Cooper Blocks Use Of Government Funds For Gay Conversion Therapy
1. Good. Government shouldn't fund it.
2. The worst plausible thing you can say about it, though, is that it seems to rarely work.
3. It's unlikely to be dangerous; that's probably progressive BS.
4. Sexual orientation probably can sometimes be changed. It strikes me as PC nonsense to deny this. The left's view of sexuality is largely based on the idea that, for a long time in a lot of places, all sorts of people were basically brainwashed and bullied into being heterosexual. One response is: they never were; their actions changed, but not their desires. That response is based on a misunderstanding about how desires work. Desires can be minimized and snuffed out. Which is not to say that this is commonly possible with respect to sexual desires. (Though it probably is.)
5. People who aren't at the extremes of the Kinsey scale have some flexibility about how they channel and direct their sexual inclinations. Humans do this with desires all the time. Desires are commonly controllable and malleable.
6. I'm in favor of people being themselves. Ideally, we'd live in a world where there was no call for "gay conversion therapy." Since I don't see anything wrong with being gay, I'd prefer that everyone just go with their natural inclinations in this respect.
7. However, we don't live in that world.
8. But, even in such a world: imagine that a father of three realizes at age 45 that he's got some kind of sexual urges--doesn't matter what they are--that would destroy his family if he acted on them. He should have the option of seeking psychological assistance in learning to suppress or re-channel them. It seems preposterous to me to claim that (a) he has no right to do so, and (b) there's nothing that can help him. "Be yourself" is fine advice in some cases; not in others. Progressives wouldn't object to him seeing help if he were obsessed with girls barely over the age of consent--or below it. So why object in the other case?
Gay conversion therapy seems like mostly a religious scam to me. But I expect most of the dust-up surrounding it is progressive propaganda. If it doesn't work very often, then that's a good reason for the government not to fund it. That progressives don't want people controlling/altering certain sexual inclinations isn't a good reason.
Public funding of gay conversion therapy probably isn't as objectionable as public funding of abortions, incidentally.
2. The worst plausible thing you can say about it, though, is that it seems to rarely work.
3. It's unlikely to be dangerous; that's probably progressive BS.
4. Sexual orientation probably can sometimes be changed. It strikes me as PC nonsense to deny this. The left's view of sexuality is largely based on the idea that, for a long time in a lot of places, all sorts of people were basically brainwashed and bullied into being heterosexual. One response is: they never were; their actions changed, but not their desires. That response is based on a misunderstanding about how desires work. Desires can be minimized and snuffed out. Which is not to say that this is commonly possible with respect to sexual desires. (Though it probably is.)
5. People who aren't at the extremes of the Kinsey scale have some flexibility about how they channel and direct their sexual inclinations. Humans do this with desires all the time. Desires are commonly controllable and malleable.
6. I'm in favor of people being themselves. Ideally, we'd live in a world where there was no call for "gay conversion therapy." Since I don't see anything wrong with being gay, I'd prefer that everyone just go with their natural inclinations in this respect.
7. However, we don't live in that world.
8. But, even in such a world: imagine that a father of three realizes at age 45 that he's got some kind of sexual urges--doesn't matter what they are--that would destroy his family if he acted on them. He should have the option of seeking psychological assistance in learning to suppress or re-channel them. It seems preposterous to me to claim that (a) he has no right to do so, and (b) there's nothing that can help him. "Be yourself" is fine advice in some cases; not in others. Progressives wouldn't object to him seeing help if he were obsessed with girls barely over the age of consent--or below it. So why object in the other case?
Gay conversion therapy seems like mostly a religious scam to me. But I expect most of the dust-up surrounding it is progressive propaganda. If it doesn't work very often, then that's a good reason for the government not to fund it. That progressives don't want people controlling/altering certain sexual inclinations isn't a good reason.
Public funding of gay conversion therapy probably isn't as objectionable as public funding of abortions, incidentally.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:43 AM
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