Conversion therapy to turn gay people straight ‘demonizes’ homosexuality and should be banned, say lawyers

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals that anti-gay groups recommended clients outlawed drugs and encourage gay men to re-enact episodes of child abuse

Gay rights campaigners celebrate when the Supreme Court rules in favour of same sex marriage in the US (Getty)

Therapy that aims to turn gay people straight is struggling after anti-gay groups have become “increasingly defensive” and lawmakers are closer than ever to banning it on a nationwide level.

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which collected testimonies from conversion therapists and survivors, has labelled the practice as “demonizing” homosexuality.

The SPLC is calling for both public and private insurers to refuse to reimburse claims made by so-called reparative therapists, and for congress to pass the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, introduced last year in the House of Representatives.

The report noted therapist James Phelan who recommended clients drugs like Metrazol, outlawed in 1982 for causing “barbaric” convulsions and spinal fractures.

The report also recounts survivors’ testimonies of working with an organisation called "Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing", an anti-gay group that went out of business last year after it was sued by six plaintiffs represented by the SPLC in 2015.

Ben Unger, one survivor who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, said exercises to “cure him” included a group of participants shouting anti-gay slurs at him while bouncing basketballs nearby. He was also asked to beat a pillow representing his mother with a tennis racket.

Another survivor, Mormon Michael Ferguson, was told to “pray away the gay” at the Christian Brigham Young University, and he even tried a related 12-step program. Later, working with JONAH, groups of men were advised to hold and cuddle each other for 30 minutes at a time to develop “healthy touch” attitudes with other men.

“It demeans, defames and defrauds human beings, typically at their most vulnerable moments,” wrote Mark Potok, the author of the SPLC report. ”And, as if that weren’t enough, it regularly lays the blame for the alleged malady of homosexuality at the feet of gay people’s parents, despite the fact that they are wholly innocent.”

The report says that Americans who provide the therapy are going to Israel to set up their practices in a “less hostile environment”.

Although JONAH is now defunct, the report lists 10 existing major anti-gay groups which claim to practise therapy, including Courage International in Connecticut, the Institute for Healthy Families in Virigina and Hope for Wholeness in South Carolina.

There are many other, smaller groups and uncounted individual practitioners, found the report.

In April, two Democratic senators from New Jersey and Washington introduced a companion bill to the one introduced in the House of Representatives in May 2015, which would label the “therapy” as fraudulent practice under the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Illinois, New Jersey, California and Oregon have explicitly banned gay conversion therapy for minors, along with Cincinnati and Washington DC.