uk politician wants to pray your gay away…

Movements who think they can "pray away the gay demons" aren't an exclusively American phenomenon.

The United States has a unique place in the developed world. It's the most religiously devout of virtually every other industrialized nation and its citizens are the least likely to accept the merits of modern biology among its international peers. In fact, much of the South and Midwest is often stereotyped as a land of televangelists where people still resort to exorcisms and street corner proselytizing.

Surely, you wouldn't see anything even remotely like that that in the UK, where some 80% of citizens accept the theory of evolution and about 43% say they never even attend religious services, right? Well, according to The Guardian, Philippa Stroud, a big shot of the British conservative party, organized sessions in which she and her followers would "pray away the gay" much like we'd expect from American fundamentalists who think they can somehow "cure" homosexuality.

Here's the dilemma with homosexuality. We don't really know what causes it and scientific investigations into the topic have come up with a number of explanations, many of which show how homosexuality could be a manifestation of selective pressures, but all of them falling short to unravel the entire story since sexuality is a far more complex topic than many people believe. Evolution complicates things quite a bit because instead of producing only one kind of behavior, or only one type of sexuality, it produces a wide spectrum of variations.

From asexuality, to hermaphrodites, to creatures able to fertilize themselves, to a number of rather bizarre and brutal mating habits, nature can get very creative when it comes to sustaining life. All that matters is how efficiently a species can reproduce. In this context, homosexuality is just another variation seen in roughly 3% of the population or so, not the nefarious demonic infestations that Stroud and those who share her religious views seem to think it is as they fervently try to pray people's gay away…

"She wanted me to know all my thinking was wrong, I was wrong and the so-called demons inside me were wrong. The session ended with her and others praying over me, calling out the demons. She really believed things like homosexuality, transsexualism and addiction could be fixed just by prayer, all in the name of Jesus."

Several other members of Stroud's church confirm this account, saying that she thought every vice or behavior with which she disagreed was a symptom of demonic possessions. And it's not just former church members venting their frustrations. Stroud wrote a book about how to tell whether someone is demonically possessed, something she didn't acknowledge in her rebuttal to the Guardian article which mentioned it.

If anything, she might have an uncomfortable closeness with Graham Dow, an accomplished bishop of her denomination of Christianity whose views are detailed in the previous link and are just as incoherently absurd as anything you might expect to come out of Pat Robertson's mouth on the subject of sexuality, and her political career may be hauntingly close to mirroring that of Bobby Jindal.

Having a track record of looking for demons in people who fall short of your standards should be a major no-no when you write legislation affecting social policies since the last time laws considered the degree of a citizen's demonic infestation was during the Inquisitions…