Argumentative Essay: Banning Conversion Therapy

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Banning Conversion Therapy

Conversion therapy: is a psychological treatment or spiritual counseling to help change a person’s sexual orientation (Segen's Medical Dictionary). Out of 50 states only 5 states have successfully banned conversion therapy for minors. Those states are California, Oregon, Illinois, Washington D.C., and Cincinnati. Other states like Iowa, Nevada and Colorado have tried but have gotten nowhere. For a while, same-sex orientation was considered a mental illness stemming from not getting enough attention from the parent that is the same-sex they are attracted to or because of something bad that happened in their childhood. Many treatments and therapies were being created and used to try and cure homosexuality. Although …show more content…

To stay at journey into Manhood for a whole weekend it would cost $650. As soon as he got there the main instructor told him that the staff weren’t actual therapists. Right off the bat the people that were going there to seek help, if they really needed someone to talk to about an exercise they did or something that was really bothering them, they wouldn’t have anyone to talk to because no one there had a licence to listen to their problems and help them. At Journey into Manhood there were different exercises that the people there did as a group. One of them was to sit on a guides lap to try and reenact a father and son moment that they didn’t get that often when they were children. Ted states “ Sometime during all that holding and touching and singing, while I was cradled in the Motorcycle position, I felt it: the unmistakable bulge pressing through his tight jeans. It was the first time in my life I had a felt another man’s erection” (Cox). Even though Ted was undercover, the camp that he was at was supposed to help him become a heterosexual male, but even some of the staff that was with him were obviously also attracted to males. This is ironic, the people that are supposed to be helping him and telling him that how he feels towards men isn’t ok, feel the same way he does towards men too. Even though these are some pretty horrifying stories there are also some success