It seems that the number of therapists offering to "cure" homosexuals and turn them into decent, upstanding heterosexuals is increasing.So gay man Patrick Strudwick discovered when he investigated some of these therapists and found they even had their own professional associations dedicated to sexual "conversion".
Many of the therapists, not surprisingly, are religious believers and hold that converting gays is a kind of spiritual cleansing and rejection of sin.
One therapist claims that a third of gays treated are completely changed while another third change significantly, but he doesn't produce any recognised research to back this up.
It's been the consensus for many years that homosexuality is a deep-rooted preference that can't be "cured", unless the person was really straight all along. But religious zealots can't accept this.
One therapist told Patrick that a part of him had not developed properly, had "stayed stuck". It was a bit like being retarded, she said. He had turned to homosexuality because he had been "wounded" by inadequate parenting, and had become "confused" about his sexuality.
It's difficult to imagine any intelligent person being taken in by this vacuous mumbo-jumbo. All it's likely to do is undermine their self-confidence.
But if you're gay and not entirely secure about your preference, and maybe having to deal with anti-gay abuse and attacks, then you might succumb to the siren voices of these charlatans and their miracle cure - you too can be a normal heterosexual after all!
Why don't these fanatics just stick to prayer and proselytising instead of trying to meddle with people's minds?
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Today (Saturday February 6) is the United Nations International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation. Some 90,000 women in the UK have either been subjected to it or are likely to be. Not one person has ever been prosecuted for what is a designated criminal offence. Two organisations, Forward and Plan, are campaigning to wipe out the practice.
