Conversion Bill Isn't What It Seems

The idea of conversion is upside down.

On Sunday March 3rd, 3pm to 6pm, at Lauriston Church Edinburgh, Common Knowledge will be hosting an ‘Honest Conversation: Scotland’s Conversion Therapy Bill’ with speakers Dr Bruce Scott, David Scott, Richard Lucas (tbc) and others, chaired by Professor Richard Ennos. A free ticket can be reserved here.

In the modern era, it all starts with Pavlov and his dogs. If Pavlov’s dogs had not associated a bell with being fed and started drooling in anticipation of a bowl of dog food then the Behaviourist school might never have been and that would probably have been best for humankind.

The Behaviourists’ believed that new behaviour could be trained and this could be done through incentives and sanctions. The body’s needs assumed primacy and the reasoning soul or non-material values were unimportant. It was a classic case in two senses of outside-in.

Classic in the Aristotelian sense that all that mattered about a person was outward behaviour, forget internal psychological workings. And in the commonplace, eternal way that we tend to believe that if a person changes their actions, it means they have changed themselves.

The ‘criminally stupid’ Dr Ewen Cameron, working in Canada and contracted by the CIA, probably is the epitome of the extreme type of Behaviourist. He believed that those who suffer from acute psychic distress could be ‘wiped-clean’ like a cassette, given the appropriate motivation, and have a new, happier personality recorded on top of the old one.

Applying electro-shock treatment, he went about destroying the lives of the depressed, schizoid and schizophrenic, as he fragmented their memories - and sense of self - with high voltages, and then had tapes played to them to programme in the new person. Needless to say, all he did was irrecoverably destroy lives. (Unbelievable that the subtleties of the human brain should be exposed to the methods of such a dimwit!)

This approach of utilising electricity was used often in psychiatric hospitals in the 60s and 70s. It was practised as a method of training the mind to be averse to painful psychological states and material. If you were depressed, and, thanks to your psychiatrist delivering 100 painful volts to your skull, it was made a sharply painful experience, then your body/mind would stop being depressed: aversion therapy, it was called.

If the mind could be made averse to despair, could it be made to reject other inclinations? What about socially prohibited ones such as homosexuality? If a gay man’s yearning for another man can be trained out of him, then would not more acceptable appetites be possibly installed instead? At the very least, he would no longer be ‘perverted’. Such thinking paved the way to one of the more barbarous modes of Behaviourism.

There are multiple methods of conversion therapy and, no doubt, many have been in use for thousands of years, elixirs and rituals and the like. Banning them is a signal that pressurising people to conform their sexuality to social stereotypes is coercive, a breach of rights, and forestalling of further institutionalised cruelty.

However, that is not why the Scottish Government’s conversion therapy banning bill is troublesome. What is disturbing is the authoritarian nature of the way that ‘rights’ are being protected in this bill.

There is a big difference between the sado-masochistic Dr Ewen Cameron-type, following half-baked theories with so little compassion or understanding for the individual at the end of his electrodes, and the parent who questions if their child’s gender fluidity is ‘just a phase’, does not want them exposed to sexual material too young and who does not want their child attending Drag Queen Story Time.

Yet a parent could end-up in prison by trying to ‘convert’ their child; a teacher could be dismissed for trying to ‘convert’ their pupil i.e. in both cases, offering a different alternative to the source of the identity they are claiming, such as the eternal desire to fit in influencing who they hope to perceive themselves as.

For the millions of people who would apply common sense to these issues in a restrained and respectful way, there is now the threat of jail time. This is just another example of the Scottish Government’s bullying, small-minded approach to its ‘Liberalism’ and ‘inclusivity’: it forces people to be ‘liberal’; it forces people to be ‘inclusive’, rather than actually making the case for these values, instead of speaking to the soul and good conscience of the populace.

It won’t work. The Behaviourists taught us that inadvertently. Few people know about the conclusion to the story of Pavlov’s experiment after the successful association of bell and food. One day, the laboratory flooded and, although the dogs were saved, whether it was the shock or the disruption of habit, the dogs never went back to their former associations, even rejecting their food. The stress of the event had broken their previous training.

Attempting to condition, via legal means, abetted by censorship and name-calling, a new culture on a country is only a major stress event away from breakdown and failure; and, as Pavel found out in later experiments, a stress-inducing backlash to achieve recovery. By pushing too irrationally hard on these issues, the Scottish Government endangers a greater threat to minority rights during the inevitable reaction; a repercussion initiated when it becomes clear that people are dying of the vaccine administered to them through government lies, the economy is deteriorating due to warmongering, corruption and greed, and indoctrination, not education, has been the focus of government policy.

17th March - Mark Devlin! Mark is a UK-based club and radio DJ and music journalist, specialising in black/dance music in its many forms. In recent years Mark has begun speaking about the dark forces that have been manipulating the music industry for decades. Mark has been an independent and courageous voice for truth and human freedom. Book a ticket here. (£10)

On the 21st March, Dr Stuart Waiton will be speaking to us about Scottish Education: its falling standards, its emphasis on experience rather than learning, its indoctrinating with dubious ideologies and its inability to permit debate. We may also get on to the topic of why this is happening across the Western world. Every parent and grandparent should be aware of these issues in order to have a better informed view of children’s education.

Free ticket for the 21st March is available here.

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