Sign In / Register
Rodney-based Labour MP Marja Lubeck received a petition on the steps of Parliament last week seeking the banning of conversion therapies that aim to make gay people straight.
The petition, containing 5157 signatures, was organised by the Rodney Area Rainbow LGBTQ+ group.
It was presented by InsideOUT national coordinator Tabby Besley on August 8, along with a second petition seeking the same ban organised by InsideOUT, Young Labour and the Young Greens.
Rodney Area Rainbow Group spokesperson Amanda Ashley says conversion therapies were an abhorrent practice that had no basis in modern science or psychology.
“It’s trying to change people from who they are and what they are, to be someone else’s idea of what they should be,” she said.
In addition to gay conversion therapies, the Rodney petition also seeks to ban other conversion therapies such as trans-conversion therapy, which aims to dissuade an individual from trying to change their gender should they wish to do so.
Amanda said there were various types of conversion therapies. Some involved a counselling session where an effort was made to programme an individual to change their minds. Others were more extreme and involved electric shock therapy.
She said the therapy was often forced upon people, typically in a religious community where parents might force a child to attend a church-led conversion therapy.
Ms Ashley said conversion therapy was wrong even if a person was unhappy about their sexual orientation and wanted to give the therapy a try.
“I don’t think they should be able to go through conversion therapy because it is not usually done by people who are registered counsellors or psychologists. If someone felt that way, they should be going to a registered counsellor and psychologist to get help,” she said.
Marja Lubeck decided to receive the petition after contacting the Rodney Area Rainbow group and asking how best she could support them.
Once an MP receives a petition, it is presented to the House, then allocated to a select committee for consideration. Although the receiving MP does not have to support the petition, Ms Lubeck said she supported this one.
“It’s proven from several studies that have been published that conversion therapy does more harm than good,” she said.
She hoped conversion therapy would be added to the Crimes Act so that it would become a criminal offence to practice them.
But the principal of Nelson-based Living Wisdom School of Counselling, David Riddell, said banning conversion therapy would be a disaster.
Mr Riddell said same-sex attraction was usually the result of social, emotional or sexual damage in the formative years.
“The vast majority of people who discover within themselves a same-sex orientation can, with a competent therapist, also be empowered to discover the malnurture that set that preference up in their psychosexual nature,” he said.
He added that if conversion therapy had been banned previously, many of his clients who had found their way out of an emotional condition that was bringing them acute shame, deepening anxiety and profound guilt would never have escaped from it.
“Any number of my clients have experienced a re-awakening of heterosexual orientation during the course of therapy,” he said.
