Reality Check 101

When stories surfaced that there was an effort in California to ban books which might support sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE), it was easy to dismiss them as either over reaction or California just being California.  Incredibly, Assemblyman Evan Low’s AB 2943 is not hype and it is not an anomaly.

Michigan State Representative Jon Hoadley has now done his part to “California-ize” Michigan.  His HB 5550 seeks to outlaw “any practice or treatment by a mental health professional that seek[s] to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity” including “sexual or romantic attractions or feelings”.

AB 2943 and HB 5550 are wonderful recruiting tools for homosexuality as are similar laws in eight other states: Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.  Why?  Because they use the full force of law to regulate guidance or therapy for feelings, “sexual orientations” and self-image, “gender identity”, of anyone whose conscience or honest questions challenge homosexual ideology.  All this is presented under the guise of a state interest in the supposed well-being of an individual’s emotions and intellect.

The reality is that in our sensualized present-day public policy, anyone who approaches a church or therapist for counsel, are easily victims of confusion and unwanted urges.  By the dictates of politicians in more and more states, they are only allowed to have the option for more sensualization, the polar opposite of the well-being of the client.  Through skewed “professional” leading, they are taught that emotions and temptations are identity.

You can’t get more authoritarian, more invasive of privacy, therapist-client privilege, or freedom of conscience than that.  But then, the left’s use censorship is not new.  It has a long history and is only growing in power, as current news stories attest.  This kind of oppression and the excuses that are used to justify their ideology should have no place in the United States of America where freedom to exercise spiritural/moral life in every area of experience, public or private, is fundamental.

The dangers don’t stop there.  Ask Metro City Church in Riverview, Michigan.  The church initiated an outreach called “Unashamed Identity” and asked for a $200.00 fee.  LGBTQ activists went ballistic.  Assuming pastoral delusion or nefarious intent on the part of any Christian-related effort to teach or counsel persons against same-sex attractions, Rep. Hoadley and representatives Adam Zemke, Darrin Camilleri, Tim Sneller, and Jeremy Moss used the opportunity to petition Attorney General Bill Schuette for an investigation of the church for consumer fraud.  The letter to Schuette even included a request for a Federal Trade Commission investigation.  Apparently, states have decided that one’s unwanted or confusing same-sex challenges and temptations are who they are and therefore have only one answer – more of the same.

To the church’s credit, they rescinded the fee but the program continues.

Laws which forbid SOCE and controversies around ministries such as Metro City’s “Unashamed Identity”, supported by FORGE Ministries, are at the center of our cultural and now political battle over the vulnerabilities and fallenness of the human condition.  The conflict is between solutions which are soulless biology and anothers which demand that the whole person be healed.

Secularists demand that consumers experience only their authorized myopic version of reality.  In a move that challenges God’s design to His face, they would cloister the mental health system in such a way that professionals with a Biblical worldview of sexuality would be drummed out of the marketplace in direct violation of thousands of consciences and the rights of citizens to exercise mental health according to personal convictions.

There is pseudoscience going on here, but it is not on the part of Christian ministries.  Instead, it is a delusion that is embedded in the policies of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the National Association of Social Workers (https://www.lambdalegal.org/publications/health-and-med-orgs-stmts-on-sex-orientation-and-gender-identity ).  After correctly removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental illness, they leapt to the conclusion that those behaviors were not only healthy but morally acceptable.  The fact is that newer studies have found that from 23%-29% of persons reported complete orientation changes and 60%-70% having behavioral successes (https://biblicalcounselingcoalition.org/2012/01/24/christian-psychology-of-and-response-to-homosexuality/ )

The Good News is that, for those individuals who willingly want alternatives appropriate to their convictions, there is hope and healing for the struggle with unwanted sexual attractions thanks to the efforts of courageous believes like those of Metro City church, and in spite of attacks like Rep. Hoagley’s HB 5550.