by Jeffery Tyler Syck, Kentucky Lantern
In the modern political climate, culture war battles are a dime a dozen. Whether it’s immigration or school choice or transgender bathrooms, the average voter can easily get lost in the sea of discontent that has become our politics.
Given this state of things, it is impossible for anyone to keep up with every single issue after it surfaces; sometimes seemingly smaller causes very reasonably get washed back out in a tidal wave of inattention.
One potential issue that may fit this bill is conversion therapy — a practice that seeks to convince gay and bisexual youths to be straight — which has recently resurfaced at the forefront of Kentucky politics.
Given the abomination that is conversion therapy, we simply cannot allow this issue to be forgotten.
Conversion therapy embraces an outmoded understanding of homosexuality — seeing it as a disease that must be treated instead of an inherent part of someone’s being. Even more than this, opponents of conversion therapy cite the frequent mental abuse such practices implement and the long lasting damage they do to “patients.” An increasingly large number of nations and states have seen fit to ban the practice.
Gov. Andy Beshear joined the mounting masses arrayed against conversion therapy last September when he signed an executive order banning it in Kentucky. He declared at the signing that “conversion therapy has no basis in medicine or science, and it can cause significant long term harm to our kids.”
Despite these recent trends, in the first days of the 2025 Kentucky legislative session, three members of the House of Representatives – Josh Calloway, Candy Massaroni and Marianne Procter – introduced an emergency bill upending the governor’s executive order.
Previous opposition to the governor’s executive order is well intentioned. Republicans have argued that the governor’s action suspends the rights of parents. They argue that parents should be allowed to raise their kids as they see fit, instilling in them values as they see fit.
It is certainly true that parents have near supreme authority in the upbringing of their children and this is how it should be. However, the law has always recognized limits to a parent’s power over their children.
Though parents may instill whatever values they wish in a child, abuse is where governments rightfully draw the line. Severe beating of a child for wrongdoing — even if such treatment is grounded in a woeful misinterpretation of Christian scripture — is simply not permitted. To give another concrete example, a Muslim immigrant family from North Africa would, of course, be allowed to teach their daughters that they must marry young, produce many children and not enjoy sex. However, that same family would never and should never be legally permitted to mutilate their daughter’s genitalia as many in North Africa believe is their religious duty. Religious freedom has never protected moral barbarism.
What the triumvirate of GOP legislators trying to protect conversion therapy do not seem to realize is that such a practice is no less abusive than child beating or genital mutilation.
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Though the aftereffects of conversion therapy are not as obvious on the outside, they are all too real. A recent study found that gay and bisexual people who experience conversion therapy are nearly twice as likely to commit suicide than those who do not. Those who do survive the experience are left traumatized and full of self-loathing. From the perspective of a Christian conservative parent, there are ways to deal with gay children; abuse should never be one of them.
All of that said, it is legally murky whether Beshear can unilaterally ban a practice he dislikes — no matter how heinous it may be.
Yet the proper course for the General Assembly is not to repeal the decision through emergency legislation, it is to ratify Beshear’s order.
People can think what they like about the ethics of homosexuality — such is the benefit of living in a free country — but the line must be drawn at medieval, abusive practices that have no place in a Christian civilization.
