A consultation on a proposed ban on conversion therapy in Northern Ireland has suggested overwhelming opposition to the plans from both the public and various organisations.
The results of the consultation were published by the Committee for Communities and found that of 1,379 responses, 93.55 per cent were opposed to the controversial measure. Forty-two of the 55 organisations who submitted responses to the consultation were against the measure.
A report in News Letter said that the Alliance party had been urged to drop the plan following the revelation. The DUP was quoted as saying that the “overwhelming opposition” could not be ignored and that evidence from health bodies suggested that abusive conversion therapy practices simply do not happen on a significant scale.
Critics of planned conversion therapy bans have long noted that abusive practices in therapy settings are already illegal and that a new law would at best be a sop to LGBT activists and at worst a pretext for criminalising parents and pastors.
In August a Freedom of Information request to the Scottish government found that a taxpayer-funded helpline for victims of conversion therapy received an average of just one call per month, possibly from the same person.
Writing on X, the DUP's Peter Martin welcomed the results of the consultation, saying that the “frankly dangerous Bill … is surely now dead in the water”.
In September a King’s Counsel produced a legal opinion on Northern Ireland’s proposed conversion therapy ban for The Christian Institute. Aidan O’Neill KC described the Bill as “jellyfish legislation” with vague and undefined key terms that carry a “sting in the tail”.
He noted that the proposed bill outlaws attempts to “change or suppress” a person's “sexual orientation or gender identity”, and that this could apply to heterosexuals as well as those with LGBT identities.
The implications of this are that parents urging their daughter to dress less provocatively, or their son to stop listening to Andrew Tate podcasts, could potentially fall foul of the law.
Prayer and pastoral work could also be criminalised if they involved the affirmation of traditional views on sex and gender. When dealing with questions of gender identity or sexuality, the only legal option would be to affirm a person’s stated identity, with the exception of a few regulated healthcare environments, O’Neill notes.
