Thrilling promises of 'conversion' therapies

If the gay really can be freed from their sexual shackles perhaps there is hope, too, for those of us serving life sentences monotonously manacled to our heterosexuality.

Being unable to feel so much as a glimmer of lust towards members of one’s own sex (your columnist’s unhappy plight for 73 years) seems a tragic thing, like a tragic inability to hear anything worth listening to in the music of Mozart.

I’m moved to this flight of fancy by the way in which the intellectually stimulating topic of “gay conversion therapy” (GCT) is suddenly abuzz again in the public conversation.

Last month saw the release of a report by La Trobe University and others finding that gay conversion practices are now entering the mainstream within particular Christian churches.

Meanwhile, this very week it emerges that a Satan-stalking conservative Christian candidate in this weekend’s Victorian state election is an advocate of God’s lust-realigning GCT.

That candidate, Dianne Colbert, running in the seat of Buninyong, has been given a starring ballot-paper preference by theVictorian Liberal Party. Ms Colbert promotes gay conversion therapy and, plausibly, blames Satan for turning hitherto decent people to vile homosexuality.

The thrilling idea that even something so ostensibly entrenched as people’s sexuality can be converted by therapy has one daring to dream of other conversions.

Perhaps, with Canberra conversion therapy (CCT) the scoffers who mock the federal capital city might be converted to thinking it a ripper metropolis.

Perhaps, with Liberal conversion therapy (LCT), habitual Liberal voters (taught that filthy habit by Satan) might be converted into wholesome Greens voters.

With NIMBY conversion therapy (NCT) those Canberrans who have hitherto been cold, selfish, insular and inhumane might instead become warm, generous and welcomingly community-minded folk, knitting socks for the deserving poor in the time they used to invest in writing bitter letters to The Canberra Times.

Mention above of the really rather ugly Victorian state election reminds us that the campaign has been an unseemly law and order auction. In recent years and to the despair of enlightened observers Victoria has become almost Texan in the ruthlessness of its laws.

Recently The Guardian, looking in dismay at the election’s crime-trumpeting tone and at the punitive tone in Victoria per se, (see online Gay Alcorn’s fine piece Law and order auction: how crime came to dominate Victoria's election) sighed that “It’s been [in Victoria in recent years] a steady story of the toughening of laws, of the sharp reduction in judges’ discretion in sentencing criminals, and of fewer people being granted bail and released on parole. [Victoria’s imprisonment rate] is skyrocketing – prison numbers increased by more than 70 per cent in the decade to June 2017, far exceeding population growth.”

Coincidentally, as Victoria’s premier Daniel Andrews and opportunistic opposition leader Matthew Guy roar that severely punishing offenders is all about the common good, the online Aeon (‘A World of Ideas’) has published a fine new piece Punishment isn’t about the common good: it’s about spite.

Some of us have always noticed the spite in attitudes to punishment. As I write I have just heard it on the ABC news in the voice of Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton as he insists, figuratively salivating, that just-released Bali Nine offender Renae Lawrence must be spitefully prosecuted for old Australian offences the moment she arrives back in Australia.

One always sees spite, too, in the grumbles of those who insist that prisons like the Alexander Maconochie Centre are plush ‘motels’ with luxuries like electric light and mattresses when all law-breakers deserve are gaslit dungeons and misery.

Now our spitefulness-in-punishment impressions are authoritatively endorsed by the Aeon piece’s scholarly authors US professors Patrick Forber and Rory Smead. In a thoughtful piece they look at what we might have evolved to use spiteful punishment for, and look at evolved spite not only in humans but also in fire ants, chimps, fish, honey bees and an especially “fascinating” bacteria.

The authors show that it’s a characteristic of spiteful punishment that it does some damage not only to the victim but to the spiteful.

If we really were thinking sensibly and altruistically about punishment, the profs say, we would have evolved to make sure it always did some good and strived to be fair. But as we know (the authors give some good examples) imprisoning people costs a society zillions to do but achieves little or no reforming or deterring. And, spitefully, we pick on particular kinds of already disadvantaged people to punish.

“[So] from an evolutionary perspective, spite is about levelling the playing field by taking everyone down, in order to get a leg up for oneself,” the authors fancy.

All of this helps to explain why those of us who are more highly evolved get nowhere when we try to use facts to argue with under-evolved politicians and their fan bases that tough-looking criminal policies are ineffective. It’s why statistics showing there is less crime, and not the “crime tsunami” Guy says has engulfed Victoria, have no power to persuade.

Effectiveness, giving taxpayers the most society-improving safety-achieving bang for the penological buck, is not what the spiteful under-evolved lauranorda zealots (like those two vicious fire ants, the premier of Victoria and the even more fire-antsy Liberal leader Matthew Guy) care about.