New Jersey’s gay conversion therapy ban is up for debate

Guests: BRIGID HARRISON, PETERSON TOSCANO and CLINTON ANDERSON

Last week the New Jersey State Senate committee passed a bill that would outlaw licensed therapists practicing gay conversion therapy. Governor Chris Christie has not signed the bill, co-sponsored by his likely gubernatorial opponent State Senator Barbara Buono.  Should there be laws passed to protect a state’s citizens from a practice that the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association have denounced? Or is this too much governmental overreach? We’ll talk to Montclair State University political science professor, BRIGID HARRISON, about the political dynamics behind this bill. Actor and Haverford College Friend in Residence, PETERSON TOSCANO, will tell his story about the 17 years and $30,000 he spent on therapy that didn’t work. Then, CLINTON ANDERSON, Director of the APA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concern Office, will join us to discuss the American Psychological Association’s position on reparative therapy.

Photo: Chaim Levin, left, and Michael Ferguson, right, with his partner Seth Anderson, listen to a a news conference, in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012. Levin, of the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. NY, and Ferguson, of Salt Lake City, are two of four gay men accusing a New Jersey organization of selling “conversion therapy” services promising to make them straight. Instead, they told the news conference that they were subjected to humiliations, including having to strip naked, or taking a baseball bat to effigies of their mothers. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)