Many cultural conservatives have been troubled by the way in which mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists have been pushing teenagers to prematurely identify themselves as gay

When Government Keeps Teens 

from Seeing the Therapist

by Robert Carle

Banning certain forms of talk therapy violates the rights of families.

California and New Jersey's new laws banning talk therapy to address same-sex attraction in minors violate the rights of parents and children to seek counseling that conforms to their values. They also endanger First Amendment rights.

The governors of California and New Jersey have recently signed bills into law that violate First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. These new laws ban licensed counselors from engaging in talk therapies that reduce the level of same-sex attractions in minors for whom such reduction is a personal goal. Strikingly, these bills apply to all minors except those who wish to change their sex ("gender identity") altogether, via hormones and surgery. Legislators in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania are pushing for similar talk-therapy bans. Such legislation usurps the rights of parents and children to seek counseling that conforms to their values. They are also based on faulty premises.

When signing these bills, Governor Jerry Brown dismissed sexual orientation modification as "quackery," and Governor Chris Christie said that "people are born gay." Both these statements ignore empirical evidence that, for many teenagers, sexual orientation is unstable and malleable. The most comprehensive study of sexuality to date, the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, found that, without any intervention whatsoever, three out of four boys who think they are gay at sixteen don't think they are gay by the age of twenty-five.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 report, Adolescent Health in the United States, surveyed 10,000 teenagers and found that the vast majority of sixteen-year olds who reported only same-sex sexual attractions reported only opposite-sex sexual attractions one year later. Because these surveys produced such unexpected results, similar studies were soon replicated all over the Western world. The outcomes were almost identical, with population-based samples now reaching into the hundreds of thousands.

Nicholas Cummings, a former president of the American Psychological Association, writes that "contending that all same-sex attraction is immutable is a distortion of reality." As chief psychologist for Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco, Cummings oversaw hundreds of patients who were successful in changing their sexual orientations. Cummings was selective in recommending therapeutic change only to those who were highly motivated to change and who were clinically assessed as having a high probability of success.

The vast majority of Cummings's gay and lesbian patients didn't want to change their sexual orientations, and Cummings offered them therapy to attain happier and more stable homosexual lifestyles. Dr. Cummings writes, "Attempting to characterize all sexual reorientation therapy as 'unethical' violates patient choice." Instead, Cummings believes that lawmakers should respect a patient's inalienable right to self-determination.

Sexual Orientation Therapies

For the last two decades, many cultural conservatives have been troubled by the way in which mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists have been pushing teenagers to prematurely identify themselves as gay, and they have been seeking out therapists with more traditionalist perspectives on sexuality.

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