CONVERSION THERAPY IN DIFFERENT FORMS IS A CATHOLIC STAPLE

The controversy rages on about Catholicism and conversion therapy of LGBT. 

Conversion therapy can happen even in secular contexts.  Psychologists can use talking therapy to try and change one's sexuality or gender.  Doctors may provide drugs. Surgeons may try castration or something.  The police may try torture.  None of these things work and leave the person terribly harmed and damaged.

The religious version may involve counselling from a religious leader or worker, prayer, exorcisms and so on.  The Catholic Church authorises refusing absolution when they know the gay penitent is going to go home to sleep with their partner.  The person will be told that absolution may happen if the person undertakes spiritual exercises so that they feel less desire for the partner sexually and avoid occasions of temptation.  This is asking the person to inflict conversion therapy on themselves.

While conversion therapy is framed as trying to heal the alleged brokenness that makes one LGBT, all versions ask the person to refrain from any activity that affirms them as LGBT.  This will include refusing dates and being celibate.  In some cases, the person will be asked to sleep with a person of the opposite sex.  In many cases, victims of conversion therapy were raped in an effort to change them.

There is more conversion therapy going on than the obvious.  It does not always take the dramatic form of castrating, hitting or starving the person in the name of getting the "evil" out.

No most of the harm and abuse is more subtle than that.

Conversion therapy happens in the secrecy of the Catholic confessional.  One is left damaged and unable to do anything about it.  Catholic schools pressure and force young children and older but vulnerable pupils to confess in guise of preparing for first communion and confirmation.

Trans are a particular concern.  Non-binary people seem to be the most vulnerable and abused of all.  Gender dysphoria or any form of dysphoria can be more tormenting than a physical agony.  Gender critical views, ie that biological sex matters, no matter how 'gentle' are literal violence.  They kill.  Religious erasure of trans is abuse.  No debate.  The Bible and the Church do not say trans or non-binary is real.  That is erasure.  They presuppose that men being men is a biological reality and women being women is a biological reality.  They would say sex and gender are the same thing and cannot be separated.

Other hateful doctrines include the claim of Jesus that his teaching is the same yesterday and today and forever.  Also that your yes should be yes and no should be no.  And that his teaching is a firm foundation and a rock.  It cannot be that when it is so wrong about gender.

The Bible says that no one ever hated their own body but feed and care for it as Christ does the Church in Ephesians 5:29.  This is hatefully accusing trans and non-binary of being invalid for hating how their body or at least body parts were sexed in the womb.

The Church claims that the male humanity of Jesus Christ is present in the Mass.

The Catholic sacrament of the anointing of the sick is a disgrace too.

Anointing of the sick is primarily about healing the effects of sin and putting God in you better. By definition it is also about blocking and/or removing demonic influence. If the person is in danger of death, the demons are thought to get especially interested in trying to get a foothold.

Christians teach that something called demonic obsession is a huge problem in many people. It is when demons influence somebody and cause an fixation or are manipulating natural causes to cause a disorder. The person for example may be obsessed with tarot cards, changing gender or getting thin or obese. That in reverse means an aversion to anything that the demon does not like such as, so we are told, Masses and crucifixes.  Catholics do not test this by trying a copy of the Qur'an.  So a demon could pretend to hate Masses etc in order to advertise Catholicism in reverse.

Now as the Church claims that God has organised you that if you choose to have sex it must be with the opposite sex and every cell in you is about what gametes you can give to them to reproduce that being actively LGBT is a sin. It is seen as failing to recognise that God knows what is best for you. This implies that being LGBT is a probably a form of obsession. The Church says that demons can be involved in a person’s anorexia.  These things open the door for grave religious harm to be done to vulnerable innocent people.

Make no mistake that as Catholicism prays for all to fit God’s plan this is implicit conversion therapy. The sacraments are seen as healing so they are in the same category. During wedding masses, in particular, the prayers are all hetero-normative and thus come close to explicit conversion therapy.  The readings are horrific.

Responding to Jews who hoped to hear that a man could take another wife and put away his wife, Jesus' babble about marriage being made unchangeably for one man and one woman for life will be read and acclaimed as the word of God.

Jesus may have said in Mark 10:6 that God made humankind male and female from the beginning and quoted Genesis to that effect but Jesus was not a scientist. He even thought the flood, a scientific impossibility, was real. His opinion does not matter and it is an insult to try and make it matter for he never sought out sexual outcasts to ask them about their lives and experiences.   He was saying that man and woman join together and are one flesh and that is why divorce is wrong.  Ken Magnuson tells us, "If sexual difference, in terms of marriage and sexual relations, was unimportant to Jesus, there would have been no need for him to cite Genesis 1:27."  All he had to do was say that if two people are married then its unjust for them to do anything that stops them being like a unit.  He did not mean one flesh as in unit.  He meant body fits body and penis is for vagina.

Implicit or hidden conversion therapy seeks to do secret harm.  The clergy use it to avoid accountability.  It can be more damaging over time that some other versions.

Until conversion therapy quacks in all their forms are incarcerated the problem will not be seen for what it is.  As conversion therapy can take place under the cover of family, with family members being the abusers, this is going to be a very wide subject.

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