Freedom of Information requests by The Christian Institute (CI) have revealed that complaints against medical practitioners or organisations for practising so-called 'conversion therapy' in Northern Ireland are so rare that the real impact of a proposed ban would be to target ordinary parents and Christians for actions as simple as praying, studying the Bible, or even just having a conversation.
The CI asked Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care Trust and the Belfast Trust how many complaints they had received “against a medical practitioner, practice, trust or other body, on the grounds of ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘conversion practice’”.
The Belfast Trust reported that there had been no more than five such cases, while the Northern Ireland Trust had no cases at all.
Under the proposed plan to ban “conversion therapy”, parents and church leaders could potentially face unlimited fines and up to seven years in prison for trying to convince their children to abandon an LGBTQ identity. The “anti-conversion therapy ban” also prevents parents from attempting to convince their children not to convert to a different gender.
A government-funded report, which had the support of LGBTQ lobby groups, recently confirmed that acts like prayer, Bible studies and teaching, could all be construed as conversion practices.
James Kennedy, NI Policy Officer for the Institute, said that the FOI requests showed that there is simply no need for legislation on the issue as the kind of “pseudo-medical interventions” that people are concerned about “stopped generations ago”.
Kennedy suggested that rather than trying to solve a genuine medical problem, the law appears to be an attempt to suppress Christians and those critical of LGBTQ ideology.
“The truth is that a new law on conversion therapy would infringe on the freedoms of ordinary, innocent people who reject LGBTQ+ ideology," he said.
"It would impact especially Christians who seek to uphold biblical teaching on marriage and gender, and parents who caution a child against gender transition.”
