FAIR defends Hitleresque techniques

[_Joe Geisner]

http://www.fairblog.org/2012/02/01/fair ... ne-thorne/

I find the podcast disgusting. How can these so called Christians advocate this despicable behavior?

The link (queerty) below the account has profanity, so I pulled John Cameron's experience with the electric shock treatment from the article. If you do not want to see profanity, I suggest you not click on the link.

It should be noted that Connell O'Donovan's discovered the following about the electroshock treatment that FAIR seems to want to defend: At Brigham Young University in 1976, Dr. D. Eugene Thorne, head of BYU's Psychology Department, oversaw Ph.D. student Max Ford McBride in his PhD dissertation that involved experiments on Gay men using Gay and Straight pornography with electric-shock therapy. They started out with 16 Gay male BYU students and staff, but two committed suicide during the experiment, so the study only ended up with 14 subjects.

And FAIR wants to defend this kind of horror?

Here is John Cameron's experience:

Twice a week for six months, he jolted himself with painful shocks to the penis to rid himself of his attraction to men. “I kept trying to fight it, praying and fasting and abstaining and being the best person I could,” said Cameron, now a 59-year-old playwright and head of the acting program at the University of Iowa. “I was never actively gay, never had any encounters with men — never had moments when I failed and actually had sex with other men,” he said.

But his undercurrent of feelings put him in direct conflict with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) and its principles. “As teens we were taught that homosexuality was second only to murder in the eyes of God,” he said. “I was very, very religious and the Mormon church was the center of my life,” said Cameron, who had done missionary work in Guatemala and El Salvador. The 1976 study at Brigham Young, “Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy,” was written by Max Ford McBride, then a graduate student in the psychology department. “I thought he was my savior,” said Cameron, who enrolled with 13 other willing subjects, all Mormons who thought they might be gay, for a three- to six-month course of therapy.

A mercury-filled tube was placed around the base of the penis and the students were shown alternating slides of men and women in various stages of undress. When participants responded to images of men with an erection, the closed electric circuit was broken and they received three-second electrical shocks at 10-second intervals. Each session lasted an hour. Participants set their own pain levels. Cameron said his shame was so deep that he selected the highest level. “Max didn’t do it, we did it,” he said. “I was always turning it up to get the most pain because I was desperate.”

http://www.queerty.com/the-byu-study-th ... -20110331/

Connell has also written this in a article on his website:

The long term effects of the electric shock "therapy" these men were subjected to has been crippling. Two of the men committed suicide soon after completing this torturous study. Every survivor I have interviewed has suffered life-long emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical damage. In 1999, John Cameron, one of the 14 men who went through this horrific experience in 1976 when he was a 23 year old BYU student and member of the Young Ambassadors, wrote to me, "For 22 years now I have lived with the scars of the experience - unable to articulate a personal suffering and longing that have almost crippled me....I didn't completely come out of the closet until I was 34, and only after much angry, pissed-off therapy. I spent a lot of money just so I could yell at my psychologist and break things in his office for an hour every week for two years. But it was a hell of a lot more fun than Ford McBride and the electrodes."

A Gay psychology intern at BYU named Ray actually assisted in giving elcectric shock therapy to fellow Gay men in the late 1970s. In an interview he did for Sean Weakland's documentary on aversive therapies at BYU called Legacies, Ray gave the following report on his activities and their results (which I quote here extensively because Ray has so much "insider" knowledge):

"A lot of times BYU security would catch people in compromising positions on campus. Those people would have the choice to either be kicked out of school and have their families notified about what they had done or they could go through this therapy. We had quite a few people who were going through it. There were others in the therapy who felt so much guilt for being the way they were or they had been promised that if they underwent the therapy they would be able to marry and have children and they would be turned. Of course they had to have the desire to change, and if the therapy failed (which it always did), it was their fault for the failure since they didn't have enough desire.

"Anyway, they would come in usually three times a week. I would be behind a glass one-way mirror, and they would be on the other side of it. They had their choice to look at pornographic magazines or watch porno videos. We would tape electrodes to their groin, thigh, chest and armpits. We had another machine that would monitor their breathing and heart rate. If there was a difference in their heart rate when looking at homosexual pornography, we would turn a dial which would send a current to shock them. If they were a new patient, we would use a very low current. From the reaction that I saw there were muscle spasms which looked very painful.

"After that was over, we would switch the pornography over so that it was a man and a woman having sex, and we would play very soothing music in the background to try and get the mind to relate to that. For the people that had been doing the therapy longer we turned the voltage way up so that you could see burn marks on the skin and quite often they would also throw up during the therapy. This is speculation, but most of the students at BYU probably hadn't even seen pornography before.

"After undergoing that kind of pain over a number of months, everyone said that they had completely changed. They kept records for as long as the people were at BYU. After they had graduated, there was no records kept to see what kind of success rate they had. The BYU statistics were wrong because the people were lying. They were desperate to get their degree and get out of the situation. They had been blackmailed into the situation in the first place.
"We did have some people who became completely asexual after undergoing the therapy. But no, we never changed anyone from gay to straight....We had several people who committed suicide during the therapy. We had three different people who hung themselves in the Harris Fine Arts Center on BYU campus."

For Connell's website - http://connellodonovan.com/lgbtmormons.html (and then scroll down to "Shocking Events at BYU")

[_harmony]

Tithing dollars at work. And people wonder at my opinion of BYU?

[_SteelHead]

Is one of the take aways from this study: pornography is a bad, evil, pernicious plague, except when used to turn gay men straight via electro-shock.

[_Drifting]

Now what nature of individual within Mormonism thought up and devised a 'treatment' for homosexuality that involved a device fitted around a man's penis followed by attempts to stimulate that penis with gay pornography to the point he achieves an erection?

That/those individual(s) deserve to be publicly named and interviewed by police officers.

[_Ceeboo]

WTF????


Peace,
Ceeboo

[_3sheets2thewind]

You are all just anti Mormons and everything you say is false didn't you jerks read about the one anonymous person. If you all weren't so stupid you would know that the one anonymous source disproves the many many other people who claim to be scared. FAIR has spoken thus the truth has been established. If you people could stop being such haters you would realize everyone but FAIR is lying. Haters gunna hate I suppose

[_Buffalo]

People should go to jail for this, and FAIR should be ashamed of themselves.