🏳️🌈🏺 conversion therapy bans
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
“Conversion therapy” is one of the darkest legacies of the queer experience. Born from pseudo-science and religious zeal, it promised to “cure” LGBTQ+ people through electroshock, institutionalization, prayer regimens, and “reparative counseling.” It led to depression, family rejection, and hate. In 1976, three years after the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a disorder, evangelical men claiming to be “Ex-Gay” founded Exodus International. For decades, Exodus was the largest conversion-therapy network in the world—until a decade ago, when it collapsed in scandal, its leaders admitting no one was ever “cured” and acknowledging the harm they caused.
Medical bodies worldwide, from the AMA to the WHO, agreed: conversion therapy is ineffective and permanently harmful, especially to children. Nations and states began passing bans to protect minors. Virginia joined half the states five years ago, restricting licensed professionals from offering it to youth. But last June, a Henrico County judge approved a consent decree in Raymond v. Virginia Dept. of Health. It permanently blocks the state from enforcing its ban against counselors who engage in ex-gay “talk therapy” with minors—reopening the door for queerness to be framed as something to be “fixed” through prayer and shame, despite universal evidence to the contrary. The Republican Attorney General AGREED to the settlement, so no appeal was filed, making the order binding.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to act nationwide. On October 7 it will hear Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge to all laws banning conversion therapy for minors. Lower courts have upheld these laws to protect children from proven psychological violence. But if the Court rules otherwise, bans across the country would fall.
For Virginians, the stakes are doubled: even if the Supreme Court upholds protections, the only way to revisit the state’s consent decree is at the ballot box—by electing Jay Jones as Attorney General, willing to fight and reinstate Virginia’s protections for LGBTQ+ youth.
We are losing our old fights fast, and we have to win both. They are coming for us now. Vote