The State of New Jersey has become the second state to outlaw reparative therapy for homosexuality. That’s what its advocates call it, at least they used to. Now they generally dare not speak its name, instead calling it “sexual orientation change effort.” I like the name some gay activists have invented for it: “pray the gay away.”  Whatever you call it, it’s no longer legal in New Jersey, at least not when it’s practiced upon minors, and just ten days after the law passed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a similar law passed in California a couple of years back. It was a bad end of August for the idiots out there who worry about who is sticking what into whom–a subject whose minute details they seem awfully intimate with and preoccupied by, especially when it concerns nubile youth.

In case it is not clear, I have no use for people who argue, from natural law or Biblical law or evolutionary doctrine, that homosexuality is a Bad Thing. Love is rare and life is hard and it is cruel to tell people who find themselves attracted to or in love with members of their own sex that they should stifle themselves. We’ll all be plenty stifled when we’re dead.

In the meantime, you could do a lot worse for a watchword than “only connect.” In fact, when I attended a conference run by the National Association for Research and Theapy of HOmosexuality a few years back in Orlando, I was pretty sure I was seeing a fair amount of connecting going on among the attendees, many of whom had supposedly been cured of their gayness–a fleeting glance in an elevator, hugs that went on just a tad long, the constant attention to the details of erotic life. Packed together into a windowless room across the road from the Magic Kingdom, their stifled desire seemed to be breaching its banks. I even got asked out on a date (or so I wanted to call it) by a tall dark man from Azerbaijan, an ex-gay, ex-Muslim, born again psychiatrist who wanted to go see Borat with me but at the last minute got a better offer. Too bad. I am sure we would have loved watching the wrestling scene together.

But I digress. Much as I don’t like these people, I think you have to admit they have a point in their opposition to these laws. Not on the mindless libertarian principle they cite–that these laws infringe on the therapist’s right to choose the proper treatment, the patient’s right to choose to change something about him or herself, and parent’s rights to look after their children as they see fit. I mean, all of that is true, the laws do this. That is their explicit point, and explicitly because  they hold that sexual orientation is not in the domain of things that can be chosen. Therefore, they say, reparative therapy is not the upholding of freedom, but rather a way to oppress people. Outlawing it is no worse than outlawing bloodletting or trepanation or, for that matter, slavery.

In real life, I am sure this is exactly how reparative therapy works. Parents scared to death that their children will grow up to be gay, and encouraged by their pastor or someone’s aunt, haul the kid they just discovered in an illicit embrace with one of their same-sex schoolmates to the nearest therapist who the pastor or aunt knows to have helped someone go straight. The point of the therapy is to change the child’s desire such that he wants what he is supposed to want, and what his parents (and probably at least sometimes the kid himself) wishes he wanted. It is inherently oppressive, in other words.

Now it turns out that sexual desire is pretty obdurate. You can shock and threaten and torture people. You can show them same-sex porn, tell them to masturbate to it, and then, right before they come, switch the  to the opposite-sex channel. You can pay sex surrogates to copulate with them in hopes that a little professional swiving will show them the light. None of that seems to work very well. People want what they want.

But that’s not to say that sexual orientation never changes. It’s not even to say that sexual orientation exists, at least not in the same way that lefthandedness or eye color exist. The idea that we have to be one way or the other is a relatively recent one, maybe 150 years old, and it’s all caught up in Victorian Europe and its ideas about taking the measure of the species and cultivating it like some kind of fine garden. And there are notable exceptions, especially among women, at least some of whom seem to be relatively fluid in their sexuality. The problem here is most likely in the notion of a fixed orientation, which fits many different political agendas, but does not seem to fit us very well. Unfortunately, the notion of a fixed orientation is also the key to many of the advances gay people have made in the last half century, starting with the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM. If gay people were indeed born that way, then it is foolish as well as inhumane to try to change them.

So here we have another one of those myths, or noble lies, or whatever you want to call them–this time, that sexual orientation can’t change. If this is what it takes for your average state legislator to pass laws ending discrimination or allowing gay marriage or even outlawing conversion therapy, then I say let’s not worry too much that it is bullshit. But just as “born that way” can become a burden when events prove it incorrect, so too outlawing therapy based on the notion that people can’t change might also prove to be a bad move. After all, it seems like every day neuroscientists are telling us about some other capacity or tendency that is beyond our control. Just today, in fact, NPR reported on the American Medical Association’s decision to make obesity an official disease. “We’re all wired in slightly different ways,” a doctor told the reporter. Which means, says another doc, “if you have that genetic susceptibility to gain weight, you will gain weight easily, no matter what.” Fat people were born that way, in other words.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t be cured. As the NPR story makes clear, the disease designation will make it easier for patients to get treatment; that. as I’ve said millions of times, is exactly what it means to call something a disease. It will also make gastric reduction surgery and/or anti-obesity drugs more attractive to more people. “Born that way” is increasingly not so much a justification for not changing something as it is a way to put that change into the hands of medical science, whose unacknowledged ability to reach deep into our persons, into our sense of agency, into our ways of experiencing the world, also seems to be increasing. It’s an invitation to the geneticists and the brain docs and their drug company patrons to figure out how to intervene, and I guarantee you that somewhere some scientist is slaving away at the question of how to change sexual orientation. It’s as if the category itself had been invented so that it could be eradicated.

I suppose if this happens, at least some of us will be glad for those laws, although once a “cure” for homosexuality is discovered, the laws will be seen as outdated and scientifically unsound. In the meantime, I for one am glad that the born that way myth reigns. This is an extremely stupid society living through what is perhaps one of its stupidest eras, and I’ll take any glimmer of light. Surely the idea that people should be free to love whom they love is way too radical for us. But mark my words. Live by the lancet, die by the lancet.

And in the meantime, if state legislators really want to protect children from oppression masquerading as mental health treatment , maybe they ought to turn their attention to the unfolding atrocity of children on antipsychotic drugs. Or maybe to the fact that 14 percent of American families are living in poverty, and 20 percent of American children. But that’s for a different day.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 16th, 2013 at 10:45 am and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.