The Mormon church has filed comments of concern about a current proposal to ban conversion therapy, worried that not enough protections for religious freedom exist in the ban.
(Yes. I’m calling it Mormon. They don’t recognize my transgender child’s identity, so I won’t recognize theirs. No, I’m not nice. Not on this).
Freedom to do what? Freedom to abuse children? Because every respectable mental health professional recognizes conversion therapy as abuse.
Further, it is futile. Conversion therapy only produces more trauma, more suicide attempts, more harm.
Banning conversion therapy for children is no more a violation of religious freedom than any other law preventing child abuse.
Speaking up against a ban of this horrible “therapy,” even if it’s couched in words of “religious freedom,” is hurtful beyond measure to the LGBTQ community, some of whom wish to remain true to the Mormon church.
LGBTQ folks are not broken. They don’t need to be fixed. The Mormon church does not get to run roughshod over Utah’s government, either.
Amiee Finster, Stansbury