I don’t know why, I just do. It might have something to do with a thread on Pundit Kitchen this morning. I found this lovely news post when I opened my daily PK newsletter today.

For those who can’t be arsed to read, its basic content is as follows. A bunch of gay activists turned up at Michele and Marcus Bachmann’s conversion therapy clinic, dressed up as barbarians, because Marcus Bachmann has said that gay people are “barbarians who need to be disciplined”. The activists demanded that Bachmann come out and punish them for their deviant behaviour, but when he didn’t turn up, instead they went into the empty waiting room and showered it with glitter while chanting “You can’t pray away the gay – baby, I was born this way!”

I find this to be an inspiring and interesting, not to mention good humoured, form of protest. Conversion therapy has been shown to do more harm than good, and there was no one there anyway. Note empty waiting room and reception area.

I scrolled down to read some comments, expecting the usual lols and humourous talking points. Imagine my shock when what I found was 300+ comments by ultra-consevatives who seem to think that these activists assaulted innocent people with glitter. Assaulted. WTF? What angered me even more was that the few people who were trying to argue held the “Well, the protestors were wrong, but so was Bachmann for saying that” approach, and they were being slaughtered by people who seem to think that you always have to pick a side, that you can’t see something from more than one point of view and that if you say you are you’re being dishonest and have no place to comment.

The way these people were defending Bachmann and his so-called “clinic” absolutely disgusted me. And these are the same people who stand idly by and say nothing at all when the Westboro Babtist Church pickets funerals or gay kids are beaten up by other kids whose bible study leader has told them being gay is an abomination. The same people who think that Christian protesters have every right to stand outside Planned Parenthood clinics with pictures of dead babies, scaring away women who need help and council.

Conversion therapy is not science, it’s not medicine, it’s not psychiatry. It’s fraud. And for every person who’s made “not gay” by conversion therapy (and this is ignoring the stress and trauma they have to go through to reach that point) there are ten others who are directly harmed, either by being forced into it by their family, or simply by seeing society around them lend credibility to these nut jobs and making them feel like they are somehow wrong.

Being gay/lesbian/bisexual/transexual/whatever else that isn’t 100% straight is NOT an illness, mental or physical, and it doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s not an abomination, it’s not a question or right or wrong. Why people are not-straight, how it happens, is completely irrelevant. It’s there. Deal with it. We’re not going away, we’re not gonna sit quiet, and we’re NOT gonna let bigoted, hateful, ignorant people tell us that we need treatment!

To Marcus and Michele Bachmann, and others like them, I respectfully suggest you go fuck yourself. In the arse. With a pickaxe.