the California ban of therapies to "cure" homosexuality
ETA: I have officially been convinced I was wrong. Hey, it happens!;-) Feel free to keep commenting, but do check out my recent blog post following up on this.Apparently, California has passed a law outlawing certain kinds of psychotherapies, specifically those that attempt to "cure" homosexuality
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And I also think I understand the situation in California better than I did. I honestly wasn't trying to criticize the law but rather express my discomfort and work out whether that discomfort actually applied! It was more that the suggestion (outlaw certain types of therapy) triggered a wire in my brain that made me think of other things that are vaguely related. I know some people use their blogs and sites to argue for what they believe; with me, it's more a way of thinking through things, getting other peoples' opinions - a work in progress, as it was. I've reread the article with that in mind, and it does look to address a real problem. (Btw, your daughter is lucky to have a mum as supportive as you sound! Not that I'm at all surprised...)
These complex issues of identity and finding your place in a community can probably wait until you're eighteen. If there's a real problem of parents forcing their kids into "therapy" to "correct" their sexual orientation... that sounds horrible! Like child abuse, or close to it. I suspect you can make a case that whatever bad results there are to denying people access to this kind of therapy - if there are any - would be outweighed by the ways people are abusing this therapy.
This reminds me of a situation I faced when I went to Cleveland State to do my M.A. I had what sounded to me like a deep southern accent. It got deeper or less deep at different times, depending on how recently I'd been talking to someone from NC, my mood, and a whole host of other things. It seems petty compared to sexuality, but you have to understand that being from a rather small NC town, going to a major city and going to grad school at all was like culture shock. And people heard my accent and reacted to me a certain way. I had to make a conscious effort to "bury" my Southernness in various ways - my diction, my expressions, the ways I dressed and interacted with people - because if I didn't that was the first association people made whenever I opened my mouth. It was less about living a double-life, and more about me taking the bits of myself I'd inherited in my life and massaging them into "me" I chose. I did not choose to be female, heterosexual, a natural student, a Protestant Christian, a Southerner, German-American, and all the rest. And I also did not choose the associations all those things had on the people I was around: take a white Southerner who spoke with a Southern twang and at that point often used the idiom of a fundamentalist Christian culture... well, it painted quite a picture that wasn't flattering and wasn't even all that honest. So I had to learn to emphasize different parts, downplay others, and transform some of the bits left over - all in a way that I actually recognized the final product.
I'm not blind to the discrimination many LGBT people face, and the powerful impacts it has on their lives. One of my defining experiences was seeing how a close friend of mine, a gay man who was pretty well hounded by some people in the more fundamentalist student groups. I'm being a bit opaque because it's actually a painful thing to talk about. But it ate me up inside, seeing what they did to him and how it broke him inside. Watching that very nearly drove me from the church, and it certainly meant I'd relate to the world I was raised in in a radically different way - in a real way, those experiences started life part II.
One way that experience impacted me (one of many) is, I tend not to judge the way people relate to their homosexuality. I'm all for giving people the tools for managing how their sexuality plays out in their lives - which isn't the same thing as changing their sexuality, of course. It's more about not letting said sexuality be the cornerstone of your identity if you don't want it to. And I think that's what I heard when I read about CA's new law. Sounds like that association is misplaced, but I hope you can understand better where I was coming from.
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