Mormon Church is Not Opposing an Anti-Conversion Therapy Bill

Last year, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Utah, the home of the Mormon Church, has the faith highest suicide rate in the USA, with a particular problem of youth suicides.  The article reported in part as follows:

Utah had the fifth-highest overall suicide rate at 25.2 per 100,000, and since 1999, the state saw a 46.5 percent increase in residents taking their own lives. It is a crisis that has led Gov. Gary Herbert to create a youth suicide task force and state lawmakers to fund a new staffer to study why Utahns have died by suicide.

The problems most frequently associated with suicide, according to the study, are strained relationships; life stressors, often involving work or finances; and recent or impending crises. The most important takeaway, mental health professionals say, is that suicide is not only an issue for the mentally ill but for anyone struggling with serious lifestyle issues.

LGBT youth have a much higher suicide rate than youths in general, often fueled by family rejection (40% of homeless youth nationwide are LGBT as a result of such rejection).   Add on top of this the reality that gay conversion therapy can cause suicidal feelings, and it is a recipe for disaster which seemingly why the Mormon Church will not be opposing a bill in the Utah legislature to ban conversion therapy for those under age 18. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this seemingly surprising move by a church that is notoriously anti-gay.  Here are highlights:

When Jason Lindow went through conversion therapy, he started abusing sleeping pills.  The treatment, he told The Daily Beast, “was making [him] feel dead inside” anyway, so he took the pills to stay in a “mellow state all the time.” He knew there was a possibility that he might “not even wake up” if he took too many, he said, but he was so depressed that death seemed almost preferable to an emotionless existence.

This was in 2012, five years before he came out as a transgender man and transitioned from female to male, so Lindow was being treated at the time for being a lesbian. The reason that Lindow, then a 21-year-old college student, sought out the treatment was so that he could serve as a missionary in the religion of his birth: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church.

Now, seven years after Lindow went through that ordeal, the LDS church has seemingly turned a corner on conversion therapy.  Earlier this month, LGBT advocates and Utah state legislators put forward a bill that would ban the practice of trying to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The bill is now in the House Rules Committee.

In a state where the vast majority of legislators are Mormon themselves, that lack of opposition from the church gives the bill a fighting chance. (In fact, the bill’s sponsor, Representative Craig Hall, is an active member of the LDS church.) If it passes, Utah would be the most conservative state in the country to have a conversion therapy ban.

The Mormon and Gay website currently says: “While shifts in sexuality can and do occur for some people, it is unethical to focus professional treatment on an assumption that a change in sexual orientation will or must occur.”

For a religion whose leaders previously taught that sexual orientation can be changed—and which stated in official literature as recently as 2007 that “many Latter-day Saints … overcome same-gender attraction in mortality”— those new statements represent a major step forward.

[M]ajor medical associations have denounced conversion therapy for precisely this reason: Not only is it unsuccessful at changing sexual orientation and gender identity, it has the potential to cause tremendous psychological harm to those who undergo it, including a risk of suicide.

In its campaign for the proposed conversion therapy ban, Equality Utah is highlighting the stories of survivors to draw attention to those harms.

Utah still has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country.

Here in Virginia, Republicans in the General Assembly who specialize in prostituting themselves to the haters and extremists at The Family Foundation once again killed legislation that would have banned conversion therapy for minors.  Hopefully, regulatory licensing restrictions will accomplish this much needed goal since the GOP seemingly cares nothing about the suicides of LGBT youths. .