In explaining his reasons for filing a
lawsuit blocking enforcement of a California law banning “ex-gay”
therapy to minors, Mathew Staver, chairman of the Christian
conservative Liberty Counsel, has called such therapy “beneficial”
to the minors he's representing.
The first-in-the-nation law prohibits
therapies which promise to alter the sexual orientation of minors
from gay to straight. It was scheduled to take effect on January 1.
But a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals postponed the law's start until it can hear a legal
challenge, reversing a district court's refusal to put the law on
hold.
The appeals court heard the challenge
on Wednesday.
“The notion that you can change
someone's sexual orientation and that homosexuality is a disease or
mental illness is pure quackery,” Democratic State Senator Ted
Lieu, who sponsored the law, told the AP outside the courtroom.
“Patients were suffering tremendous psychological harm from gay
conversion therapy, including guilt, self-hatred and some of them
committed suicide.”
Staver called the law “an
unprecedented intrusion into the doctor-patient, counselor-client
relationship.”
“It intrudes into the confidential
relationship that only the client and counselor should be able to
have information. What the state has done is actually tell the
counselor that only one viewpoint on the same-sex sexual attractions,
behavior and identity is permissible.”
“We filed the lawsuit because the
minors that we represent have been receiving this counsel and have
been benefiting. Their anger, their self-hatred, their relationships
with their friends, the relationships with their families have all
improved since they've received this kind of counseling. And it
would be irreparable and harm to them to ultimately stop this in
midstream.”