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August 15, 2005

exgaywatch poster wants to criminalize exgays

Regan DuCasse, an LAPD forensics photographer who comments for "exgaywatch", a gay critique blog, announced her efforts to criminalize professional and religious work to help homosexuals change. In her own words:
"I have been working towards a class action suit against RT[reparative therapy] and ex gay ministries and the merits thereof.
The Williams Project is the gay and lesbian legal issue institution within UCLA Law School.I have discussed this with advocate Gloria Allred, a prominent attorney local to Los Angeles. I might be able to get the Anti Defamation League in on it. The class action to have these things shut down is warranted this way:

1. When new and viable techniques for care from medical or psychiatric care givers come along to apply, it's their duty to apply them and not older, unreliable and BIASED ones. Ex gay therapy is not only archaic, but it's been rejected by all legitimate and well informed doctors.
2. Much of what motivates RT is almost exclusively religious and this is a fluid and non objective application. Religion is a separate discipline from mental health counseling.
3. Pathologies that are life threatening and harmful not only to the individual, but also those around them are evident in heterosexuals. Blaming pathologies equal in both groups on gay sexual orientation is confusing and raises or exacerbates conflict regarding sex, period.
4. Doctors have to have accurate cure rates and treatment processes open to the public to make informed decisions about practitioners. Religious counselors require licensing to cure something considered a mental or emotional disorder otherwise left to mental health care professionals to address. Most people in the ex gay business have neither.
5. Most importantly, doctors or counselors must be accurate in their diagnosis of a problem. And be unbiased in their approach to it to maximize effectiveness. Homosexuality in and of itself isn't a problem to the individual or others. Opposition to homosexuality is a bias inappropriate to be effective when dealing with other pathologies present in the individual. These alone make these therapies and ministries immediately incompetent, biased and dangerous to those at risk. We wouldn't accept this from any other care giver-it shouldn't be any less true for the ex gay business."

Source: exgaywatch, August 11, 2005

In smaller context, Ducasse's propositions seems to bear out Janet Folger's claim of criminalizing Christianity as a whole.
Related:Gay editor wants exgays 'locked up'