Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights
On December 8, 2020, I provided testimony before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, one of the Committees of Canada's House of Commons responsible for researching Bill C-6, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy).
About the Ban in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada)
Virtually every global health regulator has spoken out about the dangers of conversion therapy—countries all over the world have been consulted, survivors have shared their stories of abuse, voices from the graves of those who did not survive their own abuse have cried out, health and medical experts have now even written their recommendations, and The United Nations, in a final report I cite below, has urged all jurisdictions to ban conversion therapy. What more does anyone need to say to a city like Lethbridge before they take action?
Canada’s Proposed Ban on Conversion Therapy Falls Short
Conversion therapy itself is a lie that those who practice, perpetuate, and those who fall prey, forget, and so the aim with a ban should be to firmly and resolutely destabilize and eradicate orders of hatred and intolerance, not simply to pick and choose which kinds of bigotry may be less harmful than others or under what circumstances some people could reasonably “consent” to bigotry.
Darkness Lurks
Lately I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies on Netflix. Isolated, at times quarantined due to COVID-19, I have resisted all better judgment to the contrary and submerged myself in one film after another. And always very late at night. Call me crazy; or maybe there’s far more to it than that.
How to Make Chicken Goulash (“Paprikás Csirke”)
One of our “special” meals was Chicken Goulash, or Paprikás Csirke, my father would always say in his native Hungarian. It’s also the first meal I ate when I arrived into Budapest, Hungary, in 2004, a trip I will always cherish because it’s when and where I started to write my book, The Inheritance of Shame.
Pride and Prejudice
On June 17, 2018, CBC journalist Wendy Mesley interviewed me for her show, “The Weekly,” about gay conversion therapy in Canada. Within a day of that interview, a link to my segment appeared on several websites, including, of course, on CBC’s site for “The Weekly.” That is—until just the other day.
Vancouver, Canada, Bans Conversion Therapy
To be heard and recognized by our government officials is a deeply meaningful, and healing, experience.
To Ban or Not to Ban
To Ban or Not to Ban may be the question for lawmakers, but the underlying issue, at least in my books, remains helping to prevent immeasurable harm while fostering lives lived in honesty and integrity, or perpetuating institutionalized hatred by turning a blind eye for the sake of maintaining a lie.
From Plan A to Plan D: Stop Having Sex
No longer strapping gay people into chairs and shocking them with electricity but merely “helping” them to not have sex may sound like progress, it may no longer sound like conversion therapy, and therein lies the rub. When we talk about conversion therapy we are talking about an ideology, not any one “type” of treatment.