Gays can be reformed, just like arsonists, Trump’s new domestic policy adviser has said

Ken Blackwell has made anti-LGBT statements for years and has long endorsed a controversial mental health practice known as conversion therapy.



Ken Blackwell, tapped last week by President-elect Donald Trump to head domestic policy during the businessman’s transition to the White House, has made anti-LGBT statements for years. Among them: Homosexuality is a sin, and gay people, just like petty thieves and fire-setters, can be rehabilitated.

The former Cincinnati mayor has long endorsed a controversial mental health practice known as conversion therapy or reparative therapy. The goal is to cure a person of his or her homosexuality, and in the case of transgender people, to reaffirm the gender into which they were born.

In the past, treatments have included everything from inducing vomiting to using mild electric shock while patients viewed homoerotic images. Since the 1990s, however, the therapy has been denounced by many medical and scientific societies and even outlawed in a handful of states. In 2015, the Obama administration expressed disapproval of the practice after Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender teen in Ohio, took her life after being forced by her parents to undergo conversion counseling.
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Two years ago, in a radio interview with Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, which has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Blackwell appeared to blame the deaths of six people in a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, Calif., on the LGBT rights movement, saying it undermined “natural marriage.”

“When these fundamental institutions are attacked and destroyed and weakened and abandoned,” said Blackwell, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, “you get what we are now seeing, and that is a flood of these disturbed people in our society that are causing great pain.”