Selects: How Conversion Therapy Doesn't Work

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Speaker 1 Good day, everyone. This is Chuck here on a Saturday with a Selex episode.
about conversion therapy. Boo.
And you know what? Regardless of what you think about conversion therapy, it doesn't work.

Speaker 1 And so that's why this episode is titled How Conversion Therapy Doesn't Work from November 2019. And if you're wondering before you listen, what is conversion therapy?

Speaker 1 That's when parents try to make their

Speaker 1 LG TBQ, let's just put it in that whole bucket, child not that.

Speaker 1 And it's just not possible because that's who they are. So I hope you enjoy this episode.
And if you don't, keep it to yourself.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
There's guest producer Josh over there.

Speaker 1 Don't be confused, everybody. There are more than one Josh in the world.
It's nice to hear you finally admit that. It's taken a long time.
A lot of therapy.

Speaker 1 Hey.

Speaker 1 Nice segue. It's like a short stuff.
I'm like, let's get to it. Let's get going.
Well, I have a COA to issue.

Speaker 1 You know what cracks me up is people who are still like, what does that mean? You can figure it out. You can email me.
Eventually, some people will.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So my COA is just a personal COA that I'm going to try and just disguise my disdain for this entire topic.
Okay.

Speaker 1 But I might not do a great job about it. Well, you've already shown your hands.
All right. Good.
That's my COA. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think there's too many stuff you should know listeners who are probably into this. Yeah,

Speaker 1 but part of the problem, as we'll see later in this episode, is part of the problem with conversion therapy's coverage in the media

Speaker 1 is that it has largely been fairly even-handed and described as like this controversial therapy and not said

Speaker 1 this scam and this junk science fraud perpetrated by zealots. Super harmful.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's where I that's where I am. You know, that stuck out to me, too, that in the late 90s we'll talk about it,

Speaker 1 especially when it was treated even-handedly. Yeah.
And it made me think, like, we should do an episode on that. Like,

Speaker 1 should the media treat all sides of an issue equally? And if it does, does that just like perpetuate ignorance? Or if it doesn't, does that like support fascism? Right.

Speaker 1 Like, that's a it's a hornet's nest. I really think we should do it sometime.
It is. That's a good call.
Thank you, Charles. I don't know how we, I mean, I guess it could be researched.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Surely somebody's done a think piece on it that we can springboard off of. You know? A think piece.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 That's great. That's what we do most of our research on, think pieces.

Speaker 1 This is from one of our great writers, Julia Layton.

Speaker 1 And she put a lot of this stuff together for us. Yeah, she did a good job on this.
I like the additional histories you found out, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because this, so we'll define it first and then we'll talk about some histories. But this stuff goes back way further than you would think.

Speaker 1 But what we're talking about today is called conversion therapy, reparative therapy, ex-gay therapy.

Speaker 1 Reparative therapy is trademarked, by the way, we should say.

Speaker 1 Well, you couldn't hear it, but under my breath, I said, TM.

Speaker 1 More like TS.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was trademarked by a psychologist named Joseph Niccolosi,

Speaker 1 Sr.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 what conversion therapy is probably what we're going to mostly call it, though,

Speaker 1 what it is, is it's an alleged psychological theory and practice

Speaker 1 that is based on the idea that all people are born heterosexual. Right.

Speaker 1 And because of certain

Speaker 1 certain events

Speaker 1 traumas typically, but also the family dynamics play a huge role.

Speaker 1 People who would otherwise are meant to be heterosexual can be accidentally steered into homosexuality. And therefore can be purposefully steered back.
Right. Cured.
Yes. Cured.
Being gay. Right.

Speaker 1 Back to the righteous land of heterosexuality. Yeah.
And as you can imagine, that this is a

Speaker 1 very popular with the fundamentalist Christian right. Sure.
And I mean, like, that's not even like a guess, like, it overtly is. They've adopted and taken on ex-gay, the ex-gay movement, as

Speaker 1 basically one of the

Speaker 1 what's it called? An attempt poll, a temp post?

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 One of the planks in the Christian rights platform for social change. Oh, it is a,

Speaker 1 it was officially part of the 2016 Republican Party platform, even.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 Well, wait, the whole RNC. Yeah, which has been called, the 2016 platform has been called by far the most anti-LGTBQ platform in the nation's history.
Wow.

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, if that's a plank in the party's platform, that's pretty significant. Like, they don't throw just anything in there.
No, they don't. So with the, with, with

Speaker 1 the ex-gay movement and conversion therapy,

Speaker 1 I saw it described, at least back in the late 90s, as a front in the culture war that's as strong and as significant as abortion.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 the Christian right in particular

Speaker 1 has basically dedicated itself to stamping out gayness and by do by converting gay people to straightness. The problem is, is there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that that is even possible.

Speaker 1 Right. And the problem is when you try and stamp out gayness, that creates a good beat that you can dance to.

Speaker 1 It makes that sound. They're like, no, no, no, no, no.
Stop stamping. Yeah, exactly.
I had, actually, I went to, well, should I say this? Oh, I don't know. Sure.
Why not? Because it's the truth.

Speaker 1 I went to a church camp once when I was a youth. Oh, I figured a story or two.
I guess we're going to go.

Speaker 1 They talked about stomping your feet to the music or whatever they were playing. And they literally said, don't alternate feet because that's too close to dancing.
Wow. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And these weren't like,

Speaker 1 I mean, these were pretty mainstream Baptist church camps. It wasn't like I went to some snake handling thing? No, not at all.
But you did a really good episode on that. Yeah, that was a good one.

Speaker 1 So anyway, stomp your feet, everybody.

Speaker 1 Just don't alternate.

Speaker 1 So you stomp them both at once because that's... No, just stomp one foot.
Just stomp your right foot. I was going to say, that's just jumping.
Lightly.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's what we're talking about is conversion therapy. And like I said, it

Speaker 1 became part of the Christian rights kind of philosophy and part of their culture war, their culture war they're fighting.

Speaker 1 But it goes back way further than that. I think it was the late 90s when the right kind of adopted it.

Speaker 1 As a matter of fact, like into the 19th century, there were people who subscribed to this, but they were all psychologists.

Speaker 1 This is back at the time when you could be a ghost investigator and say, I'm a psychologist. This is

Speaker 1 the times when you could say, you know, this cigar reminds you of your mother. You know what I'm saying? Right.
And you could be a psychologist. You could be a father of psychology at that point.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You dug up a great article from history.com called Gay Conversion Therapies Disturbing 19th Century Origins by Aaron Blakemore.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 nice attribution, Chuck. Yeah, well, Aaron wrote a great article.
And

Speaker 1 in it,

Speaker 1 she talks about in 1899, this hypnosis,

Speaker 1 well, again, in the days where you could be a hypnotist and be a legitimate scientist at the same time. Is I get into stage shows or psychology? That's right.

Speaker 1 Where's the money?

Speaker 1 But he was German, of course, and he claimed to have turned a gay man straight after 45 hypnosis sessions and some other therapies.

Speaker 1 And that's sort of the first evidence of what we would later call conversion therapy starting up. Yeah.
Although I'm sure even before that, people, they probably didn't call it conversion therapy.

Speaker 1 But if you were an effeminate man, you were no doubt probably beaten by your parents and shunned by your community. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

Speaker 1 I think one of the other things that's kind of a hallmark of this long tradition of converting people from being gay to straight or trying to is this idea that there's something wrong with you if you're gay.

Speaker 1 Right. And that that idea can actually become hung up on the individual, the gay person, so that they actually do seek out help

Speaker 1 in becoming straight. But the problem is, is in seeking that help, they're going to be frustrated and they're ultimately probably going to be

Speaker 1 they're going to have feelings of shame, guilt, inadequacy, that they're not capable of helping themselves. There's something wrong with them.
Why can't they just be straight kind of thing?

Speaker 1 And then if you're a minor and your parents are forcing this on you, then that raises a whole other can of worms, of ethical dilemmas. Sure.

Speaker 1 But even from the outset, there were probably people who sought out hypnotists and other psychologists for help.

Speaker 1 It wasn't just people walking around kidnapping gay people and taking them off the street and trying to convert them. Right.

Speaker 1 It could have very well been some man that's like, wait a minute, I don't feel normal feelings because I'm looking at Joe out there in the field and things are happening. Right.

Speaker 1 If you know what I mean, Doc. And they're like, well, come on in.
Watching him swing that scythe and take his sweaty shirt off, wring it over his face.

Speaker 1 That kind of thing. Right.
So just sit down and follow the wristwatch with your eyes. Right.
Or I guess the pocket watch. That'd be a weird

Speaker 1 technique.

Speaker 1 Swing your arms.

Speaker 1 Moving my wristwatch. But from that same history.com article, there

Speaker 1 she talks about some of the early attempts, like with electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies. I think we even talked about some in the lobotomies episode.

Speaker 1 Man, they would give you a lobotomy for anything. Oh, sure.
What about testicular transplantation? Right.

Speaker 1 Because that was a theory from a doctor, an endocrinologist named Eugene Steinock, who thought that your testicles were the root of the problem. Well, a lot of people did.
Yeah. There was like a...

Speaker 1 You could have gay testicles, literally, and they would swap them out for straight ones. Right.

Speaker 1 And there's no, I could not find any evidence one way or the other that any of these testicular transplants worked or were successful. I don't think they were.

Speaker 1 But I didn't see anything that said, like, all of them just failed or whatever. But, like, what happened? Did they just shrivel up and fall off or something? So.
Do you mean if it actually

Speaker 1 like medically took to the body? Or

Speaker 1 yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Okay.

Speaker 1 Saying, like, did it convert them? Did it work? Right. Yeah.
No. Yeah.
That's the answer. But yeah, I didn't know that you could, in the 1920s, have a testicle transplant successfully.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm saying. Like, I, I surely, I mean, at some point, and we must have talked about this in the Michael Dillon episode.

Speaker 1 We talked about the, I don't think it was, but it wasn't a transplant, it was just a straight-up removal, an orchiectomy, I believe. Castration.

Speaker 1 So, but at some point, testicles have been transplanted onto a person successfully. When did that happen? That's my question.
It probably did to a dog first. Right.
But I mean, think about it.

Speaker 1 Like, if it didn't work, well, sorry, you're castrated now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They probably didn't say sorry, though.
No, but we took your gay testicles. The heterosexual testicles just didn't pan out.
Right. But now you don't have any testicles, gay or otherwise.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 Some of the other awful techniques that they would use back in the day

Speaker 1 were

Speaker 1 chemicals that they might have to make you retch and vomit when you look at, you know, pictures of people of the same sex. Yep.
That's called covert sensitization. Yeah.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Or if you're cross-dressing, maybe, same thing. Sure.
Or look in a mirror and be disgusted with yourself and retch and vomit. Yeah.
And very sadly, if you have, say, like

Speaker 1 someone you are in a relationship with that you love, they might show you a picture of that person and

Speaker 1 carry out aversive therapy or aversive conditioning.

Speaker 1 What's weird is you said

Speaker 1 these are things they used to carry out. From what I've seen, this stuff still goes on today.
Yeah, some of it.

Speaker 1 So what we're talking about, though, back in the 19th and most of the first half or so of the 20th century, this was all like the domain of psychology.

Speaker 1 And then eventually, gay psychologists and other straight psychologists, too, were basically like, this is wrong. Like, the science is not adding up.

Speaker 1 This is just

Speaker 1 incorrect. Yeah, there were medical doctors too, though.
It wasn't just psychologists. Right, sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So eventually, in 1973, the American Psychological Association said, hey, big news, we're no longer going to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. Right.

Speaker 1 And a certain part of the population went, yeah, it's 1972. Why did it take this long? Right, exactly.
Yeah. But that was a big deal.
And at that point,

Speaker 1 psychology mostly abandoned the idea that

Speaker 1 being gay. was a disorder of any kind and therefore there was no point in researching how to cure someone of being gay.
And so it turned its back on this whole history of

Speaker 1 conversion. Conversion.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it didn't fully die away. And I believe starting in like the 80s, the Christian right started to kind of pick up on it and kind of breathe new life into it again.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Think we should take a break? Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a robust and a half setup. Is that, oh, I thought we were already into it.
Oh my gosh. No, it wasn't just the setup.
It was more. You're right.
We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Support for the show today comes from Public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 1 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 1 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.
Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 1 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 4 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 5 Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 7 listed registered securities, options, and bonds, and a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 8 Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 4 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

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Speaker 1 All right, so let's talk a little bit about, because there's a couple of

Speaker 1 schools of thought here,

Speaker 1 and I hesitate

Speaker 1 to call the one

Speaker 1 more bona fide.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's conversion therapy that can happen at a licensed therapist's office,

Speaker 1 and there's conversion therapy that can happen in

Speaker 1 somebody's basement or the basement of a church. I was going to say basement too.
Yeah. Or a room.
Doesn't have to be a basement. I know, but a basement makes it seem

Speaker 1 sinister. That's probably why I said it.

Speaker 1 So there are two sort of ways that can happen.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk a little bit about the first way,

Speaker 1 the patented way, reparative therapy trademark by Joseph

Speaker 1 Niccolosi Sr.

Speaker 1 That guy doesn't even get the Italian accent, man, and I don't blame you. He doesn't.
Which we should say, by the way, in July of this year, Amazon stopped carrying his works on their website.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because

Speaker 1 they considered them

Speaker 1 that they promoted fraud. That's right.
Which we'll get to. Yeah, which is interesting.
But this guy is like a psychologist. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's a trained psychologist who basically said, I'm going to take everything I learn and direct it toward curing gay people of being gay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know much about, do you know much about his religiosity?

Speaker 1 I think he was Jewish. Okay.
And born in Brooklyn, from what I understand. I wrote a really, really great article, not a think piece, but a memoir in The American Prospect

Speaker 1 from American Prospector? From 2012, yeah. That's different.
They're gold by Gabriel Arana. Okay.
It's called My So-Called Ex-Gay Life. It's definitely worth reading, but it's a great look at

Speaker 1 conversion therapy, but also is overlaid with his... like personal experience with it.
Okay.

Speaker 1 At any rate, his contention was that, like we said,

Speaker 1 you develop homosexuality or homosexual feelings at least because of a result of environmental conditions, childhood traumas, and they call it same-sex attraction, SSA.

Speaker 1 And that could stem, in his opinion, from a few different things.

Speaker 1 Desire for adventure, peer acceptance, loneliness or boredom or curiosity,

Speaker 1 approval or affection from males. And a lot of this is centered on men, although it's certainly women have been involved in this as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah, but

Speaker 1 a lot of this over the years is making gay men straight.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah.
But it's not exclusive to that. No, it's not.

Speaker 1 General rebellion, which is pretty funny. And then

Speaker 1 sexual molestation by another male. And I think that is a very, like, I think

Speaker 1 the idea that that leads to being gay is very widespread in culture, well beyond the Christian right or people who believe in conversion therapy.

Speaker 1 The idea that if you're sexually abused by a man or somebody of your same sex, you become gay. Yeah.
Which is just wrong. But I think a lot of people still believe that.

Speaker 1 I know that's what I thought when I was a kid. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not wrong. Well, no, it's utterly wrong.

Speaker 1 And the whole basis of Niccolosi's theory, he takes back to a study from 1992 called Demography of Sexual Orientation in Adolescents.

Speaker 1 And this was an actual study from the Journal of Pediatrics that looked at patterns of sexual orientation in high school students in Minnesota and what they found out was that younger teens in Minnesota in this study

Speaker 1 were more likely to express sexual confusion about their orientation when they were younger and as they grew older they were less confused about their sexual identity and orientation.

Speaker 1 Right, and that's a legit study. Right.
And I think that probably anyone who's ever been an early teenager and a late teenager can be like, that sounds about right. Exactly.
You know?

Speaker 1 But the extrapolation that Niccolosi did was what the problem is. Right.

Speaker 1 So Niccolosi was saying, like, yes, that shows that like you're you're you're in a dangerous place earlier on and that if a couple of things happen in a certain way, you can be veered off of this natural path toward heterosexuality into homosexuality.

Speaker 1 Right. And also more dangerously,

Speaker 1 that means we got to get them while they're young. Right.
So one of the other things that he really based his practice on was this family triad of a domineering over

Speaker 1 attendant mother, a passive, detached father, and a sensitive child. Bogey nights.
In kind of in

Speaker 1 that that

Speaker 1 triangle, like you would like almost certainly have a gay kid if somebody didn't intervene. So he he decided like this was his career was intervening in that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But that in and of itself has never been proven to

Speaker 1 create gay kids.

Speaker 1 Like whether you believe in coercion therapy or not, if you have a domineering mother and absent father and you're like a sensitive type who likes dolls even, doesn't mean you're going to turn gay.

Speaker 1 Right. This is the basis of that though, is that yes, you will turn gay.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 still to this day, this idea is allowed to live because science has never fully satisfied the question, like, are we born gay? Do we develop being gay?

Speaker 1 And it looks like it's on a pretty strong track toward a genetic basis of homosexuality.

Speaker 1 But it's still nothing's definitive. And so people can say, well, maybe we do develop, you know,

Speaker 1 in adolescence, you know, being gay or whatever, because science is not filled this void quite yet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the way Niccolosi would write about this stuff and describe it is in a very sort of professional, innocuous type way, where a casual reader

Speaker 1 might say, well, this seems totally valid and above board. Yeah, a Newsweek reader or an Oprah viewer.
That's right.

Speaker 1 This is one of the things. I think this is from one of his books.
And this is how he describes the relationship from patient to therapist.

Speaker 1 The client has come to the therapist seeking assistance to reduce something distressing to him, and the RT psychotherapist agrees to share his professional experience and education to to help the client meet his own goal, his own goal.

Speaker 1 The therapist enters into a collaborative relationship, agreeing to work with the client to reduce his unwanted attractions and explore his heterosexual potential, which again, it seems very innocuous.

Speaker 1 And there are plenty of cases where a grown man or woman of their own volition goes and seeks this out. Right.

Speaker 1 But what they don't say is what happens many times is a parent forces their young child to do this. No, that's a big one.
Yeah, that's a big one. In this

Speaker 1 American Prospect magazine, the author was like in his early teens when he went to Niccolosi's therapy.

Speaker 1 But he said everybody else in the group was in their like 40s or 50s. So it was definitely both.

Speaker 1 But there's something here that's really important because, like you said, if you just read this stuff, it does sound innocuous.

Speaker 1 It's all very much based on things like cognitive behavioral therapy, like stuff that works, which means that this works in a weird, twisted way, which we'll talk about, but not in the way it's ultimately meant to.

Speaker 1 It works in a bent way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean. Do you want me to explain now? I feel like I should.

Speaker 1 I take issue with the word works at all.

Speaker 1 There are situations where it might prevent someone from acting on a homosexual impulse. That's what I mean.
Yeah, but that doesn't change the nature of their sexuality. No, no, right.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, preventing someone or training someone to not act on their sexuality is damaging in and of itself and causes all sorts of other problems.

Speaker 1 But maybe good enough for a really religious family. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, that's what I read, is that over time, as the Christian right adopted the idea of championing the ex-gay movement, that part of that was accepting gay people

Speaker 1 who... refrain from gay sex.
Right. So if you were like, I'm gay, I'm never going to be straight.
I tried,

Speaker 1 but I don't have sex with with men.

Speaker 1 I'm not welcome in church.

Speaker 1 So what I was saying, though, is with Niccolosi's thing,

Speaker 1 there's something fundamentally wrong with it. And that if somebody came to you and said, I'm tired of being white.
Right. Or black or Hispanic.
Or straight. I can't stand it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't say, oh, well, let's figure out how to make you not black or white or Hispanic or straight. Let's figure out how to change you.

Speaker 1 They would say, any therapist worth their salt would say, well, no, there's a lot of great things about being white or black or Hispanic or straight, and let's focus on that so that you can own your identity.

Speaker 1 Conversion therapy does the opposite. It says, yes, let's figure out how to get the gay out of you.

Speaker 1 Let's change your identity because

Speaker 1 this group of society has said that it's unacceptable. That's right.
And that is an extraordinarily damaging position to come from, and that is the basis of conversion therapy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and as we'll see later on, the AMA's official stance is that it is, and we'll read the quote later, that it is a damaging prospect

Speaker 1 and creates real harm. An American prospector.

Speaker 1 So this approach by Niccolosi

Speaker 1 has four steps to it.

Speaker 1 The first one is interesting because it's the disclosure of the therapist's personal, professional, philosophical, and religious views on homosexuality, which includes, Niccolosi says, the gay affirmative therapist also discloses his philosophical views to the client, but from a gay affirmative perspective, does he just put that in there to cover his bases?

Speaker 1 No, it's true though. Because you wouldn't send

Speaker 1 your son or daughter to a gay affirmative therapist to convert them.

Speaker 1 Into...

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 I think this is what he's saying. You've been to therapy before, right? Sure.

Speaker 1 Have you ever noticed that when you first, your first session, the therapist tells you a lot about themselves and what they think about mental health or life or whatever?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I'm always like, wait a minute, what about my problems? Yeah, I thought we were talking about me.

Speaker 1 I'm getting charged for this? I don't care about your family.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 That's what he's saying, that they do. But because this is about being gay, that's what they're going to talk about, is their views or whatever.
Interesting.

Speaker 1 They're going to share their opinions of it and that they think that there's problems with it.

Speaker 1 You know what my line is that the therapists, when they do all that stuff, I'm like, great, that's really interesting. At the end, I'm like, you want to start the clock now? Right.
Nice.

Speaker 1 Either that or I can prorate.

Speaker 1 Number two of the four steps is encouragement of the client's inquiry. So basically

Speaker 1 asking the client the questions, examining their feelings

Speaker 1 to try and discover like what lies beneath. Right.

Speaker 1 Number three, resolution of past trauma. If it is in fact one of the reasons they suspect

Speaker 1 this person has

Speaker 1 gone down the road to homosexuality.

Speaker 1 And then education regarding features of homosexuality, which includes everything from what motivates you to do this to you know that if you are gay, then this lifestyle ends in a very bad way for you.

Speaker 1 Right. That there's a lot of physical harm, social harm.
Emotional harm. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 So what's weird, though, is like, I can't, Niccolosi's like a tough person to paint with just one brush. Even though I totally disagree with what he

Speaker 1 dedicated his career to, he doesn't seem, at least from what I've read, and including that American Prospect article from somebody who was a patient of his for years. Right.

Speaker 1 He doesn't seem to have been like any sort of evil man or anything like that.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he just thought like this was a real thing and he was really helping people or what. But for example, there's this one quote from

Speaker 1 Gabriel Ariana who said that

Speaker 1 he had been like experimenting with sexual encounters with other men as a teenager. And he said that he'd been meeting men off of the internet.

Speaker 1 And he told Niccolosi, like, he's like, I trusted the guy enough to share this in therapy.

Speaker 1 And he said that Niccolosi told, he said, he told me to be careful meeting men off the internet, but that I shouldn't dwell on it or feel guilty.

Speaker 1 He said, my sexual behavior was of secondary importance. If I understood myself and worked on my relationships with men, the attractions would take care of themselves.

Speaker 1 I just had to be patient, which is, I mean, that's a pretty great thing for a therapist to tell a patient. Right.
Don't dwell on it. You know, don't feel guilty.

Speaker 1 Just, you know, accept it and move on and learn from it or whatever. But then the second part

Speaker 1 is where it goes downhill. Yes.

Speaker 1 And so the thing is, though, with conversion therapy in most cases, Niccolosi is...

Speaker 1 Like, he's almost a shining example in a weird way, whereas other people associated with it are, it's very easy to paint them with just one brush. Yeah.
You know.

Speaker 1 So we should talk a little bit about the argument against, a little bit more about the argument against, which includes a little bit more history.

Speaker 1 You know, we talked about the earliest stages of conversion therapy in the late 1800s.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it really kind of picked up steam in the United States in the 1960s.

Speaker 1 when the civil rights movement, you know, when gay people started coming out of the closet more, presenting themselves more in public, gay bars popping up, things like that. Stonewall.

Speaker 1 Stonewall, of course.

Speaker 1 Which, you know,

Speaker 1 anytime something like that is becoming a little more accepted in the mainstream, there's going to be another side that really roots down and digs in.

Speaker 1 And that's sort of how the modern gay conversion therapy movement was born, was out of homosexuality becoming more accepted. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I read a really interesting journal article from 2007 by Robinson and Spivey. It was in Gender and Society, the journal.
And

Speaker 1 they basically

Speaker 1 looked into the ex-gay movement, not necessarily

Speaker 1 the psychology community's basis of it, but later on the adoption of it by the Christian right.

Speaker 1 And they explained why the Christian right would be interested in that. And they were interested in it and dug in, like you said,

Speaker 1 because they saw homosexuality and feminism in particular as signs of a decadent society that would eventually cause us to crumble and collapse. And that the

Speaker 1 and this is according to Robinson and Spy-V. I haven't actually interviewed anyone on the Christian right who believes this,

Speaker 1 but they are academics and this was a peer-reviewed journal.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 masculinity is the antidote to that.

Speaker 1 It's the antidote to homosexuality, it's the antidote to feminism, and that it is up to each man to be a strong leader among women and children and to be as masculine as possible.

Speaker 1 That's how you did that. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 I went, I heard sermons every Sunday, well, not every Sunday, but I heard sermons on many Sundays where they were still saying, wives, submit to your husbands. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Straight out of the Bible.

Speaker 1 You know? Yeah. And like most of the antidote is, dads, you're being way too passive.
You need to step up and be the leader of your family.

Speaker 1 But also, moms, you can help by saying, oh, you have a question? Ask your father. I defer to your father.
Go ask your father.

Speaker 1 And just, yeah, being passive. Well, which goes back to that triad you mentioned earlier about the domineering mother, the passive father equals gaps.

Speaker 1 That's basically the basis of the whole thing, from what I could tell, is that, at least among the Christian right, that

Speaker 1 if the father is not the dominant and leading figure in the family, that's where the trouble comes from. And that can produce homosexual children.
Interesting. Yes.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 something we failed to mention as part of the AMA's

Speaker 1 change in 1972, or was that the APA?

Speaker 1 APA. APA.

Speaker 1 Was they said, and this is an important distinction, is that homosexuality they deemed a normal variation, not deviation, but a variation in human sexual orientation.

Speaker 1 And like other normal sexual orientations, can't be changed.

Speaker 1 In other words, you can't make a straight person gay any more than you can make a gay person straight. Right.
Is what that equals.

Speaker 1 And because of that, as we'll see later on, that became the basis for this idea that conversion therapy is in essence a fraud. Right.
Because it purports to do something that can't be done.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 Should we take another break? Oh, man, really? They're coming hard and fast. We can wait a few minutes.
Like men swinging scythes in sweaty shirts on the field.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's take another break and we'll talk about what might happen in conversion therapy right after this.

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Speaker 1 All right, Chuck, I'm excited about this part.

Speaker 1 You're excited about the horror show of conversion therapy. It's not all horror shows.
Some of it is just outright laughable. Yeah, so

Speaker 1 statistically, I can't.

Speaker 1 Also, I'm sorry, everybody. I want to say something, too.
Okay. We typically try to be super objective.

Speaker 1 This one is very tough. We have science on our side, too.
This was really hard for me to research. Yeah.
Nothing is ever hard for me to research. This one was.

Speaker 1 It was like turning over a log and finding it like maggots writhing underneath. That was what researching this one was like.
I just kept putting it off.

Speaker 1 I would just keep leaving it and just going and watching the office or something like that. Just anything but researching this.
Because it's super sad. It is.

Speaker 1 That children are taken at their most vulnerable time in adolescence when they don't know what's going on and they're told that they're wrong and they're sinning and they're dirty.

Speaker 1 That is a part of why it's sad. Another part to me of why it's sad is that the idea that grown-ups would direct this much thought and attention and effort into

Speaker 1 slamming their head up against a wall to try to change someone else to a way they think they should be. Right.

Speaker 1 That, I think, is...

Speaker 1 That's at least as sad to me as the children being misdirected like this. Because a kid can go on and grow up and be like, geez, my family was super messed up.

Speaker 1 I'm really glad I don't speak to them anymore because I'm much happier over here. Right.

Speaker 1 Well, that can't happen in the ideal circumstance. Sure.
Or the ideal circumstances that the family's just like, hey, we're really screwed up. We're really sorry.
Right.

Speaker 1 We love you no matter who you are. Yeah.
But the idea that there's a group, a social movement dedicated to just eradicating another group of people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I find that very hard to swallow. Yeah, agreed.
So apparently, statistically, about

Speaker 1 or close to 700,000 people in the United States have undergone conversion therapy. And we should mention that

Speaker 1 it's a real problem in places like Africa and Asia and South America. Yeah, where you can still be imprisoned for being gay.
Yeah. Like Uganda is a big, a big place for that.

Speaker 1 Conversion therapy is like on the rise in those places and other places. Right.
But we're talking about the United States in this case, 700,000 people.

Speaker 1 And like we said, sometimes it is

Speaker 1 with a licensed therapist. Sometimes it's

Speaker 1 done by a religious advisor in a basement or at a church.

Speaker 1 You know what that reminded me of is another thing we need to talk about sometime is exorcisms, like church exorcisms. Oh, we've done exorcisms.
We did like straight-up Roman Catholic exorcisms.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. I'm talking like the kind that somebody does in the basement of their house

Speaker 1 because they're supposedly an exorcist or something like that. Sure.
Backdoor exorcism. Basically,

Speaker 1 black market. You'll see.
You'll be like, oh, man, we should be talking about this. All right.
Well, I agree already. I trust you.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the AMA says that conversion therapy programs may utilize harmful psychological techniques.

Speaker 1 We were talking earlier about aversion therapy

Speaker 1 and given chemicals. They can still be given noxious stimulus.

Speaker 1 And I didn't see exactly what that entailed or could entail.

Speaker 1 There was a guy named Robert Gilbraith Heath who was the father of implanting electrodes into the brain to deliver shocks. And one of the things he directed that toward was curing gay people.

Speaker 1 I don't think anyone in their basement is implanting electrodes or whatever.

Speaker 1 But there are things like

Speaker 1 giving people like

Speaker 1 nausea-inducing medications is one.

Speaker 1 Showing them pictures that might nauseate them, and then figuring out how to associate that with masturbating the thoughts of other men or something like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, we should talk about a few of these specifically.

Speaker 1 I mean, all you have to do is look up on a search engine conversion therapy horror stories, and there are plenty of people out there saying what happened to them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look up also conversion therapy, super happy, fun stories, and

Speaker 1 you're going to come back with almost nothing. Google zero results.

Speaker 1 There was one teenager who said that he was forced to wear a backpack with 40 pounds of rocks 18 hours a day to just signify the physical burden of being gay. Right.

Speaker 1 One person's family gave them a fake funeral, closed casket funeral in front of him where they said that he died of AIDS and they said their final goodbyes because he went down the sinful path.

Speaker 1 Pretending he wasn't there, like that he was dead and in the casket. Yes.
Talking about him in third person. That's right.

Speaker 1 His family.

Speaker 1 One reported being told to strip naked in front of a mirror and say disparaging things about themselves. I just do that normally, though.

Speaker 1 Well, I did read one account where they basically said the whole idea is to break you down to nothing in the worst way possible and then build you back up again in the image that they want.

Speaker 1 So I get the impression that that is one route, but that is not necessarily what you're going to get at any place you go for conversion therapy. There's other ones that say.

Speaker 1 That's the problem, we don't know because so many people don't talk about it. Right.

Speaker 1 There's some that, like you would go to that say, okay, we're not going to abuse you or anything like that. But the basis of our beliefs in this is that

Speaker 1 you are gay because either you had an absent father, a domineering mother, some combination of the two, or you always wanted to be loved and

Speaker 1 popular among your male peers, and you didn't get that. So now you are misdirecting this need, this unmet need, toward having anonymous gay sex on the dance floor with some dude in Miami or whatever.

Speaker 1 So we need to figure out how to meet that need and have you hang out with guys who will tell you how cool you are and how popular you are. Yeah, like tailgating or something.
Kind of.

Speaker 1 And while we're at it, we're going to do that by

Speaker 1 accenting the masculinity. We're going to teach you how to be masculine so that you can hang out with dudes in the real world and they will think you're cool.

Speaker 1 So things like, we're going to teach you how to change the oil in your car. We're going to teach you to sit without crossing your legs.
No joke.

Speaker 1 There was a guy who teach you how to man spread on the subway. There's a guy who's kind of a prominent thinker.

Speaker 1 I think he was, I saw him as a sexologist, maybe a Christian sexologist. Gerhard van den Ardluig.

Speaker 1 It's pretty great. I think I nailed it.

Speaker 1 He said that homosexual men need to unlearn avoidance of getting their hands dirty, doing

Speaker 1 manual work, like chopping wood, painting a house, using a shovel. And that.
I say no thanks to all three. I chop wood.
That's kind of fun. It is fun.

Speaker 1 And that not necessarily just, here's an axe, start chopping wood, you're going to just suddenly become cured, but that that is part of it. Right.

Speaker 1 And in this thought, this tack, where they're not abusing you, they're not degrading you or anything like that. They're teaching you masculinity and manliness.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 the ultimate aim and goal of that is to go get married and have a kid. Right.
Or kids. Right.

Speaker 1 And that that is a big part of conversion therapy, or it was for a very long time, was saying,

Speaker 1 you might still be gay or whatever, but you're not really gay. You're now married and you have a kid, and that is what you're dedicating yourself to.
That's right. You're a wood chopping,

Speaker 1 football-throwing dude. With a pencil-thin mustache.
Oh, no, no, not that.

Speaker 1 So, in 1974, we should talk about George Reckers. He was a psychologist who

Speaker 1 tested whether or not this was an effective treatment. And he had a four,

Speaker 1 this wasn't his boy, but this was his client. It was a four,

Speaker 1 I guess client's a weird way to put it. Sure.
This child was forced to go to this person at four and a half years old. And this is a boy manifesting, quote, childhood cross-gender identity.

Speaker 1 And they said this is based on the clothes.

Speaker 1 that this boy wears.

Speaker 1 And now, of course, looking at this, it was probably a transgender child. Yeah, or gender fluid.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell because this was 1974, and the way they wrote about it, it's hard to kind of piece it together.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's also like just how much of this behavior did this child exhibit? Like, it makes it seem like this is all the kid did was act like a girl when he was a boy. Right.
What else was he into?

Speaker 1 What else, you know? Yeah. It's just such a narrow picture of the subject.
Of course. So in the end, Reckers

Speaker 1 did something super damaging. He trained the boy's mother to be the therapist.
Like, here's what you need to do so this kid can get 24-7 therapy from you.

Speaker 1 And basically punish feminine behaviors, reinforce masculine behaviors

Speaker 1 at all times. And they said that, hey, this is working because every time this boy gets punished for doing something feminine, he stops and like chops wood or throws the football and gets a reward.

Speaker 1 because he's four and a half years old, he's doing the things that their parents congratulate him for and reward him for. Right.
And not doing the things that he's getting punished for. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Punishment is what stood out to me.

Speaker 1 It's just so sad that the mother was instructed to reject him, to basically ignore him when he acted like a girl, but not ignore him, like pretend it's not going on, like let him know that she is giving him the cold shoulder.

Speaker 1 And that that's how he learned. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's just devastating. It's heartbreaking.
And what's heartbreaking is this is used, was used as an example. Like, see, this works.

Speaker 1 This four and a half year old is now acting more masculine and is not going to grow up to be gay.

Speaker 1 And this

Speaker 1 child died by suicide at the age of 30. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like that's the end result of this road. That's where it ends up.

Speaker 1 And that's what I meant earlier when I said like it does kind of work because it follows psychological techniques that actually work, but it works in like kind of a bent way where, yes, you can train somebody, you can mold a four-year-old to behave in a certain way by conditioning them.

Speaker 1 It's possible. You can get somebody to do just about anything like that.

Speaker 1 But the ramifications, the results, the damage to the individual's identity that will eventually come out later are widespread and sweeping.

Speaker 1 And that's the point. That's why you shouldn't monkey around with somebody's identity using proven psychological techniques.
That's what's so evil about the whole thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, my daughter's four and a half. I had a hard time even getting through this stuff.

Speaker 1 And then also, if somebody comes, this is the other thing, too.

Speaker 1 If you're a conversion therapy advocate or activist or practitioner and you say, no, there are people out there who are distressed, who are experiencing psychological distress for being gay.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's true. I guarantee that there are people like that out there, but directing them toward working on not being gay is not the answer.
Yeah, go to regular therapy.

Speaker 1 And learn to love that you're gay. And go find a church that accepts gay people.
There's step two. Yeah, because they're out there.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about the science of it because the... We are so contributing to a decadent society.

Speaker 1 In 2009, there was a report from the APA task force on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation. Quite a read.

Speaker 1 And this was the actual final stance was sexual orientation change efforts can pose critical health risks to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Critical health risks.

Speaker 1 Not emotional, not, I mean, it's part of emotional health too. Sure.
But critical

Speaker 1 health risks. And if you read the

Speaker 1 review of research and peer-reviewed literature and the findings of what it can result in, it reads like the worst pharma ad disclaimer you've ever heard.

Speaker 1 Depression, guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, shame, self-hatred, hostility, dehumanization, betrayal, social withdrawal, substance abuse, stress, sexual dysfunction, loss of faith, and suicidality.

Speaker 1 And on that that last note, homosexual teens attempt suicide more often than heterosexual teens.

Speaker 1 And then among those homosexual teens, you're twice as likely to try that if your parents have rejected you and three times as likely if you have undergone conversion therapy. Three times as likely.

Speaker 1 Yes. Compared to a heterosexual teen.
That's right. Man.

Speaker 1 Well, there you have it.

Speaker 1 That was just the APA.

Speaker 1 A bunch of different associations, like legit medical and psychological associations, have come out and condemned in no uncertain terms conversion therapy.

Speaker 1 And all of

Speaker 1 these condemnations basically follow two different texts. One, there is no science backing up the idea that you can change somebody from homosexuality to heterosexuality.

Speaker 1 And number two,

Speaker 1 there is science backing up the idea that trying to do that causes damage to the individual. So don't do that.
And as a matter of fact, some countries and

Speaker 1 states in the United States have said,

Speaker 1 this is outlawed. You can't do this anymore, everybody, which is really touchy stuff because, again, the Christian right kind of adopted it.
And

Speaker 1 we don't really infringe on religious beliefs, but that's how strong these condemnations have been that they're saying, we'll kind of start to wade into that with this one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and we'll talk about the legalities of recent years in a sec. But before that, between

Speaker 1 the 70s and the APA's stance changing things a little bit, then through the 80s and 90s where conversion therapy was really sort of hitting its peak, I think in America,

Speaker 1 there were a few high-profile cases that were exposed that have helped sway things. a little bit back to sanity.
So first thing in the more recent years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so before those high-profile cases, and I mean right before them, I think in 1998, a coalition of church groups got together and sponsored an ad campaign, something like a $600,000 ad campaign.

Speaker 1 And things like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, all this. And this ad featured John and Ann, I believe, Ann Polk, both of whom were formerly gay, but were now ex-gay

Speaker 1 and married and had a kid, and said, gay conversion helps. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of ink on the other side saying, actually, this is totally discredited.

Speaker 1 And it captured everybody's attention. And this is when the Christian Wright came in and said, we're going to make this huge push in the culture war.
And it really worked.

Speaker 1 That's when that Newsweek story came out. Yeah, they were on the cover of Newsweek.
He was the...

Speaker 1 He was the leader of an ex-gay organization called Exodus International. John Paul was.
Right. And it brought a lot of exclusion.
Yeah, he was the poster boy. Yes.

Speaker 1 And Exodus International in particular became one of two main umbrella organizations. They were kind of like the

Speaker 1 I saw it put the spiritual version of this, the ex-gay movement, and then something called NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, was like the scientific branch of the ex-gay movement.

Speaker 1 And so, Exodus International became a very well-known, prominent organization in the late 90s. But within two, three years,

Speaker 1 it would basically be the poster child for how conversion therapy doesn't work. Right, because John Paul is gay.

Speaker 1 In 2000, just two years later, he was photographed coming out of a gay bar in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 At the time, he refuted that. He didn't refute that he was there.
He said, what you always say, I didn't know it was a gay bar. I went in there asking for directions.

Speaker 1 No, I saw he went in to use the bathroom. So

Speaker 1 either way. I just read the article.
And then they were like, but you were in there for a couple of hours.

Speaker 1 Like, did you get the directions and use the bathroom? It clearly says blue oyster in neon. Have you not seen the police academy movies?

Speaker 1 That was the name of it in the police academy, right? The blue oyster bar.

Speaker 1 Oh, goodness.

Speaker 1 And John Paul, we should say, now lives life as a gay man and is a chef. He's been on some celebrity chef shows.
Is that right? Uh-huh. Cool.
And he is

Speaker 1 living his best life. He's living his best life from what it looks like.
So he's no longer married any longer to Ann?

Speaker 1 Actually, that I don't know. Because there are some, but we'll keep going.
I don't think he is, but there are a couple of people that are. There was in 2003, Michael Johnston,

Speaker 1 he was another person touted as an ex-gay success story. Founder of National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day.

Speaker 1 He actually was,

Speaker 1 he was found out to be having sex with men that he met online and infected them with HIV.

Speaker 1 Very big deal. And then there's Ted Haggard, of course, in 2006.
I remember this. Yeah, he was a preacher and president of the National Association of Evangelicals,

Speaker 1 or was at the time, I guess. Very much an anti-gay leader in the religious circles.
And this one sort of unfolded little by little. Like,

Speaker 1 hey, this guy came out and said, this guy had a relationship with me for like three years. We did crystal meth together.
And then Haggard came out and said, so cliche.

Speaker 1 You know what? I have to admit, I sinned. I bought crystal meth, but I didn't use it.
I threw it in the trash. I was just because I wouldn't succumb to the sin.

Speaker 1 Is that what he said? Yeah. He says he did buy crystal meth.

Speaker 1 And because I assume that was proof.

Speaker 1 And he said that he didn't use it at all. He threw it in the trash before he used it.
Where the other guy was like, No, he did tons of meth and had gay sex a lot.

Speaker 1 He's like, oh, I know what he's talking about. On like day four of us staying up, he like freaked out and threw it in the trash, but then he went back and got it.

Speaker 1 And the proof was that he paid for it by check.

Speaker 1 Maybe. No.
No, probably not. I don't think meth dealers take checks anymore.
I think so.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 he was outed by

Speaker 1 having a relationship with an underage boy, a sexual relationship. This was Ted Haggard again? Yeah.
And the boy sued, and it was settled by the church with a dollar figure.

Speaker 1 I think it was like $180,000. And then finally, in 2011, Ted Haggard comes out and is like, all right, so I did have a relationship with a boy, but we never touched each other.

Speaker 1 I just masturbated in front of him. I threw him in the trash.
And in 2011, he said, you know what?

Speaker 1 I'm bisexual. I'm going to admit it.
I am bisexual, but I am going to choose to live my life as a faithful heterosexual husband to my wife.

Speaker 1 I wonder if after he admitted that,

Speaker 1 it came out as bisexual, what that felt like.

Speaker 1 If he felt like a weight was lifted or if the anxiety associated with it was just so much or, you know, what his wife knew or didn't know or thought about it.

Speaker 1 I'd be very curious to know what that, you know, what life has been like for him after that. I mean, he's a preacher again.

Speaker 1 Because, I mean, more power to him if he's like, I'm a Christian and I'm just not going to have gay sex. That's as much a personal choice as having gay sex.
You know?

Speaker 1 I mean, the whole underage boy thing, that's a huge problem that I think

Speaker 1 I'm hoping was addressed. But I wonder what his life is like now.

Speaker 1 Oh, I mean, he's, like I said, he's preaching again, I think, in Colorado. He's probably a stuff you should know listener.
Haggard, right in. Yeah, we'd like to hear from you, sir.

Speaker 1 You want to talk about the law?

Speaker 1 Because right now. Oh, wait, there was one more.
Chuck, there's a big one. Who? Alan Chambers? Yes.
So John Polk, when he was outed cruising the Blue Oyster in D.C.

Speaker 1 back in 2000, he was running Exodus International. Yes.

Speaker 1 He was replaced a couple of years later by Alan Chambers.

Speaker 1 And about a decade after Chambers took over Exodus International, he said, I'm gay. I've been gay.
Conversion therapy doesn't work. We're shutting down Exodus International.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I apologize to the LGTBQ community. Yes.
So within about a decade or so of the Christian Right adopting the ex-gay and conversion therapy pillar post as part of the platform for their culture war,

Speaker 1 the biggest organization, one of two biggest organizations dedicated to conversion therapy said, it doesn't work. We're sorry, gay people, for all the damage we've done.

Speaker 1 That's a pretty big turn of events. It is.
So yes. Yes, it still continues.
So that led to, yeah. So that led to a bunch of laws that are trying to keep it from continuing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the laws are basically usually around minors saying you cannot force a minor to do something like this.

Speaker 1 Not, hey, the whole thing is outlawed. If you're an adult and you want to go do this, then that's up to you.
As of 2019, this year, 18 states in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 and Puerto Rico have similar bans enacted.

Speaker 1 And also, it's important to point out that those bans are about the legitimate scientific community. Like you will have your license revoked.

Speaker 1 It doesn't say anything about a preacher that you go to or a youth counselor or any sort of non-licensed church there. Right.
It's only scientists or licensed

Speaker 1 counselors or psychologists or psychiatrists or doctors, I'm sure, who can lose their license if they practice it. That's right.
But yeah, that's because there's religious freedom.

Speaker 1 I guess you can still do that to minors, minors, though, if it's a religious group doing it.

Speaker 1 That is what I'm not sure about. So, for the.

Speaker 1 Well, it depends on the state. So, there was a group, or there was a counseling

Speaker 1 organization called Jonah.

Speaker 1 And Jonah. Was this Goldberg and Burke? Yes.
They ran Jonah, which stood for, I can't find it anywhere. I got it here.
Jews offering a new alternative for healing. Okay.

Speaker 1 They were not only

Speaker 1 found practicing in New Jersey conversion therapy, so they both lost their licenses. They were also sued in a civil suit by former patients for fraud and lost.
It's interesting if you think about it.

Speaker 1 Like, wait a minute, if this is not possible,

Speaker 1 you're charging people for it, that's fraud.

Speaker 1 So they had like a $3.5 million settlement levied against them and lost their licenses, but then they just set up shop under another name, apparently the same year of the verdict and the civil suit.

Speaker 1 But for the most part, part, if you're a state and you pass a law banning conversion therapy to minors among medical practitioners or counselors,

Speaker 1 the courts are going to uphold that law. Yeah, it's been upheld in California and New Jersey.
Most of the challenges are on the grounds of free speech.

Speaker 1 And the New Jersey,

Speaker 1 when they upheld the New Jersey, or maybe it was Maryland, the judge said,

Speaker 1 we're not infringing on your free speech. You can say whatever you want, but you can't practice this therapy.
That's different than free speech.

Speaker 1 You can believe what you want, say what you want, but you can't do this as part of your licensed therapy. It's the same thing as

Speaker 1 if you carry out quack

Speaker 1 cancer treatments. Right.

Speaker 1 That is harmful, like you're poisoning your patients or whatever.

Speaker 1 And like they become,

Speaker 1 they lose the use of their arms and legs because of a treatment that you gave them for cancer that the American Medical Association has specifically said is damaging and harmful.

Speaker 1 You're totally going to get held accountable for that. You're lucky to just lose your license in that case.
This is the exact same principle. Yeah, for sure.
So,

Speaker 1 because it deals mostly with minors or exclusively with minors, the courts have upheld it.

Speaker 1 But New York City actually is widely considered to have overstepped its bounds and actually misstepped in this kind of culture war about conversion therapy in banning the practice among minors and adults.

Speaker 1 Right. And that got New York City sued.

Speaker 1 And New York City was like, well, the Supreme Court's actually gotten pretty conservative lately. I don't know if we should test this.
And they repealed the ban. Yeah,

Speaker 1 as a strategy.

Speaker 1 Right, to keep it from getting tested in the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court could say, no, all laws against conversion therapy are unconstitutional. You can't outlaw it or ban it in any form.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think the Supreme Court already refused to hear one case.

Speaker 1 Which actually upheld the state's outlaw of

Speaker 1 conversion therapy. Right.
Yeah. Very interesting.
There's a movie I haven't seen yet called The Miseducation of Cameron Post. It's a 2018 film from the 2012 novel by Emily Danforth.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen it yet, but it's about a girl who undergoes conversion therapy. And it's

Speaker 1 Chloe Grace Mortz, Moritz I you know her I I do I can't put the face with the name but I know both yeah you've seen her for sure sure if you want to know more about arrested development conversion therapy all that stuff you can well I guess start researching online see what you think and since I said see what you think it's time for listener mail

Speaker 1 I'm gonna call this complaint pedantic complaint. Okay.
A right to complain.

Speaker 1 Josh, in the episode on historic districts, you kept referring to them repeatedly with the indefinite article and rather than a and historic district. I said and.
That's what he says.

Speaker 1 That sounds unusual. I don't usually do that.
Really? I guess I was just being unconsciously correct.

Speaker 1 So is that correct? Yeah. So what's the rule?

Speaker 1 Because I don't even know it. Huh? What I just said.

Speaker 1 That's the rule. That's the rule.
What I say?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I try not to exercise it too much. Okay, good.
Only when I'm right. Joe says this, I realize this infuriating practice has become popular in recent years in the U.S.

Speaker 1 I feel passionately that it must be discontinued, especially primarily by those voices that are attended by large audiences like you. You are no doubt aware the letter H is a consonant,

Speaker 1 necessitating, geez,

Speaker 1 the use of the indefinite article A rather than and. Citation, all grammar books ever.
I should limit the scope of my gripe with an important caveat, cockneys.

Speaker 1 They should probably continue to say and because they pronounce it historic. This guy doesn't even know that the rhyming slang episode is coming out.
How weird.

Speaker 1 But guys, that's not really what I write today. I love the show.

Speaker 1 I wanted to tell you, I wanted to wait for a halfway plausible pretense to make the email a little more fun, which I hope this has been. Any chance on an episode of How Pedentry Works?

Speaker 1 Keep up the good work, Joe. Joe's Joe.
He's spoken fun. Turns out he's good peeps after all.
Yes. Is the and before an H? Is that a thing? Oh, you know that.
Is it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think I don't know if it's proper or not, but I understand where it comes comes from because the vowel that comes right after the H is usually so heavily pronounced in relation to how it's pronounced when it comes after other consonants, like an historic

Speaker 1 district sounds okay.

Speaker 1 An honor. An honor? A honor? Which one sounds better? Like I was bestowed an honor.
Yeah, no, say it the other way. But you wouldn't say that.
Dog vomit comes out.

Speaker 1 In high school, I had an history teacher that was great.

Speaker 1 You know, it's really weird.

Speaker 1 Did Joe tell you to say that? No, I just thought of it because

Speaker 1 I had a historic history teacher. I had a historic.
Yeah, both work. How about this? We're both right, Joe.

Speaker 1 Try not to focus on such stupid stuff.

Speaker 1 I'm curious if there is. I really want to know the rule now, because I know it's a consonant, but if people are saying it these days, is that just some sort of a...

Speaker 1 Fighting the system? That's the descriptivist way. The prescriptivist is like, no, it's this way.
Right. Joe's the prescriptivist here.
We're descriptivists. All right.

Speaker 1 I think we've proven ourselves that. Maybe we should launch a side podcast called The Descriptivists.
Oh, that's a good one. Yeah.
Almost has like a Civil War era folk band feel to it.

Speaker 1 We'd have to curl curly cues though. That's fine.
We're not going to do that. We could get fake ones that we just took on and off for publicity.

Speaker 1 That's right. Scout mob.
All right.

Speaker 1 If you want to get in touch with us like Joe did, have a little quibble, a little gripe, or praise, or whatever, you can go on to stuffyushouldknow.com and check us out.

Speaker 1 Our social links are all up there. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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