When Discrimination Is Acceptable
I found myself yesterday commenting on a Facebook posting about a man called Dr Michael Davidson from an organisation called Core Issues Trust. This organisation embraces the discredited practice of reparative therapy in to in their own words “challenging gender confusion, upholding science and conscience”. Pretty words, and a lofty goal to uphold science and conscience, however, in reality they do not uphold science, they embrace quackery and for conscience, it is their personal Christian conscience that they uphold. And under the cloak of religious conscience organisations like this try to make homosexuality a pathology, a practice which legitimate psychology, psychotherapy and medicine ceased doing in 1974.
We live in a free, secular society so what a person believes is their own business, however, it seems that when it comes to homosexuality it is perfectly okay to be discriminatory as long as you do it under the cloak of religious freedom. I wonder how society would react to people saying “Well, in the bible, it was perfectly okay to marry underaged girls and to sell ones daughter into slavery as well as kill anyone who works on the Sabbath” Oh wait, it does. Yet, surely if people started selling their daughters, marrying 12 year olds and/or killing people working on a Sunday the police would get involved and rightly so. Beliefs are not higher than the law of the land, and in the UK all people are equal and should not be subject to discrimination of any kind.
Homosexuals do not need to be cured, religious intolerance and scientific quackery does. Let’s stop giving anti gay, anti science organisations a platform, sure it probably makes good copy and gets viewers, but it also damages vulnerable people. Let us try to educate these groups about tolerance and good science. We are a tolerant nation it is time for the majority to stand up for tolerance and continue to expose reparative therapy for what it is, scientific and medical quackery.
