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What the White House's Opposition to “Conversion Therapy” Means

In early April, the Obama administration responded to an online petition calling for a “Leelah’s Law” that would ban “conversion” therapies. The petition, launched in response to the suicide of a child born a boy and given the name Joshua Ryan Alcorn who felt himself to be a girl and called himself Leelah, conflated therapeutic practices aimed at treating gender dysphoria and those aimed at sexual orientation change. In response to the petition, the White House added its voice to a growing chorus of opposition to such therapies while doing little to clarify the petition’s confusion: “We share your concern about its potentially devastating effects on the lives of transgender as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer youth,” wrote Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama. “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.” Continue Reading »

Our One-Eyed Friends

It wasn’t a conclusion he thought he’d come to. When he was a young graduate student, Jonathan Haidt presumed that “liberal” was pretty much a synonym for “reasonable,” if not for “obvious.” Now, as he writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and . . . . Continue Reading »

A Grammar of the Self

You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves whether they have any selves. —G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Chesterton was wrong, for that other vision stood in the wings. But, writing in 1908, how could he have predicted that parents would one day pay minds so . . . . Continue Reading »

The Use and Abuse of Freud

Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud’s Theory on American Thought and Culture by E. Fuller Torrey, M.D. HarperCollins, 362 pages, $25 This book has its flaws, especially with regard to Freudian thought, but its contributions to our understanding of how Freudian concepts were used to . . . . Continue Reading »

The Psychology of Altruism

In his 1987 book Hope Within History, Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that when people are in situations like that of the ancient Hebrews under Babylonian captivity, where an overwhelmingly powerful majority holds seemingly complete and brutal sway over an oppressed minority, the latter must . . . . Continue Reading »

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