The short movie “Free to Love” is the highlight of the conversion agencies’ effort in the USA against the the anti conversion legislation trend. The chairperson of Havruta, Shay Bramson, shares his thoughts.
I watched the propaganda video for Free to Love conversion therapy on YouTube, on the “recommendation” of the organization’s activist, Rafael (thank you, really!). It’s amazing to see the twist that conversion therapy agents are making today, real acrobatics, and hope that sometime during the video the viewer will forget what he saw and somehow swallow the nonsense they are pushing him.
In words, the choreography goes something like this:
“We agree, conversion therapy is bad. But that’s not what we do. We do therapy that changes your sexual orientation, and converts you into being straight. That is, conversion therapy. So it is wrong that you prohibit conversion therapies in the law!”
“And as proof that we are able to bring about change, here are some people who are treated by us, who even before the treatment were attracted to women. There is a chance that they are bisexual, but for the video we will call them ‘gays’, who tell how bad it is for them as gays. So you should come to us.”
“Here, we come to a pride event and photograph several such gays in colorful attire that will anger the conservatives among you, who do not rule out that in the future they will get their attraction to women if they feel that way.”
“We do not do conversion therapy at all. The conversion therapy we do is regenerative, where we decide on a narrative (childhood trauma), dress you in it, say that’s what made you gay and hope for the best.”
“Our treatment is related to an agenda? They claim against us that it is only because we are religious that we offer this treatment? Right! Is it forbidden to be religious anymore?!”
The year is already 2021, and all the conversion therapy agents have to offer is just more lies from the same thing. As we have said countless times, we who struggle against conversion therapy, do not come to keep therapy from anyone. We come to stop a very specific type of “therapists” – those who perform conversion “therapy,” harmful, ineffective and unethical practices, as has already been shown in many studies, banned by many countries in the world and already sentenced to negation and warnings against it in position papers from all professional therapeutic unions in Israel. And taking care of more control over such “therapists” is always good.
The word launderer gets overloaded here, and explodes in the launderers’ faces: Are you not performing “conversion therapy” as you have recently claimed but other things entirely? Then you have nothing to fear from legislation against you. Very simple. But, as mentioned, it does not matter what you call your revolutionary “therapies,” regenerative or reparative. They all came to destroy, to be de. Completely devolutionary, degenerative and defective. They all came to destroy, to be devolutionary, degenerate and completely defective.
The interesting and ironic point in this film for me is the show that the honest, open and simple answers of gays from some event of pride present to the filmmakers without them noticing. Yahti (slang) wearing make-up and dressed up Mehadrin for the mitzvot of the holiday, answers in a cute and simple voice: “If I want to go out with women one day – I will go out with women.”
Perhaps the best conversion you can make is to leave us alone and not make any of this a big deal.
In short, if I left you in suspense, I was not convinced. The law against conversion will still pass, God willing, or I will die first.
There was Tu B’Shvat this week (I’m still the chairman of Chevruta and all that), and “Because Man is a Tree of the Field” starred as usual in the role of “the verse on duty that will put something else in the text about the holiday except for ‘today is Tu B’Shvat.'” It’s taken from the issue forbidding the felling of fruit trees during a siege of a city in a discretionary war, from Parshat Shoftim in the book of Devarim.
But why “a tree of the field?”
What tree is even found in the fields? Trees are in forests, groves, orchards, not in fields. A field is a flat place in which things are grown. A tree is just stuck there.
But even the stuck, lonely tree, outside the walls, which has not found its place, must not be cut down. It is forbidden to cut down, it is forbidden to flatten it, it is forbidden to destroy whoever it is. It is forbidden to be converted to something else. He is a human being. He will bear fruit one day. Let him grow. The unnecessary descretionary war that the conversion agencies are waging on the LGBTQ+ community will not succeed, that’s pretty clear. But we need to make sure that more men and women are not cut down on the way there.
“In short, if I left you in suspense, I was not convinced. The law against conversion will still pass, God willing, or I will die first. Shay” Bramson (Photo: Rotem Shavit)
For those who still want a recommendation for a movie worth seeing, there is a film that is not at all simple on Netflix that is relatively faithful to what people go through in conversion therapy workshops (yes, even in Israel, even today), called “Boy Erased”. It is important to see.
