In light of recent events surrounding the 2016 American election, Donald Trump is now the President Elect, with his Vice President being Mike Pence. There has been a large amount of uproar about these results coming from the LGBTQ community, and have been one of the largest groups speaking out in protest against Donald Trump’s election. However, this does not make that much sense because Donald Trump claimed to be an ally of the LGBTQ community several times on the campaign trail.
This upset starts to make much more sense when you look at Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, who, according to Liam Stack with the New York Times, has been an opponent of gay rights as Indiana Governor and a congressman, and Pence is associated with supporting conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy is a form of psychological treatment, targeting members of the LGBTQ community, in an attempt to convert the individual’s sexuality from whichever identity they align with to heterosexual. To believe that this could in fact work, means that anyone supporting conversion therapy believes that being lesbian, gay, or bisexual is suffering from a mental illness to make them that way, and that conversion therapy is a cure. That being said, the question that I want to pose from this is, does conversion therapy work, or is it simply bad science? Building from this question, the null hypothesis is going to be that conversion therapy does nothing and has no positive effect, or the alternative hypothesis being that conversion therapy can have an effect on changing sexuality.
On the website of the American Psychological Association, they have taken the firm stance that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, as well as stated that the majority of the rhetoric of homosexuality being unnatural stems from conservative religious political movements. Alongside this, there are no studies that support or endorse conversion therapy.
In light of these findings, The null hypothesis is accepted and the alternative hypothesis is rejected. Just like it was spoken about in class, there is such a thing as bad science that can hurt people, whether it is this scenario regarding conversion therapy, or the bleeding that killed George Washington.
Photo Cited
http://www.christianpost.com/news/donald-trump-waves-the-gay-pride-flag-171238/
Works Cited
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/us/politics/mike-pence-and-conversion-therapy-a-history.html?_r=0
http://apa.org/about/policy/sexual-orientation.aspx
http://www.christianpost.com/news/donald-trump-waves-the-gay-pride-flag-171238/