Parliament member tells gay bashing victim to seek ex-gay therapy
“As far as I’m concerned they’re scum…. It’s enough to take a life – there were three of them on me and I was left for dead.”
Stephen Scott of Newtownabbey (an area in the northeast part of the United Kingdom) who says he was the victim of a homophobic attack — kicked, punched and shouted at — by three teens as he was walking home.
“I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn away from what they are engaged in…. I’m happy to put any homosexual in touch with this gentleman and I have met people who have turned around and become heterosexuals.”
Iris Robinson, a Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland, speaking with BBC Radio about the anti-gay beating of Stephen Scott. (BBC)
“One of the things that kept coming up was people who had a conflict between their religious identity and their sexual identity…. They were being told ‘you are gay and you need to embrace that’ but they were not happy with that and I had a very sad case of a man – who I was treating for something else, who took his own life…. I don’t want to be in a position again where I lose someone because they have been told something that is factually inaccurate, change is extremely difficult but it is not impossible. A lot of the research has never been disproven but it has become politically unacceptable to talk about it…. But really the work I’m focussing on is for the people out there who say that they don’t want to [decide they want to be gay-identified to the world].”
Dr Paul Miller, a Christian psychologist who engages in ex-gay therapy and is at the heart of a political uproar between Member of Parliament Iris Robinson and the British gay community after she told a gay bashing victim to seek ex-gay therapy. Miller refers to his work as “sexual reorientation cases.” (News Letter)
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