Reparative therapy is the idea that homosexuality and transgenderism can and should be “cured.”
There are plenty of such therapies out there, of course; none of them work, and
even the guiding idea is, needless to say, based on pure, unsupportable
bigotry, but that has, once again needless to say, not stopped several
fundamentalist bigots from setting up reparative therapy “camps” where parents
can send their children to be abused.
Raymond Bell is a pastor of the Cowboy Church of Virginia
(yes!), and has his own version of reparative therapy: “Equine Assisted
Psychotherapy” (EAP). Yup, Bell thinks gay kids can be turned straight by
hanging around with horses (presumably not ponies). How it is supposed to work is a bit unclear, but
according to Bell “homosexuality is actually a type of addiction. It is not ‘curable’ as a
disease because it is a ‘choice driven’ by the person,” and EAP to identify how
a person got “involved” in homosexuality to begin with; for example, because of
rape, abandonment, lacking a male role model, abuse, and having low
self-esteem. Then they ride and stroke horses and turn straight, apparently. So
there.
Diagnosis: One cannot help but suspect a poe. On the other
hand, Bell thinks he can “cure” gay men by inviting them over to stroke horses
… we really don’t know.
In my experience with horse riding, the stereotype of men around the barn is that they were gay. Strange that he would choose this method of curing homosexuality.
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