The government has asked its consultative council on LGBT+ rights to draft a Bill that would make ‘gay conversion therapy’ a criminal offence. This time, the wind is blowing from the west.
The Sunday Times of Malta last week published an interview with Tom Brown, a US Evangelical preacher who is on a pastoral mission to Malta as a guest of the local congregation known as River of Love. Brown’s dastardly views on homosexuality and their implied corollary that it was possible to cure homosexuals of their ‘illness’ set alarm bells ringing, and rightly so.
The big news in the background was that Barack Obama had earlier this year called for a ban on conversion therapies in the US. His call followed the high-profile suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender youth who killed herself last December following a botched (what else?) attempt by her parents to have her converted.
Alcorn left a suicide note that ended with a plea: “The only day I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was... My death needs to mean something. Fix society. Please.”
The proposed ban may not be the wisest way of dealing with conversion therapy
This government and the local LGBT+ groups that have worked tirelessly for many years now, have done much to fix society. As recently as 10 or so years ago, Gabi Calleja was still widely dismissed as something of a human curiosity. Her views on LGBT+ rights are now an important part of our public discourse.
The shift isn’t a cosmetic one either. I regularly talk to people who might not know what heternormativity is, let alone how to spell it. Many of them come from backgrounds you wouldn’t normally associate with particularly enlightened views on this one. And yet they feel that “kulħadd għandu jgħix ħajtu” (people should be free to live their lives).
I shall argue that the proposed ban may not be the wisest way of dealing with conversion therapy. Part of my argument is precisely that the refreshing changes we’ve seen in recent years were not down to prohibitive bans and convictions. Rather, they were the result of laws and initiatives that established things. The point is that innovation is infinitely more effective than prohibition.
The rest of my argument hinges on two distinctions. The assumption throughout is that conversion therapy is a rubbish idea that can indeed harm those who subscribe to it.
The first distinction concerns legal age. It’s reasonable to argue that on no account should children and underage adolescents be forced, coerced, encouraged or even allowed to take part in a practice that will very likely harm them. The State has every right to step in to stop their parents from doing so, just as it does with abuse or absenteeism, for example.
The argument that things like exams may also cause harm (exam stress has produced its Leelah Alcorns), and that therefore there is nothing particularly the matter with conversion therapy, doesn’t hold. Exams are intended, and for the most part succeed, to uphold an educational system that by and large benefits young people. Conversion therapy offers no benefits; on the contrary, it will very likely cause harm.
The case of minors is easy enough to deal with, then. Thing is, the people who want to criminalise conversion therapy for adults tell us that it preys on people who are ‘vulnerable’, and whose judgement is presumably impaired.
This is where we part company, because I think it’s very dangerous to infantilise adults by calling them vulnerable. It’s especially deadly when that ascription is used to rob them of their right to take part in things that may harm them. That’s essentially an assault on individual autonomy.
The zealots will say that individual autonomy is never completely free. Rather, it comes entangled in a social context, in this case one that includes homophobia. That social context, the argument goes, makes people vulnerable and incapable of making informed choices.
At which point I get vicious. Of course, individual autonomy is entangled in a social context. But surely the whole point is to inhabit that context and make up your own mind. If autonomy were free-standing and not linked to anything, there wouldn’t be much left to be autonomous about.
The argument that people are free to choose if and only if they make the right choices (as defined by whoever) is, quite frankly, fascist. The word ‘vulnerable’ lends that fascism the face of Florence Nightingale. But, make no mistake, it’s fascism alright. Clearly, the only exception involves choices that actively harm others.
The second distinction that matters is that between providers and consumers. That’s because one way of avoiding the fascist trap is to ban the provision of conversion therapy in the first place. If we can show that it is a fraud, conversion therapy would be out.
Or would it? That depends on whether it is a medical or a religious practice. If the first, one might be justified in saying that the State has a right to regulate it, and therefore to outlaw fraud. Science can, in fact, decide, on the basis of empirical evidence, whether or not a said medical practice is fraudulent.
I’m not sure where that would leave homeopathy and other forms of quackery that have no scientific basis whatsoever, but never mind. Certainly science would settle the case of conversion therapy in an afternoon’s work.
Things get thornier if conversion therapy is a religious practice, for two reasons. First, because there is no such thing as a fraudulent religious belief. It would, for example, be mad to apply medical science to show that belief in the Resurrection is fraudulent. By definition, belief in the Resurrection is not a scientific statement.
Second, because religious beliefs and practices have a right to exist irrespective of their value to humanity. People have a right to believe any rubbish, including rubbish that might cause them more harm than good. The belief (now defunct, apparently) that babies who died unbaptised spent the rest of eternity in a dark place must have caused untold psychological harm to parents. Should it therefore have been criminalised?
The problem is that I’ve heard both Evangelical preachers and Catholic priests say that Jesus is the best psychologist. Things like conversion therapy is where religion and medicine meet, in other words. Obama or no Obama, the case for banning it is far from straightforward.
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