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TO: California State Senate, Standing Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development
April 23,2012
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) wishes to be on record as objecting to SB 1172 and strongly recommending that this bill not be passed out of committee. NARTH is a professional, scientific organization whose members include fully qualified academics and therapists who are fully licensed professionals and who abide by high standards of ethical care. NARTH supports the freedom of individuals to claim a gay identity or to explore their unwanted attractions and make changes in their lives. NARTH objects to this bill for the following reasons:
1. SB 1172 inaccurately represents the science on sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE).
SB 1172 makes serious errors in its representation of both the issue of change in sexual orientation and in the likelihood of harm from efforts to change. SB 1172 references the report by the American Psychological Association's task force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation (2009). When the task force committee was being formed, NARTH and others submitted the names of highly esteemed professionals who either practice or were sympathetic to the informed and professional provision of SOCE. However, none of these individuals was appointed to this committee, which ended up being comprised of professionals who essentially were in ideological lock-step with one another in their preconceived notions regarding SOCE. In NARTH's view, this limits the scientific authority of the task force document. However, even with this highly restricted range of viewpoints, the task force's statements related to change of sexual orientation and the resulting harm seem to be ignored by the crafters of SB 1172 in several important ways.
First, SB 1172 presents the issues of change and harm in a partisan manner. In Section 1(c) (and again in Section 865.1 [b]), the bill states that "there is no evidence that any type of psychotherapy can change a person's sexual orientation." The task force report, however, actually "concluded that there is little in the way of credible evidence that could clarify whether SOCE does or does not work in changing same-sex attractions" (p. 28). Absence of conclusive evidence of effectiveness is not logically equivalent to positive evidence of ineffectiveness. A more accurate statement...