Letters: Debating conversion therapy

Re “Therapy that isn’t,” Opinion, Aug. 27

Let me add my voice in support of Lara Embry, a psychologist who rightly excoriates “conversion therapy” to change someone’s sexual orientation. Such conversion therapies are harmful and without credibility or professional support, and we shouldn’t be surprised that our society would take measures to make them illegal.

The belief of the immorality of gay or lesbian behavior is purely religious. Until my retirement, I professionally engaged in supervising psychotherapists as a licensed clinical social worker and as a psychologist. I have seen the damage to those whose conflicts arise from religious exhortations.

We must get around the suffocating nature of religious beliefs when they interfere with laws to control such destructive practices.

Ralph Mitchell

Monterey Park

Regardless of the fact that the mental health establishment disapproves of “conversion therapy,” the state Legislature should not be in the business of deciding which forms of therapy are acceptable and which are not.

The efficacy of conversion therapy is a scientific dispute that should be contested freely as a battle of ideas. Intervention by the state to suppress ideas deemed harmful was bad policy in the time of Galileo, and it’s bad policy now as well. One need only imagine a red-state bill requiring conversion therapy to see the danger of legislative intervention in this issue.

The Business and Professions Code, which the proposal seeks to amend, already contains provisions whereby therapists who cause harm to their patients can be disciplined. Wholesale condemnation of a therapy as unprofessional conduct by legislative fiat is a dangerous abuse of state power, however well intentioned.

Paul S. Zimmerian

North Hollywood

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