New York’s Governor Cuomo Cracks Down On Gay Conversion Therapy


New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new regulations Saturday that would curb the use of so-called “Gay Conversion Therapy” in the Empire State, CNN is reporting.

The new rules don’t outright ban the practice, but rather instead place tight restrictions on it. Specifically, Cuomo’s regulations would prevent public and private insurers from paying for gay conversion therapy. Further, mental health facilities are prohibited from using the controversial therapy on minors.

However, therapists in their own practices are still allowed to practice the therapy, provided they are paid for out-of-pocket.

According to the American Psychological Association, so-called gay conversion therapy “refer[s] to counseling and psychotherapy aimed at eliminating or suppressing homosexuality.” Specifically, the therapist uses specific techniques to convince the patient, often teenagers and children, that homosexuality and non-conforming gender identity are wrong, immoral, or abhorrent, and tries to “convert” them.

Governor Cuomo gay conversion therapy
A gay pride festival. [Photo via Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 3.0]
The specifics of what takes place during gay conversion therapy vary from therapist to therapist. Writing in BuzzFeed in 2015, British writer Patrick Strudwick describes how, pretending to undergo gay conversion therapy as an adult, the therapist continually tried to convince him that he had been sexually assaulted as a child. The therapist seemed insistent that childhood sexual trauma had made him gay, even though Patrick insisted that there never was any in his life.

“The ideology, that homosexuality must be caused by early psychological damage, means those who adhere to it will find such damage – whether or not it is there.”

Similarly, James Guay wrote in Time in 2014 about how, as a teenager, his fundamentalist Christian parents sent him to a gay conversion therapist to try to “make” him straight (it didn’t work).

“For a year, I attended weekly individual therapy sessions where I was encouraged to blame my distant relationship with my father and over-involved relationship with my mother for my same-sex desires. I was also guided to ‘remember’ an original wounding—in particular, sexual or physical abuse—that I had not experienced. The main cures were to build ‘healthy same-sex non-sexual friendships,’ become more ‘masculine’ and date girls.”

Depending on whom you ask, gay conversion therapy is either an abusive and dangerous practice discredited by just about every respected psychiatric and medical society, or a protected form of religious expression aimed at preventing a person — especially a child or teenager — from engaging in what they believe to be an unacceptable lifestyle.

The American Psychological Association take the former view.

“The most important fact about these ‘therapies’ is that they are based on a view of homosexuality that has been rejected by all the major mental health professions.”

However, some proponents of gay conversion therapy believe that to ban it is to infringe on the First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of religion, according to the Journal of the American Bar Association.

For New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, however, there is no debate, and the issue of gay conversion therapy is settled, as far as he is concerned.

Governor Andrew Cuomo Gay Conversion Therapy
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo [Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images]

“Conversion therapy is a hateful and fundamentally flawed practice that is counter to everything this state stands for. New York has been at the forefront of acceptance and equality for the LGBT community for decades — and today we are continuing that legacy and leading by example. We will not allow the misguided and the intolerant to punish LGBT young people for simply being who they are.”

With Cuomo’s regulations, New York joins a handful of other states, as well as the District of Columbia, that have limited gay conversion therapy in one way or another. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has called for limits on gay conversion therapy at the federal level, as well, according to USA Today.

Do you believe New York Governor Cuomo’s limits on gay conversion therapy are the right move?

[Image via Shutterstock/wavebreakmedia]

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