Pride events were once a necessary form of activism to ensure homosexuals were legally equal before the law. When gay marriage was legalised in 2013, Pride was able to become a platform for celebration. Now it has become a platform for Social Justice grievance addicts with no gratitude for what the pioneers of gay activism have achieved, nor for the privilege it is to be alive in a first world western democracy.
Safety, compassion, security and kindness are just some of the flimsy excuses big-government advocates of the left and right use as justification for expanding the power of the state at the expense of individual liberty. The professionally oppressed now use the pseudoscientific practice of Gay Conversion Therapy as their new rallying flag for compassion-driven expansion of state power.
Gay Conversion Therapy was historically quite a horrific practice, especially in jurisdictions which considered being gay to be a mental disorder. Methodology included ice-pick lobotomies, chemical/physical castration, hormone treatment, electro-convulsive therapy, aversion therapy and nausea inducing drugs provided with homoerotic stimuli. The American Psychiatric Association voted to remove references to homosexuality from its manual in 1973.
Now the practice of GCT is generally the province of religious organisations, taking the form of group prayer, psychoanalysis and counselling. A case could be made for the assertion that simply talking to a gay person about changing their sexual orientation or preaching sections of the Bible constitutes GCT. It is difficult to provide a definition sufficiently objective to be legislated without posing a severe danger to religious freedom and subsequently political freedom and free speech.
The murky waters around properly defining GCT are not cleared by the hysterical rhetoric of left-wing extremists. Rainbow Greens recently attacked National MP Simon Bridges for expressing a cautious view on banning GCT over concerns that it could pose a threat to free speech.
Using the word “literal” to describe an activity which literally isn’t as portrayed, is typical Social Justice Warrior behaviour, which would be laughable were these manic harpies not sitting in Parliament today. It’s ironically useful being banned from Twitter. All the accounts that had previously blocked me are now visible again, even if I cannot comment on them directly.
Also highly ironic is Green MP Golriz Ghahraman‘s assertion that Simon Bridges has publicly announced a belief that his right to say stuff is more important than other people’s right to exist.
Golriz Ghahraman infamously worked as an unpaid volunteer intern in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She assisted the defence of Rwandan pop-singer Simon Bikindi who was convicted of inciting genocide for writing songs encouraging Hutu to slaughter Tutsi during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Ghahraman was literally defending the right of Bikindi to say stuff that convinced others that Tutsi had no right to exist.
Shaneel Lal is the co-founder of the Conversion Therapy Action Group. When he isn’t spewing racial hatred and comparing gay white men to white supremacists on Twitter, he is using frenzied exaggeration and factual distortion to attack religious and political freedom in New Zealand. Currently, this novelty project appears to be occupying most of his energies, though I don’t doubt he will return to pursuing more insidious forms of neo-Marxist division once GCT is banned.
He penned an opinion piece in The Spinoff on February 9th which opens with the retelling of an interaction between himself and a priest while volunteering at Middlemore Hospital in 2017.
“…a priest walked up to me and offered to “pray my gay away”. I refused. So he looked at me, and he said “it’s hot, but you know what’s hotter? Hell.”
An unpleasant interaction indeed but is this the target Lal has in mind when GCT is criminalised? He also refers to the horrific treatment dealt to Joan Bellingham who found herself a patient at the Princess Margaret Hospital (date not specified but the treatments were inflicted from 1970 to 1983), where she was subjected to over 200 electric shocks to treat “neurotic personality disorder.”
Electro-convulsive therapy remains legal in New Zealand but it cannot be used to change a person’s sexuality. This doesn’t stop the ‘literally’ false equivocations some CGT-ban activists make in claims that it is still legal for gay people to consent to ECT. The Ministry of Health provides information on this treatment which makes the strict criteria for eligibility very clear and that it is only used to treat cases of depression, mania or catatonia which have not responded to conventional treatments. Seven out of ten people who receive ECT find the treatment improves their condition.
Ice-pick lobotomies are the other archaic procedure cited by some activists as remaining legal for Gay Conversion Therapy. Having spent time researching this in detail, I am yet to find any evidence it has been criminalised in New Zealand or any reference to it in New Zealand legislation. The reason for this in other jurisdictions appears to be due to the difficulty of defining this particular form of brain surgery with sufficient objectivity to legislate a prohibition without adding unnecessary legal risk to the actions of surgeons. If there is an area politicians are obviously unqualified to hold an opinion on, it is brain surgery.
The Labour government campaigned on banning Gay Conversion Therapy during the 2020 election campaign. Last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed the government intended to introduce legislation to Parliament before the end of 2021. This isn’t good enough for Shaneel Lal and his screeching cohorts of the emotionally overdosed. Lal states that by not implementing a ban immediately, they condemn queer people to spend another year being tortured. While obviously completely ignorant of the dangers rushed legislation poses to individual liberty, I suspect he would be the cheerleader for such violations in any case.
The ban on Gay Conversion Therapy will inevitably pass in Parliament and become law this term. It already had overwhelming support, with Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party supporting a ban – 77/120 votes. Judith Collins and National have disappointed me (I should have expected it) by caving in and announcing on February 9th that National will also support the GCT ban, despite previous reservations at not having seen any draft legislation. Once again, ACT will stand alone in Parliament in its rigid defence of free speech; though having grown from one vote to ten is only a small comfort.