"Ex-Gay" Clinics Are Torturing Youth Around the Globe

Slow progress is being made in America to ban the use of fraudulent "ex-gay" therapy, also known as conversion therapy or reparative therapy on minors despite the protests of Christofascists backed quacks and charlatans who (i) use the practice to continue in political realms to claim that being gay is a "choice," and (ii) to fill their financial coffers as they prey on ignorant and gullible parents general motivated by Bronze Age religious beliefs.  Sadly, while slow progress is being made in America, the Christofascist have exported the practices overseas, fighting a rear guard action as their influence wanes, especially among the Millennials.  A piece in The Advocate looks at how this form of torture and psychological abuse has spread like a cancer overseas.  Here are article excerpts:

Tragically, Manuel* had a very different outcome. As recently as one year ago, he had been forcibly admitted to a clinic where he was subjected to electroshock therapy in an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality. Disturbingly, Manuel’s situation is not an anomaly. Countless others have endured a myriad of treatments aimed at curing their “sexual deviations,” including surgery and substances. This issue was first brought to the public eye in 2011, when the national newspaper in Ecuador ran an article that estimated that 200 such facilities were still in operation across the country. 

This may be shocking to some, but consider it in context: Fewer than 30 years ago, the World Health Organization continued to include homosexuality on its list of diseases and mental illnesses. It was only 20 years ago that Ecuador repealed its law against same-sex romantic activity and relationships. The rehabilitation clinics like the one Manuel attended were once far more prevalent; they closed down not only because they were not properly registered with the Ministry of Health, but because no one should endure having their sexuality forcibly “converted.”

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the families who send their children to these clinics do so out of love and concern for their wellbeing. Ecuador, while officially secular, is a largely Roman Catholic country. In fact, most of the clinics shut down by the Ministry of Health in 2011 were religiously affiliated.

It’s unknown how many of these clinics may still exist in Ecuador or around the world. They may even exist in your own proverbial backyard. The National Center for Lesbian Rights is working to pass legislation against gay conversation therapy in the United States, but at the moment, there is only legal protection for minors in four states and the District of Columbia.

I was able to find my safe place, and now I write in the hope that others will be able to find their own. In the words of LGBT activist Harvey Milk, “All young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.” 

The use of "ex-gay" therapy must be banned  for not just licensed clinicians, but by bogus, witch doctor like religious "ministries."  "Ex-gay" therapy is a form of child abuse and needs to be treated as such and outlawed and its practitioners prosecuted.  Ignorance based religious belief should give no shelter to parents who subject their children to such harmful abuse. 

Why Does Gay Sex Scare Modern Muslims?

This blog has often noted that the raging homophobia in African nations reflects the ignorance of the populace as to true history of their own societies where homosexuality was accepted or at least tolerated.  A piece in The Daily Beast makes a similar case with Islam which in its so-called Golden Age was tolerant and strikingly different from the horrible thing it has become under Islamic fundamentalists.  The irony - as is the case with African nations such as Uganda - is that while fundamentalist seek to rebel from western values, homophobia was largely a British import.  It was Britain and the foul Christian missionaries that spread across the empire that brought homophobia to much of the world (American Christofascists now seek to maintain the bigotry as they lose power in America).  Here are article highlights:

LONDON — Half of British Muslims say being gay “should be outlawed.” Thus ran theheadline in London’s Sunday Times this week. Even more opposed gay marriage, while almost half thought it was unacceptable for a gay or lesbian to teach their children.

These findings from an ICM poll will be presented in a Channel 4 documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, airing this Wednesday. The show will portray the growing divergence between mainstream Britain and its Muslim communities.

Poll after poll of British Muslims has revealed statistically significant levels of illiberal opinion. Polling methodology and data may contain errors, as some critics note, but this is only scientifically rectified by more data, not by defensive posturing. A 2009 poll by Gallup found that 0 percent of Britain’s Muslims believed homosexual acts to be morally acceptable. What previous polls have shown us time and again is more of the same. This latest ICM poll asked a slightly different question, about whether homosexual acts should be legal rather than viewed as morally acceptable. Despite half saying no, this time 18 percent did say being gay should remain legal. Progress? Well, if our baseline was zero, there could only ever be progress.

Such numbers ought to prompt an urgent conversation about why Europe is having trouble integrating its Muslim communities. And it is likely that the answer, in part, relates to rising neo-fundamentalist approaches to scripture among Muslims.

There was a time when it was not like this.

Traditionally, Islam was open to exploring beauty and sexuality, especially when Islamic culture flourished and Europe was in what were known as the Dark Ages. The Prophet Muhammad taught that “God is Beautiful, and loves Beauty.” The 11th century Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm wrote “The Ring of the Dove,” a treatise on the different stages of love, including some rather explicit real-life stories.

It is true that many early Muslim scholars condemned homosexuality, and cited scripture to justify their position. But the themes of love and sexuality have been debated and discussed by Muslim theologians and artists for centuries. The word “homosexuality” is not even used in the Quran. In fact, it did not exist in the Arabic language. The modern Muslim conclusion that homosexuality is “unnatural” is therefore not based on anything in scripture.

The chapter of al-Nur (Quran 24:31) specifically recognizes “men who are not in need of women.” As the context of the passage shows, these are men who are not attracted to women. They may have been gay or asexual, but, by definition, they were not heterosexual men. They are also not judged or condemned anywhere in the Quran. The Prophet’s own example shows that he accepted men living around him who were called “Mukhannath,” seen to be “acting like women.”

This subtle early recognition grew to a point where it was open within the courts of various caliphs in the Muslim Golden Age. Abu Nuwas (756-814) was one of the greatest classical Arab poets. He flourished during the start of the Abbasid era Golden Age (750-1258), based in Baghdad. 

As was normal during this period, sexual roles were only imagined in terms of active and passive participants, not as gay or straight sex, and what we would today describe as homosexuality was clear and present in this society.

Many other excellent classical Muslim poets wrote in homoerotic tones, including the Persian Ibn Dawud (868-909), Andalusian Ibn Quzman (1080-1160), and the Arab Sicilian Ibn Hamdis (1053-1133). Lovemaking manuals are also to be found, such as The Perfumed Garden (al-Rawd al-Atir fi Nuzhat al-Khatir) by the Tunisian Shaiykh Muhammad ibn Umar al-Nafwazi, between 1410 and 1434, and The Book of Respective Merits of Maids and Young Men (Kitab Mafaharat al-Jawari wa al-Ghilman) by the prolific al-Jahiz (777-869).  Later on still, Omar Khayyam (d. 1126) set the tone for sexuality in his Quartets(Ruba’iyyat), and Sa’di of Shiraz (1184-1291) graphically discusses his love of young men. 

But as prudish Victorian values spread from Europe to the Middle East through colonialism, and as 19th century neo-fundamentalist Wahhabism began to take hold in the Arabian peninsula, and as 20th century Islamism gained ground, spreading from Egypt around the globe, censorship, misogyny and homophobia began to spread among Muslims worldwide.

Despite this diverse history, homosexuality is forbidden today in almost every modern Muslim-majority country, while censorship, homophobia, and misogyny reach worryingly high levels.

Previous Orientalist assumptions that fetishized Eastern sexuality have given way to a new form of generalization that accepts as normal the overbearing religious conservativism that has swept across Muslim-majority societies.

For too long, populist demagogues, xenophobes and racists have been able to use coded language about intolerable Muslim intolerance to argue that Muslims have no place in Europe. We must begin to discuss these issues with courage and candor, rather than trying to pretend there is no problem, or shying away from the difficult conversation we all must have around the non-integration of Europe’s Muslims.

In this way, if we are able to bank the progress that has been made, admit to the progress that is yet to be made, and throw open the conversation for all to participate, perhaps, just perhaps, we will be able to pull the rug out from under the feet of populists who want us all to believe that the only good Muslim is a deported Muslim.

But the only way to achieve this is by owning the conversation, not fearing it, nor by ceding it to those who seek to use these depressing survey results for their altogether different aim.

Sadly, like conservative Christianity, much of Islam has come to celebrate and embrace ignorance as it tries to war against modernity and its own past (it wasn't until the 12th and 13th centuries that psychotic and mentally disturbed "Church fathers" began their war on same sex love). 

The Christian Right’s New Global War on Gays

As other posts on this blog have noted, as the American Christofascists have been steadily losing the culture war over gay rights and marriage equality, they have been increasingly focusing their efforts on exporting the extreme religious beliefs and anti-gay animus overseas.   The Trojan horse that they are using for this endeavor is "protecting the natural family" which translates to opposing abortion, contraception, divorce (at least in theory) and, most importantly, gay equality and marriage.  Leading the export of ignorance and religious intolerance is the World Congress of Families (WCF) which defines the "natural family" as "centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage."  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at WCF's insideous throcratic agenda.  Here are excerpts:

The news looks bad for America’s conservative rear-guard. This month’s decision by the Supreme Court may soon make marriage equality the law of the land. Over three-quarters of Americans support anti-discrimination protection for gays and lesbians. One of our star athletes (and a Republican!) has transitioned her gender to overwhelming (though not universal) applause.
Does the Christian Right have a Plan B?

You bet they do. Their main weapon is an unfamiliar term: “natural family.” And they’re going to use it to beat back advances in women’s and LGBT equality worldwide, starting at the UN.

Since 1948, the United Nations has stated that the family is “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.” It makes policies and appropriates funds with that in mind.
But whose family? Does the term (and the policy and the money) only cover Mom-and-Pop nuclear families? Does it include single parents and kids? Gay families? Extended families? Families of choice?

These parameters are not just semantic, because they dictate policy. If “family” means a heterosexual couple with as many children as possible, then policies like family planning and LGBT equal rights should be opposed, if (a big if) they have a negative impact on families thus defined. If “family” is a broader term, then those same policies should be promoted.

These issues came to a head in 1994, designated the “Year of the Family” by both the United Nations and the Vatican. . . .In fact, progressives had sought to make 1994 the Year of the Families, plural. Conservatives successfully beat that back, but between pluralism and support for reproductive freedom, 1994 was a wakeup call.

“Natural family” was one response. As defined by its leading promoter, conservative activist Allan Carlson, the “natural family” is a small, conservative subset of actual families. It is “centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage,” and is for the purpose of “ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children.”  Although this definition is at variance with the Biblical institution of polygamy and concubinage, it nonetheless became the central value of the World Congress of Families (WCF), founded by Carlson in 1997 . . . . 

One of WCF’s biggest successes is Russia. Beginning in the 1990s, Carlson and his Russian counterparts—conservative sociologists at Lomonosov Moscow State University—melded American “family values” conservatism with Russian concerns about a “demographic winter.” One result was the first WCF conference, in 1997, and its declaration that, in Parke’s words, “condemned policies that subvert ‘the legal and religious status of traditional marriage,’ as well as those that promote contraception and abortion, ‘state welfare systems,’ comprehensive sexual education, nonmarital cohabitation, ‘homosexual unions,’ and single parenting.”

[A]s it happens, there is no demographic winter—in Russia or anywhere else. What there is, both in Russia and the United States, is a demographic shift toward, bluntly speaking, more brown people and fewer white people. This is what the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin’s revanchist circle are fighting—and the WCF is happy to help.

Inside Russia, WCF helped pass the notorious Anti-Propaganda Law, banning gays from any public displays of existence, and wrote the ban on gay adoption.  

[A]t the UN, Russia has blocked every effort to recognize multiple forms of family—most recently in June 2014 . . . “It is part of a broader agenda led by the U.S. Religious Right aimed at cementing a patriarchal and heteronormative family structure as the fundamental unit of society, and then using that as a tool to advance conservative, right-wing social policies through the UN and other international organizations.”

[At the 2015 WCF assembly in Salt Lakr City] the cast of characters will be the same: Russian and African far-rightists, together with WCF partners Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Americans United For Life.  Not surprisingly, the theme of the conference will be “religious liberty.”

There are plenty of reasons to take these wingnuts seriously. First, there’s a lot of money: oligarch/Putin money in Russia, conservative foundation money here. Second, the governments of Russia and many Global South countries are actively hostile to LGBT people, blaming them for every problem under the sun, from Ebola to Hollywood movies. Third, they may have the votes at the UN—as they did last year in Geneva.

It’s entirely possible that LGBTs and women throughout the world will suffer a backlash because of advances in rights for gay people and women in the US and Europe. That means those advocates in the West shouldn’t get too carried away with themselves. Opponents of equality are just getting started.

Religious conservatives remain a cancer on society and the world.  As throughout history, they continue to market hate, discord and theocracy at the expense of human rights and science and knowledge. 

Having Lost in America, NOM to Go Global to Keep Money Coming In

I said it before and I will say it again, the National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") and its allied "family values" organizations like Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association (and The Family Foundation here in Virginia), etc., are parasites that prey on the ignorant and uneducated and fan the flames of hate, bigotry, and more subtly, racism. Having largely lost the culture war on same sex marriage in America - the final nail in the coffin will hopefully be delivered by the U.S. Supreme Court in late June - NOM is now going to go global.  While officially stating other reasons, the real reason for the move is that Brian Brown, Maggie Gallagher and others have become too accustomed to living well while marketing hatred and homophobia.  Heaven forbid that they get real jobs that do something productive for society.  BuzzFeed looks at NOM's announcement that it will go global in the spread of lies and homophobia.  Here are excerpts:

The National Organization for Marriage is continuing to work towards the creation of an International Organization for Marriage, NOM President Brian Brown told BuzzFeed News in an interview just before the start of NOM’s March for Marriage in Washington on Saturday.

A planning meeting was held around last year’s March for Marriage, convening members of groups opposed to marriage equality from around 70 countries to begin working to that goal, BuzzFeed News reported last spring. This year’s march does not feature the international speakers that last year’s did, perhaps because of the pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling on state bans on same-sex marriage.

Although “we have our hands full here in the U.S.” at the moment, Brown said, the group was “definitely” still working to establish “an organization that focuses on uniting people of different faiths and different backgrounds internationally” to oppose same-sex marriage. 

Brown wasn’t certain of when an International Organization for Marriage would officially launch, but said, “I think there will be a formal launch” at some point. . . . . Brown said an international group is needed to counter the influence of organizations like the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which he said has had great “success” at advancing LGBT rights at the United Nations and the European Union.

Fundamentalist Christianity  - and other fundamentalist faiths - is a cancer on the world that needs to be eradicated.   Thankfully, more and more Americans seem to be coming to recognize this reality.