banks worked for Ford in Michigan for more than three years as a product engineer. But one day he received an email, left a message in the comments section, and two weeks later – in August 2014 – was fired after being told he had violated Ford’s anti-harassment policy. Liberty Institute has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) – and their investigation could lead to a lawsuit in federal court.

OneNewsNow asked Liberty Institute attorney Cleve Doty the nature of the article on which Banks commented.

“It was about the basically LGBT organization at Ford,” Doty responds, “and Mr. Banks had published a comment that said [in effect] Look, we should care about automobiles, not about this. This may be offensive to Christians and others in the workplace. Why don’t we focus on cars – [that was] the essence of his comment.”

Banks’ specific comments, as outlined in the complaint, were as follows:

“For this Ford Motor should be thoroughly ashamed. Endorsing and promoting sodomy is of benefit to no one. This topic is disruptive to the workplace and is an assault on Christians and morality, as well as antithetical to our design and our survival. Immoral sexual conduct should not be a topic for an automotive manufacturer to endorse or promote. And yes – this is historic – but not in a good way. Never in the history of mankind has a culture survived that promotes sodomy. Heterosexual behavior creates life – homosexual behavior leads to death.”

“Absolutely. Diversity and inclusion means that we’re able to have people in the workplace work together and don’t necessarily have to agree but we can all get along,” replies Doty. “And Mr. Banks gets along individually with folks. But here, he was told immediately [he was] fired based upon a single comment.”

Liberty’s director of litigation adds that if Ford is permitted to get away with firing Banks over the comment, “we fear that every person of faith will be punished for talking about his or her faith in the workplace.”

This article was originally posted on the OneNewsNow.com website.

IFI is richly blessed by the supportive, encouraging, wise, impassioned, and eloquent email messages and Facebook comments we receive. Yesterday, we received just such a message in response to the call-to-action article about State Representative Kelly Cassidy’s (D-Chicago) anti-identity-choice bill, which is formally titled “Conversion Therapy Prohibition Act.”

We think IFI subscribers would be equally blessed by reading what a practicing psychologist with over fifty years of experience thinks of the legislation that professional politician and pro-abortion/pro-homosexuality activist Kelly Cassidy has proposed.

With the author’s permission, his letter is published here:

This legislation is an outrageous intrusion into the rights of families. I cannot begin to expand on the extraordinary self-imposed stupidity of persons espousing such thinking. (I do not use the word “stupid” very often, but I can think of no more expressive, all-encompassing word than “stupid” to describe my disgust for such people.)

Their ignorance of human psycho-sexual development is abysmal. There is no such thing as a “gay” gene. There may, in some cases, be a pre-disposition to what is called “gay-ness” (although the word “gay” seems an absurd distortion of language, given the relentlessly depressing medical and psychological outcomes experienced by its full-time participants). But in most instances, the choice (it is a choice) of a “gay” lifestyle results from a combination of factors, not from a single, universally determinant gene, as much of the gay community disingenuously preaches.

To suggest that counseling, freely chosen as an aid to the choice of a non-“gay” lifestyle, is harmful says that no one has the God-given, constitutionally-protected freedom to choose his/her behavior and to accept responsibility for such behavior. Such prohibitive legislation is utterly unconscionable.

Those who support the denial of client-and-family rights might also wish to recall that similar legislation was passed during the 1930s in Germany and is also entirely in sync with the dictates of Shari’a law prompting the stoning of women and the whacking off of hands. The next step could well be the banning of Alcoholics Anonymous by heavy-drinking legislators or the banning of certain religious teachings about marriage by divorced lawmakers.

One is stunned by the crass and punitive measures which militant “gay” legislators engender and, worse, by the further blindness of their colleagues who promote the advance of injustice in the cause of a sickeningly intolerant political correctness. The dimensions of this debate are a good example of how politics has overcome science and how evidence is diminished in the face of pressure, especially among ruling members of the American Psychiatric Association who knew better but caved to the politically correct flow from the “gay” culture—pressure which has devastated both common sense and our collective wisdom

Daniel Boland, PhD.

If passed this bill would prohibit parents from accessing any counseling efforts for their minor children—including teenagers—that may involve facilitating the construction of an identity that does not affirm homoerotic feelings or gender confusion. This disastrously written, fascistic (i.e., oppressive or dictatorial) bill would prohibit such counseling even if, for example, a teenager desires to construct such an identity.

This draconian bill even mandates that if a licensed mental health provider in Illinois were just to refer a teen to a mental health provider in another state in which such counseling is legal, the Illinois mental health provider would be subject to professional discipline. So much for autonomy, choice, parental rights, religious liberty, and free speech.

TAKE ACTION: CLICK HERE to contact your local state representative and urge him/her to protect the rights of minors to seek help for their unwanted attractions.  Ask them to uphold parental rights. Request that they vote “NO” on HB 217.

You can also call the Illinois Capitol switchboard at (217) 782-2000 and leave a message for your state representative.

Fighting back: Click here to donate to the Illinois Family Institute!

Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission has already handed down its decision in a case involving a baker who favors biblical marriage – now it will hear one concerning a baker who favors same-sex “marriage.” A customer walked into Azucar Bakery in Denver and requested a cake in the shape of a Bible inscribed with what bakery owner Marjorie Silva describes as “a hateful message” and an “X” through the image of a same-sex couple.

Silva agreed to bake the cake in the shape requested, but refused to add the inscription. The customer left and later filed a complaint before the Commission.

Alliance Defending Freedom represents Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips, who has already been found guilty of discrimination because, based on his Christian faith, he refused to do a special cake for a same-gender “wedding.” ADF attorney Jeremy Tedesco argues that Silva has every right to decline to promote a message with which she sincerely disagrees – the same stance ADF took in defending Phillips.

“So the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which now has a complaint before it on [the Silva] case, has to decide whether this baker is going to have their First Amendment rights respected – or if they’re going to be put in the same position as Jack Phillips, who faces potentially losing his business just because they exercised their First Amendment right.

“We support the right of this baker who didn’t want to create a cake that was contrary to their beliefs,” he summarizes.

Tedesco says the state can go one of two ways in the matter.

“Colorado is either going to have to say We don’t care about anybody’s First Amendment rights in our state – or they may say, Well, we’re going to play favorites. We’re going to allow the baker who supports same-sex marriage to decline to provide services to people who object to that point of view.”

According to the attorney, the state would be stating the latter by allowing the baker who supports homosexual marriage to get away with it and letting stand the punishment against Christian baker Phillips. He has taken his case to the Colorado Court of Appeals.

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

Doggedly committed to pro-homoeroticism, lesbian activist State Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) has resurrected the dangerous “Conversion Therapy Prohibition Act,” which seeks to prohibit minors from receiving any counseling that involves efforts to change homoerotic desire, homoerotic activity, gender-confused feelings, and behaviors impelled by gender confusion.

This doozy of a bill states that “‘Sexual orientation change efforts’ or ‘conversion therapy’” means any practices or treatments that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation, as defined by (o-1) of Section 1-103 of the Illinois Human Rights Act, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions.” Unlike the more common definition of “sexual orientation,” the Illinois Human Rights Act defines “sexual orientation” as “actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or gender-related identity, whether or not traditionally associated with the person’s designated sex at birth.”

If passed this bill would prohibit parents of a child or teenager who experiences homoerotic desire, gender dysphoria, or Gender Identity Disorder from having access to counseling that may include facilitating change in feelings or volitional activity—even if such change is desired by both parents and their children.

Cassidy’s oppressive anti-autonomy, anti-parental rights bill seeks to ban any counseling that may result in the rejection of a “gay” identity. This bill seeks to rob minors of the freedom to seek ways of constructing an identity that don’t include affirming their unchosen homoerotic feelings. Liberals like Cassidy don’t believe that it’s possible for people who experience unchosen homoerotic feelings to construct such an identity and want to impose their philosophical and moral assumptions on everyone in America.

Such a bill would be more accurately titled the “Anti-Identity-Choice Act” because what homosexual activists like Cassidy seek to do is legally prohibit mental health professionals from even discussing ways to construct identity that do not affirm same-sex attraction. Surely though, if mental health providers are permitted to help minors pursue radical changes in their “gender expression,” including even sanctioning cross-dressing and the use of hormone-blockers, they should be allowed to help minors pursue changes in their sexual identities. If minors are allowed to reject their physical embodiment, why shouldn’t they be allowed to reject their homoerotic feelings? Cassidy needs to explain why the rejection of one’s objective, biological sex is viewed as sound, right, healthy, and legally permissible while the rejection of one’s homoerotic feelings is viewed as unsound, wrong, unhealthy, and legally prohibited.

While the Left wants minors to be able to change their “gender identity” (or access oral contraceptives and abortions) with absolute, unfettered freedom, they want minors to be prohibited from even hearing any ideas that may be linked to their unchosen same-sex attraction, because such ideas undermine the unproven, non-factual, self-serving assumptions of homosexual activists and their highly politicized, Leftist mental health community allies.

The sponsors of this bill have marshalled an unimpressive array of claims from mental “health” organizations, all of which are loaded with biased and ambiguous language in support of an astoundingly totalitarian bill. If we have any really good critical thinkers and debaters in Springfield, they should be able to shred this bill in a floor debate. (That said, I’ve learned that floor debates are not debates in any true sense of the word. Participants in even a faux-debate should challenge contentions and demand evidence for claims.)

Questions for the bill’s sponsors

This bill raises a number of questions—all of which would be good for lawmakers to pose to Cassidy:

• What specifically constitutes “sexual orientation change efforts”?

• The bill cites the AMA’s criticism of one type of therapy (i.e., aversion therapy). Is that the only form of therapy that would be prohibited by this bill?

• Would a 17-year-old who experiences homoerotic feelings but wants to construct an identity that does not include affirming those feelings be allowed to get help from a mental health provider for such an endeavor?

• Would a 14-year-old who experiences homoerotic feelings and admits to having been sexually molested be allowed to explore the connection between sexual molestation and homoerotic feelings with a mental health provider?

• The bill claims that homosexuality is not a “disorder, deficiency, or shortcoming,” stating that “The major professional associations of mental health practitioners and researchers in the United States have recognized this fact for nearly 40 years.” What specifically does this mean? Are the bill’s sponsors asserting as fact that engaging in homoerotic activity is not morally disordered, morally deficient, or a moral shortcoming? If so, where is their conclusive scientific proof for such a claim about the moral status of freely chosen activity?

• One of the “expert” organizations cited refers to “bias” and “societal prejudice,” neither term of which is defined. Is the belief that voluntary homoerotic activity is immoral proof of bias and prejudice? So, for example, since Pope Francis, Oxford University law professor John Finnis, Princeton University law professor Robert George, and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright believe that homoerotic activity is immoral, are they—in Cassidy’s view—biased and prejudiced? If the bill’s sponsors think such moral beliefs about homoerotic activity are inherently biased and prejudiced then they must include their definitions of “bias” and “prejudice” in the bill.

• The bill cites the American Psychological Association’s (APA) claim “that sexual orientation change efforts can pose critical health risks to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people.” Note that the APA did not claim that such efforts do pose risks but rather that they can. Additionally, the claim does not identify if all “sexual orientation change efforts” pose such risks. Nor does the bill provide conclusive, incontrovertible proof for this nebulous claim. The bill’s sponsors should be asked which specific “sexual orientation change efforts” have been unequivocally proven to cause serious health risks and asked to provide their incontrovertible proof.

• The bill cites the APA’s admission that there exists “anecdotal reports of ‘cures’” which are “counterbalanced by anecdotal reports of psychological harm.” Someone should ask Cassidy, why she believes there are quotation marks around the word “’cures’” while no such marks surround “harm.” Then someone should ask if she believes anecdotal reports of “harm” should be treated the same as anecdotal reports of cures.

• The bill cites the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s claim that “there is no medically valid basis for attempting to prevent homosexuality.” Might this statement hold true for other conditions for which people seek counseling, like “minor-attraction,” paraphilias, and relationship problems? Couldn’t an argument be made that “there is no medically valid basis for attempting to change” minor attraction, or paraphilias, or relationship dysfunction? In addition,  aren’t there reasons other than medical reasons for which people seek counseling?

• The bill claims that “Minors who experience family rejection based on their sexual orientation face especially serious health risks.” First, what does this have to do with prohibiting certain therapeutic modalities? And second, not all parents who believe homoerotic activity is immoral reject their children. Merely holding the belief that homoerotic activity is immoral no more constitutes rejection of minor children who experience unchosen homoerotic attraction or engage in homoerotic activity than does disapproval of polyamorous activity constitute rejection of minors who experience polyamorous feelings or engage in polyamorous activity.

• The bill cites the National Association of Social Workers’ claim that “sexual orientation conversion therapies assume that homosexual orientation is…freely chosen.” This claim could mean two different things. It could mean that some therapies assume homoerotic feelings are freely chosen, or it could mean that some therapies assume a “gay identity” is freely chosen—which, of course, is true. Cassidy should explain which of these two interpretations is correct. More important, if the justification for banning “sexual orientation conversion therapies” is related to the claim that homosexuality is freely chosen, shouldn’t Cassidy identify which specific therapeutic modalities make that claim?

• The bill cites the National Association of Social Workers’ claim that “no data demonstrates that reparative or conversion therapies are effective.” But what about, for example, the study conducted by Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse and published in the book Ex-gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Medicated Change in Sexual Orientation that suggests that some therapeutic modalities can result in “sexual orientation” change in some people?

• The bill cites the American Counseling Association Governing Council’s statement that they “oppose the promotion of ‘reparative therapy’ as a ‘cure’ for individuals who are homosexual,” which is a very specific and limited claim. So, would therapeutic models that do not promote therapy as a “cure” but instead allow for the possibility of change or allow for the construction of an identity that does not affirm homoerotic feelings, activity, and relationships be permissible?

• The bill cites the American Psychoanalytic Association’s claim that “Psychoanalytic technique does not encompass purposeful attempts to ‘convert,’ ‘repair,’ change or shift an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” If passed would this bill allow for discussions that are not initiated by mental health providers but rather are initiated by minors who desire to purposefully pursue shifts in their sexuality identity?

• What is the goal of mental health practice?

• Is the goal of mental health practice to eliminate all guilt?

• Is the goal to affirm all feelings, desires, or attractions? If not, how do the bill’s sponsors determine which feelings must be affirmed?

• Is the goal to prevent or alleviate depression by any and all means (including even affirming non-factual, subjective assumptions as unassailable, incontrovertible facts)?

• Might a healthy identity ever entail rejection of or resistance to feelings, desires, attractions, or volitional acts?

• Can sound mental health practice include helping people of faith—including minors—to incorporate their religious beliefs—including orthodox religious beliefs—into their construction of identity or their choice of life path?

• Is our contemporary mental health community capable of responsibly and ethically treating those whose faith is central to their identity?

• Is the rejection of or hostility to the existence of God corrupting social science research and counseling?

• Has society elevated unstable social science research to an omniscient, godlike epistemological status it does not warrant?

• What if the Left’s assumptions about guilt, shame, depression, homosexuality, gender confusion, morality, and identity are in reality false?

More flaws in the bill

Here are some criticisms of the resurrected “conversion therapy” ban:

• It fails to distinguish between counseling in which explorations of potential links between same-sex attraction and family dysfunction, peer rejection, or childhood molestation take place and other discredited and abusive aversion therapies. In other words, it fails to distinguish between coercive attempts to eradicate same-sex attraction and counseling efforts that would allow a teenager who wants to find a life path that does not involve affirming his or her same-sex attraction as central to his or her identity.

• It fails to acknowledge that it is a belief—not a fact—that the only path to happiness for those who experience unchosen same-sex attraction is affirmation of those feelings.

• It fails to distinguish between unchosen same-sex feelings and/or voluntary homoerotic activity, and persons. It says, “being lesbian, gay, or bisexual is not a…disorder…deficiency, or shortcoming.” Such a statement fails to distinguish between feelings and acts and between feelings/acts and persons, thereby revealing that this legislative project is infused with Leftist assumptions about identity.

• It fails to acknowledge that science has not proved that homoerotic desire is 100 percent heritable or biologically determined, in which case it is possible that it is caused or influenced by environment. If same-sex attraction is influenced in some cases by environment, it is possible that it can in some cases change. Moreover, would the influence of biology in the development of homoerotic attraction necessarily mean homoerotic activity is inherently moral? That question stands far outside the purview of both hard science and unstable social “science.”

Conclusion

This is not a bill created essentially to protect minors. It’s yet another pernicious effort to forcibly rid the culture of any suggestion that homoerotic activity may be immoral, or any suggestion that homoerotic desire can in some people change, or of any suggestion that individuals who experience unchosen homoerotic desire may choose to construct a meaningful identity that does not affirm such desire. All humans experience unchosen, powerful, and persistent feelings that for a variety of reasons they choose not to affirm, act upon, or place at the center of their identity.  For some, that unchosen, powerful, and persistent desire is homoerotic attraction.

While Kelly Cassidy continues her unhealthy quest for legislation that serves the desires of homosexuals for compulsory affirmation of homoeroticism, it is hoped that the will of wiser men and women will prevail.

TAKE ACTION: CLICK HERE to contact your State Representative and urge them to protect the rights of minors to seek help for their unwanted attractions. Urge a “No” vote on HB 217.

Like a plastic Piggly Wiggly bag fluttering about in the alley, those untethered from God’s natural law are violently tossed to and fro by the gusting winds of moral relativism. Jenny Kutner is one such Piggly Wiggly bag. A 20-something assistant editor at Salon.com, she describes herself as “focusing on sex, gender and feminism.”

By “focusing on sex, gender and feminism,” and as you will soon see, this young “progressive” means to say that she spends her days rationalizing each and every conceivable form of sexual deviancy, as well as trying to otherwise deconstruct that which she and her fellow feminist travelers view as an artificially constructed culture of “heteronormativity” – the sinister brainchild of the evil-man-led global patriarchy (for those interested, we meet Tuesdays at noon at the Golden Corral on Wards Road). Along with a growing number of secular leftists, Kutner’s latest sexual taboo for de-stigmatization is incest.

Those of us defending the institution of legitimate marriage and fighting to preserve respect for sexual morality in our culture have long warned of the greasy slope made slippery by the advent of counterfeit “same-sex marriage.” If you artificially remove one requirement for marriage – in this case, the binary male-female prerequisite – then there is no justification, logically or legally, for not removing all requirements. If we yank one foundational brick from the marriage wall, then, as in the days of Jericho, the whole danged thing comes a-tumblin’. That is to say, in the wake of America’s burgeoning “gay marriage” tsunami, we can soon expect to dog-paddle the ensuing sewage of legalized polygamy, incestuous marriage and heaven-knows-what-else.

In her Jan. 15 piece headlined, “A woman describes her sexual relationship with her estranged father,” Kutner introduces us, via an earlier interview with the “Science of Us” website, to “an 18-year-old ‘from the Great Lakes region’ who has been in a serious relationship with her previously estranged father for two years.”

Daddy’s little girl, a self-identified bisexual who says she lost her virginity to her father at the age of 16, is planning a grand wedding with the old man. (Can you say mass confusion? “Are you family of the bride or the groom? Forget it. Sit wherever you want.”)

They later plan to settle down and have cross-eyed children of their own, thereby restocking the shallow gene pool from which Pops can later fish for his next victim.

Writes Kutner: “Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) is a term used to describe intense, almost obsessive romantic and sexual feelings that estranged relatives often feel for each other upon reunion – yes, I said ‘often.’ According to the Guardian, ’50 percent of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth’ result in GSA – a much higher proportion than one might expect.”

Holy Oedipus complex, Batman! I guess absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

Calling Dr. Freud.

Set aside for a moment the bovine nature of this absurd assertion and pay special attention to Kutner’s application of the pseudo-scientific phrase: “Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA).” This is a regular propagandist tool employed by the sexual anarchist left. They’ve become quite accomplished in the art of Orwellian Newspeak. To achieve the noble cause of unfettered sexual license, one must redefine the terms. In fact, one must recreate the terms.

Hence, male-on-male sodomy becomes “gay.” That which, heretofore, has been known as “child rape” shall, from henceforth, be called, “intergenerational romance.” He who was once identified as a “pedophile predator” shall, from now on, be referenced as a “minor-attracted person.” And, yes, the empirically pathological impulse of some sick pervert to schtupp his 16-year-old daughter shall, forevermore, be known as, “Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA).”

Kutner continues: “The woman goes on to describe moving in with her father and his ex-partner (who is now their roommate), and how she must hide the relationship from her mother, who she says has not yet picked up on the fact that she and her dad are dating.”

Ah, the indifferent ease with which Kutner writes the words, “… she and her dad are dating.” This heartwarming story of love, romance and everlastingly damnable criminal reprobation “actually forces one to do some rigorous double-checking of one’s own beliefs,” she adds. “What the woman has to say about having children with her father, for instance, certainly forced me to consider my response carefully, given my own advocacy of reproductive freedom.”

And that’s what it all boils down to – that nebulous catch-all known as “reproductive freedom.” Libertine license. The left’s sacred “right” to have sex with, and/or to dismember alive in the womb, their own children. The freedom – between abortions, AIDS treatments, herpes outbreaks and Hep C shots – to otherwise copulate with whomever, or whatever, they so choose.

You know: “Equality.”

The Truth Project

First Annual IFI Worldview Conference
featuring Dr. Del Tackett
April 10-11, 2015

CLICK HERE for Details