The Dangerous Plot to Ban Christian Counseling

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Writer’s Note: Imagine ropes restraining your body as you struggle to break the surface of the water to suck in another gasp of air. A nearby person wants to help you, but the rescuer is being physically restrained. This frantic fight for life is how our counselors and their clients feel in the face of horrible laws that ban lifesaving counsel for people caught in the bondage of unwanted same-sex attractions, behavior or gender confusion. Believe me, this is a struggle for life and death.

Liberty Counsel has led the nation against counseling bans. We won the first case in the country at a federal Court of Appeals a few months ago! But if the “Transgender Bill of Rights” (H.Res. 1209) passes, Christian counseling for those suffering from gender confusion and unwanted same-sex attraction will be illegal everywhere. Liberty Counsel is fighting for our children in courtrooms and in the halls of Congress. We need your help! Please, fax Congress NOW demanding they vote no on H.Res. 1209.—Mat Staver

A new study reveals that more than half of persons identifying as “transgendered” were sexually abused as children, with most of the abuse happening before they were 13. And 77% reported other forms of abuse, indicating the deep emotional wounds carried by these individuals.

Body dysmorphic disorder was first included in the 1980 publication of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III” (DSM-III), where it was called “dysmorphophobia.”

Body dysphoria has been recognized as a mental illness for over a century. In 1891, Italian physician Enrico Morselli stated that “[t]he dysmorphophobic patient is really miserable; in the middle of his daily routines, conversations, while reading, during meals, in fact everywhere and at any time, is overcome by the fear of deformity … which may reach a very painful intensity, even to the point of weeping and desperation.”

Like too many children and young adults in modern times, the patient Dr. Morselli treated 131 years ago suffered from a mental illness that caused them to believe their body was flawed and did not accurately reflect their identity. To put it in contemporary terms, emotional pain caused these patients to believe they had been “born in the wrong body.”

Traditionally, dysphoria was successfully treated with cognitive behavioral therapy and medication to increase serotonin levels in the patient’s brain. But that all changed in 1973, thanks to serial child rapist and child sexualization advocate Alfred Kinsey.

As part of Kinsey’s child sexualization project at Indiana University (where his statue stands despite the hundreds of child rapes he documented), he convinced Dr. Henry Benjamin of Germany to give an elementary aged boy estrogen, in the first-known case of “cross-sex hormone treatment.”

For the next several decades, Dr. Benjamin intentionally tampered with the hormones of thousands of children to further Kinsey’s evil theory that homosexuality, pedophilia and infant sexualization were normal and good.

In fact, Kinsey and Benjamin were grooming these children for sexual abuse, then demanding their perverse crimes to be normalized. To dress this evil in the clothes of medicine, Benjamin coined a new term that would resonate over the decades: “gender dysphoria.”

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) adopted Dr. Benjamin’s Kinseyan terminology and methodology. Instead of treating body dysphoria with the cognitive behavioral therapy that had worked well for over a century, the APA removed mental illness from descriptors of the disorder and began recommending the deviant “sex change therapy” invented by a child rape proponent and his protégé.

This evil propaganda has continued to spread, not just through popular psychology trends but in our schools as well. Maryland’s largest school district saw a staggering 582% increase in “gender nonconforming” students between 2019 and 2022 as gender-bending pseudoscience began to be pushed in public schools.

But it gets worse. Not content to merely treat young people with surgeries and hormone therapies, the APA and Kinsey/Benjamin adherents worked to ensure that no other therapy was available to those seeking to end their gender confusion and same-sex attractions.

Cities and states around the country began to bow to Kinseyan demands. Cognitive behavioral therapy for sexual disorders was derisively labeled “conversion therapy” and banned.

Liberty Counsel encountered this issue in 2012, when the State of California banned any counseling aimed at changing unwanted sexual desires. New Jersey followed suit in 2013. Since then, we have defended several “change counsel” cases in which Christian therapists use Christ’s love and biblical principles to help those suffering from unwanted desires.

Defending Counselors in Court

This summer, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Liberty Counsel’s clients in Otto et al. v. City of Boca Raton, FL et al. The Court struck down ordinances that prohibited licensed counselors from providing counsel to minors who desperately desire to conform their attractions, behaviors and gender identities to their sincerely held religious beliefs.

As a result of our Otto case, counselors in Florida, Georgia and Alabama are free to help their minor clients, and these children are free to seek and receive the lifesaving therapy they need.

Beyond this historic win, Liberty Counsel continues to defend Christian counseling, and now we are fighting to keep Congress from passing a law that will ban lifesaving counsel nationwide. {eoa}

For the original article, visit our content partners at lc.org.

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