Conversion therapists sued

[zsdersw]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/27/us/con...html?hpt=hp_t4

The conversion therapy techniques included having them strip naked in group sessions, cuddling and intimate holding of others of the same-sex, violently beating an effigy of their mothers with a tennis racket, visiting bath houses "in order to be nude with father figures," and being "subjected to ridicule as 'faggots' and 'homos' in mock locker room scenarios," the suit said.

Shocking, shocking I tell you, that this sort of "therapy" didn't work and was psychologically destructive for these guys.

[Ausm]

Oh I thought this was an article about Marcus Bachmann!

[ichy]

Maybe someone can start suing homeopaths, naturopaths and other quacks and scam artists as well.

[Theb]

At first I was going to say they're lucky they didn't get 'inappropriately touched' by the counselor like those other guys, but after reading the techniques I think I would've rather gotten a handy.

How do people come up with this crap? "Beat your mom with a tennis racket, then cuddle with this other guy. Ok, you ready for some vagina?"

[dank69]

lolreligion

[zinfamous]

Originally Posted by Theb

How do people come up with this crap? "Beat your mom with a tennis racket, then cuddle with this other guy. Ok, you ready for some vagina?"

well, it worked for me!

[nehalem256]

Why would anyone think that "cuddling and intimate holding of others of the same-sex" would make someone less gay?

[SMOGZINN]

Originally Posted by nehalem256

Why would anyone think that "cuddling and intimate holding of others of the same-sex" would make someone less gay?

That part wasn't really meant to be effective, the therapist just enjoyed watching it.

[zinfamous]

Originally Posted by SMOGZINN

That part wasn't really meant to be effective, the therapist just enjoyed watching it.

most likely this.

[MomentsofSanity]

Originally Posted by Theb

How do people come up with this crap? "Beat your mom with a tennis racket, then cuddle with this other guy. Ok, you ready for some vagina?"

Shit I, in no way, have expressed any outward violence to any representation of my mother and have laid named with many women.

My wife is going to be heartbroken to learn I've now got the gay

[JohnOfSheffield]

Originally Posted by ichy

Maybe someone can start suing homeopaths, naturopaths and other quacks and scam artists as well.

If people are stupid enough to use that crap then they should suffer.

However, i don't think that they should be able to claim any effects of their treatments that have not been proven in a peer reviewed clinical study. IOW, they shouldn't be able to claim that their treatments do anything at all.

[ShawnD1]

Originally Posted by dank69

lolreligion

The really sad part is that religious nuts could have "cured" gayness just by reading a science book. Several studies have shown that increased levels of dopamine in the brain can radically change a person's sexual preference. In tests with fruit flies, giving them alcohol or meth would make them stop caring about male vs female; they would try to mate with everything. A similar effect is seen in humans. Drunk girls make out with each other, and meth is widely known to cause homosexual behavior in men. If we put on our thinking caps, we can figure out a way to do the opposite. Meth is a strong dopamine activating drug, so it would make sense that blocking dopamine would "fix" gay thoughts. As expected, this prediction is confirmed by science. Dopamine antagonists are generally used to treat psychotic disorders, and one of the side effects is that they completely kill a person's sex drive.

So here we see the difference approaches to making people less gay.
Science - give them haloperidol.
Religion - torture them until something happens.

[Rob M.]

Originally Posted by ShawnD1

The really sad part is that religious nuts could have "cured" gayness just by reading a science book. Several studies have shown that increased levels of dopamine in the brain can radically change a person's sexual preference. In tests with fruit flies, giving them alcohol or meth would make them stop caring about male vs female; they would try to mate with everything. A similar effect is seen in humans. Drunk girls make out with each other, and meth is widely known to cause homosexual behavior in men. If we put on our thinking caps, we can figure out a way to do the opposite. Meth is a strong dopamine activating drug, so it would make sense that blocking dopamine would "fix" gay thoughts. As expected, this prediction is confirmed by science. Dopamine antagonists are generally used to treat psychotic disorders, and one of the side effects is that they completely kill a person's sex drive.

So here we see the difference approaches to making people less gay.
Science - give them haloperidol.
Religion - torture them until something happens.

I have a cure!!

...leave them alone.

I'm not pro-gay, but I am against "forcing" things out of people. You can't do that anyway, and this "conversion therapy" trash isn't real science.

[IronWing]

People never learn. Anti-cult deprogrammers got their butts sued off back when cults were the big thing.

[zsdersw]

http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2...xgay-therapist

A first-of-it’s-kind lawsuit charging a prominent ex-gay leader with consumer fraud for offering to “cure” homosexuals will be waged in a New Jersey court. Whichever way the court may rule, we can confirm that the Southern Poverty Law Center's allegations match our own personal experiences with the man at the center of the lawsuit.

Arthur Goldberg is the founder of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, commonly known as JONAH. Goldberg has made no public comments about the substance of the lawsuit other than to issue a press release condemning the suit as an attack on free speech. But the issues at the heart of the lawsuit—the therapy practices he promotes as a “gay cure”—were the subject of hours of videotaped interviews we conducted with Goldberg several years ago. Those interviews ended up being featured in our documentary, Chasing the Devil: Inside the Ex-Gay Movement.

In the lawsuit, four gay men claim that Goldberg’s organization charged them for phoney counseling sessions that involved pillow beating, trash talking their mothers, and nudity with other men to switch their sexual orientation. All of the claims match what Goldberg told us on camera, and showed us during the filming of our documentary (watch an excerpt from his interview on the next page). We can’t tell you if this amounts to consumer fraud, but we can tell you that the plaintiffs' charges ring true.

We first met Goldberg at our apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after he refused to give us the address of his organization. He said he had to get to know us before releasing such sensitive information. “We’re somewhat afraid of the gay activists, they can make things difficult for us, and that’s why the address isn’t listed,” Goldberg explained. Several hours later, satisfied we were really documentary filmmakers and not gay activists, Goldberg agreed to allow us access to his facility, therapists and some patients. It turns out the JONAH headquarters are inside a Jersey City building fronting as a Russian Jewish art museum.

In the consumer fraud lawsuit Benjamin Unger claims he was ordered to beat a pillow with a tennis racket while shouting “Mom! Mom! Mom!” That’s a practice Goldberg was eager to have us film when he put us in contact with Baltimore based conversion therapist Richard Cohen. Goldberg works closely with Cohen and refers many of his clients to him for counseling. Cohen had a patient demonstrate the practice for us. Goldberg told us the treatment was based on the idea that homosexuality comes out of family dysfunction, “there is a very clear pattern of what causes homosexuality, over involvement with the mother is a major factor.” In the lawsuit Unger says the treatment greatly damaged his relationship with his mom. No doubt. Goldberg listed other possible causes as, “child sex abuse, same sex peer abuse, body image wounding, and defensive attachment to the father.”

Richard Cohen is not named in the New Jersey lawsuit but a source says he was involved with treating the plaintiffs. Cohen practices a form of touch therapy that involves caressing and holding the patient on his lap. In the lawsuit against Goldberg, it’s alleged that young men were instructed to remove their clothes and stand naked in a circle with an equally nude counselor. This tracks with what Goldberg and Cohen told us about the importance of male bonding and body image issues.

“Body image problems are confidence problems, a body wound is a sense of feeling different,” is the way Goldberg put it. It’s worth noting that Cohen is a former moonie who married his wife at a Unification Church mass wedding at Madison Square Garden. He was disciplined by the American Counseling Association and ultimately kicked out of the organization. Goldberg is a disbarred lawyer who was convicted of three counts of mail fraud and served six months in a federal prison.

At the heart of the potentially ground breaking lawsuit against Goldberg is the argument that conversion therapy promotes the idea that being gay is a choice, a position gay activists believe promotes anti-gay bigotry. ” There is no such thing as homophobia, homophobia is a made up term, a way of making the average American feel guilty,” was how Goldberg responded to a similar argument in our film. We’ll see if it’s the same argument he makes in court.

During the course of our filming with Goldberg he said a lot of surprising things. But perhaps nothing was as surprising as the revelation that he has an openly gay son, “ I don’t want to embarrass my son, but yes, he doesn’t like to be publicly identified, it’s not just my son, it’s a lot of members of my family.” It will be interesting to see if any of them get called to testify.

[DrPizza]

Richard Cohen is not named in the New Jersey lawsuit but a source says he was involved with treating the plaintiffs. Cohen practices a form of touch therapy that involves caressing and holding the patient on his lap. In the lawsuit against Goldberg, it’s alleged that young men were instructed to remove their clothes and stand naked in a circle with an equally nude counselor. This tracks with what Goldberg and Cohen told us about the importance of male bonding and body image issues.

Maybe he was kicked out as a scout leader & came up with this idea. ??

[TheVrolok]

Originally Posted by ShawnD1

The really sad part is that religious nuts could have "cured" gayness just by reading a science book. Several studies have shown that increased levels of dopamine in the brain can radically change a person's sexual preference. In tests with fruit flies, giving them alcohol or meth would make them stop caring about male vs female; they would try to mate with everything. A similar effect is seen in humans. Drunk girls make out with each other, and meth is widely known to cause homosexual behavior in men. If we put on our thinking caps, we can figure out a way to do the opposite. Meth is a strong dopamine activating drug, so it would make sense that blocking dopamine would "fix" gay thoughts. As expected, this prediction is confirmed by science. Dopamine antagonists are generally used to treat psychotic disorders, and one of the side effects is that they completely kill a person's sex drive.

So here we see the difference approaches to making people less gay.
Science - give them haloperidol.
Religion - torture them until something happens.

.. I don't even.

[werepossum]

Originally Posted by ShawnD1

The really sad part is that religious nuts could have "cured" gayness just by reading a science book. Several studies have shown that increased levels of dopamine in the brain can radically change a person's sexual preference. In tests with fruit flies, giving them alcohol or meth would make them stop caring about male vs female; they would try to mate with everything. A similar effect is seen in humans. Drunk girls make out with each other, and meth is widely known to cause homosexual behavior in men. If we put on our thinking caps, we can figure out a way to do the opposite. Meth is a strong dopamine activating drug, so it would make sense that blocking dopamine would "fix" gay thoughts. As expected, this prediction is confirmed by science. Dopamine antagonists are generally used to treat psychotic disorders, and one of the side effects is that they completely kill a person's sex drive.

So here we see the difference approaches to making people less gay.
Science - give them haloperidol.
Religion - torture them until something happens.

But is killing someone's sex drive really curing their gayness? (Or is that gaity?) By that standard I can make you stop having gay thoughts with just a hammer, a hard surface, and your finger. (Disclaimer: My patented gay-thought curing therapy may not work if administered by George Clooney or whoever gay men find especially attractive. And results may vary over time, as digits heal.)

Conversion therapy obviously didn't work on whomever designed the OP's quoted "therapy".

[TheVrolok]

Originally Posted by werepossum

But is killing someone's sex drive really curing their gayness? (Or is that gaity?) By that standard I can make you stop having gay thoughts with just a hammer, a hard surface, and your finger. (Disclaimer: My patented gay-thought curing therapy may not work if administered by George Clooney or whoever gay men find especially attractive. And results may vary over time, as digits heal.)

Conversion therapy obviously didn't work on whomever designed the OP's quoted "therapy".

I wouldn't bother delving further into that pseudoscience.

[sandorski]

This used to be called "Brainwashing"

Protip: If the "Blood of Jesus" and Prayer don't Cure it, maybe it's because your Religion is BS?

[Rob M.]

Originally Posted by werepossum

But is killing someone's sex drive really curing their gayness? (Or is that gaity?) By that standard I can make you stop having gay thoughts with just a hammer, a hard surface, and your finger. (Disclaimer: My patented gay-thought curing therapy may not work if administered by George Clooney or whoever gay men find especially attractive. And results may vary over time, as digits heal.)

Conversion therapy obviously didn't work on whomever designed the OP's quoted "therapy".

Nope, it won't work.

They may want to stop homosexual conduct, after all, this is how us "outsiders" (non-attraction detectors) properly identify homosexual persons by seeing them in romantic relationships with persons of the same sex or by their sexual contact with one another.

It all starts in the mind. If thoughts are controlled, so is conduct.

[hal2kilo]

Originally Posted by ShawnD1

The really sad part is that religious nuts could have "cured" gayness just by reading a science book. Several studies have shown that increased levels of dopamine in the brain can radically change a person's sexual preference. In tests with fruit flies, giving them alcohol or meth would make them stop caring about male vs female; they would try to mate with everything. A similar effect is seen in humans. Drunk girls make out with each other, and meth is widely known to cause homosexual behavior in men. If we put on our thinking caps, we can figure out a way to do the opposite. Meth is a strong dopamine activating drug, so it would make sense that blocking dopamine would "fix" gay thoughts. As expected, this prediction is confirmed by science. Dopamine antagonists are generally used to treat psychotic disorders, and one of the side effects is that they completely kill a person's sex drive.

So here we see the difference approaches to making people less gay.
Science - give them haloperidol.
Religion - torture them until something happens.

Hard to get it up when you are Dozn an Drooln (one of my favorite Rootboy Slim songs)

[Jaskalas]

I don't care for our sue happy culture...

OTOH, some of this stuff... hell, ALL of it is quite absurd.

[Moonbeam]

Originally Posted by Jaskalas

I don't care for our sue happy culture...

OTOH, some of this stuff... hell, ALL of it is quite absurd.

Call me if you have lung cancer and worked with asbestos. I may be able to make me some money and give you a bit.