Posted on 08/21/2016 3:56:29 PM PDT by Petrosius
CHICAGO, Illinois, August 19, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — A group of ministers is suing the state of Illinois over a law that makes Christian counseling for minors with same-sex attraction a crime.
Pastors Protecting Youth has filed a lawsuit against the state's Youth Mental Health Protection Act, which makes it illegal to help teens overcome unwanted homosexual inclinations.
The Illinois law states that "being lesbian, gay, or bisexual is not a disease, disorder, illness, deficiency, or shortcoming.” It bans "conversion therapy" and any counseling that "represents homosexuality as a mental disease, disorder, or illness."
The language of the law is in direct opposition to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that homosexuality is an "intrinsic disorder."
The ministers’ lawsuit explains that "many pastors" are employed to preach and counsel the biblical teaching that sex is for natural marriage between one man and one woman, that homosexual conduct is "contrary to God's purpose for humanity and a disorder of God's creation," and that homosexual temptation can be "resisted or overcome."
The lawsuit goes on to state that the First Amendment not only protects pastors' speech and the exercise of their beliefs but the rights of the people they counsel "to receive speech, to make personal decisions, and to exercise their beliefs."
The pastors' complaint characterizes the Illinois law as a "broad attempt to criminalize any dissenting views on homosexuality." They are seeking a religious exemption.
Nu-Church Apostolic Ministries pastor Steven Stultz explained, "The Apostle Paul writes to those who had overcome many sins, including homosexuality, stating, ‘Such were some of you,’ but you were changed through God’s healing. I have personally witnessed many people change their sexual orientation through counseling and know it is possible. The government is interfering into someone’s private decisions.”
Proponents of the Illinois law say it protects LGBTQ youth from "discredited and dangerous" therapy "that has no proved efficacy." Media reporting falls in line with the LGBTQ position that "all major medical bodies agree that conversion therapy is totally unwarranted, because being gay or trans is a healthy expression of adult sexuality or gender."
Equality Illinois CEO Brian C. Johnson defended the Illinois law as protecting patients from "harmful, coercive, and fraudulent treatments that attempt to change the unchangeable."
But Illinois Family Institute cultural issues writer Laurie Higgins told LifeSiteNews, “The deceptively named ‘Youth Mental Health Protection Act’ should be called the ‘Youth Anti-Autonomy Act. While leftists believe minors should have access to medical help in rejecting their unwanted, unchosen but immutable biological sex, leftists believe minors should be prohibited from accessing medical help in rejecting their unwanted, unchosen but mutable homoerotic feelings.”
Higgins pointed out that the Illinois law lumps Christian counseling in with abusive, pain-inflicting methods of steering patients away from homosexuality. “Another problem with this law,” she noted, “is that it fails to define what specifically constitutes banned ‘conversion therapy.’ Instead, the bill’s supporters prefer to confuse the public by conflating coercive aversion therapies with genuine counseling efforts.”
Pastors Protecting Youth attorney John W. Mauck of Mauck & Baker explained in a press release, “We are most concerned about young people who are seeking the right to choose their own identity. This is an essential human right."
Mauck criticized the Illinois law as undermining "the dignity and integrity of those who choose a different path for their lives than politicians and activists prefer."
"Each person should be free to receive biblical and spiritual counseling from the pastor of their choice to help them orient their sexuality,” the attorney stated.
Higgins further criticized the Illinois ban as having the potential to stop counseling that merely discusses the roots of a patient’s same-sex attraction.
“Several years ago, Oprah Winfrey hosted a program in which her audience was composed of 200 men who had been sexually molested as children,” she explained. “One of her guests was Dr. Howard Fradkin, a homosexual licensed psychologist who stated that children who are sexually molested can experience ‘sexual orientation confusion’ as a result.
“Leftists should be forced to explain whether the Youth Mental Health Protection Act —which should be repealed — will prevent minors who have been molested and subsequently experience same-sex attraction, from receiving helpful and healing counseling that examines the connection between molestation and homoerotic feelings.”
California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia have also made Christian counseling to youth illegal.
The legislators are quick to make laws that favor their pet groups, those that are guaranteed to vote for them, and to send money.
They also are quick to make laws that burden normal people.
I have an idea. How about we let the THERAPISTS decide what they can treat, and the legislatures stay the F%CK out of the way.
Sexuality is a mine field for everyone. That's why "lust" is a sin.
Lust/pornography creates chemicals that hit the same receptors, in the same way, as cocaine and other pleasure boosters.
bump
Couldn’t they just call it “therapy,” instead of “orientation-change therapy”? As I understand it, when a therapist starts addressing child sex abuse, other trauma, OCD, depression, etc., this sometimes results in a diminution or elimination of the urge for same-sex copulation.
Whether the person acquires an urge for opposite-sex copulation is a separate issue.
Most “legislators” today need to be added to George Carlin’s “List of People who Need to be Killed!”
Rather, the main thing (I'm thinking) is to understand the factors that are feeding into your sex/gender confusion, depression, anger, compulsive risk-taking behavior, the emotional deficits or traumas or twisted experiences pushing you to sexually exploit others or leaving you vulnerable to being exploited by others. Right?
Getting a handle on these underlying causes could then give you the power you to diminish and get control over unwanted sexual urges.
Developing an abiding romantic/sexual interest in people of the other sex could eventually be a part of this, but doesn't have to be. If you don't end up decisively heterosexual, it doesn't mean therapy has failed.
For a Christianm, the goal would be to be able to live in a way which is pleasing to God. Could be honorable holy matrimony, could be honorable chaste celibacy.
I realize I'm blathering here. Not sure if I'm on the right track. Is that more or less what you had in mind?
Yes!!! That's exactly what I had in mind! The urge to copulate, is, in itself, morally neutral, just as the urge to eat is morally neutral. The urge to have sex in an immoral way (sodomy, bestiality, etc.) or the urge to have sex in an immoral situation (outside matrimony) is a temptation to sin, just like any other excess or deformity of biological appetite is a temptation to sin. It becomes an actual sin only when it is indulged mentally or physically.
The determination to define homosexual activity as a sin (which it is) often results in writers' giving the impression that sexual desire for the opposite sex is in itself a virtue (which it is not, any more than hunger is a virtue) and that sexually using the opposite sex is always right (which it is not, any more than eating "food" is always right, while eating auto parts is wrong).
You have done a great job saying what I meant. Help yourself to a Guinness and a kitten!
Meanaholics. That’s what proponents of sex perversions are.
Addicts to meanness.
Take care of the “meanaholism” and the perversion begins to be sapped of its power, begins to become visible as the wicked, dignity and joy spoiling thing it is.
We should not stop being sympathetic to them, while not feeding into the particular means that they have chosen to deal with their plights in life.
Jesus, being Creator and Savior, had and has this down to a T.
I’m not sure what technicalities are actually implied in the “state ban.” Instead of worrying about whether the state intends to stop them, they might just keep right on going, being crystal clear that this is religious or faith counseling, and let the state try to come after them if it wishes, choosing to deal with it only then.
The devil is mean, very very mean.
Out of this meanness, the devil eggs on these things.
By both implication by contrast and scriptural testimony, the Lord is kind. To the point that His most typical means of chastisement is indirect, to permit stubbornly sinful souls to indulge themselves in a measure of the hellish world that they had longed for, in hopes that they would be willing to decide to pursue the Lord in preference to that world after all. He does not “willingly grieve the sons of men” (unlike Satan, who is gladdened incomparably by doing so).
Meanness is something that humanity shares in from birth. It’s addictive as a way of thought. That’s how the serpent was able to sell the supposed advantage of “being like God, knowing good and evil” (while actually following a wicked plot).
People who accept God’s offer to teach them His kindness will learn an entirely new way of living. People have a tendency to think they have learned it all and have nothing new to discover. That is like blind men scoffing at the idea of seeing. Those whom Jesus healed of blindness did not thus scoff; they understood through testimony and believed that such a thing as seeing existed, and beseeched Him for it.
Placemark.
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