Amazon Sells How-To Suicide Books But Yanks Gay Reparative Therapy Guides

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SEATTLE (ChurchMilitant.com) - Online retail giant Amazon has prompted charges of censorship and hypocrisy for banning the sale of gay reparative therapy books while continuing to sell such works as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, the notoriously anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, works by infamous Nazi Joseph Goebbels, the book mass-killer Timothy McVeigh had on his possession when he orchestrated the Oklahoma City bombing and books on how to commit suicide.

Last week, Amazon capitulated to a petition organized by a gay advocate identified as Sky Gray, elsewhere going by the name Rojo Alan from Peterborough, England. Alan's petition resulted in the company refusing to sell books on gay conversion therapy.

These works, many of them written by Joseph Nicolosi, offer therapeutic advice on how to counter same-sex attractions.

Among the claims Alan made against conversion therapy is the statement, "Conversion therapy is destructive in all ways."

Refutation from past homosexual-lifestyle practitioners was swift, beginning with a counter-petition announced on the Change.org website.

"We demand an immediate reversal of this decision and the restoration of these and all other books that were removed on this topic," reads the petition.

Nicolosi, a Catholic clinical psychologist, wrote books on his treatment of patients seeking to stem their same-sex attractions.

In an essay published by The Heritage Foundation's The Daily Signal, Nicolosi's son, Joseph Nicolosi Jr., wrote:

This week's book ban by Amazon and radical LGBT activists reveals the blatant hypocrisy of today's leaders of the LGBT movement: They celebrate exploration of every kind of sexuality they can imagine, unless that exploration happens to lead an individual toward a traditional, heterosexual lifestyle. That sort of exploration, of course, must be banned.

He continued:

From 1981 until his death in 2017, my father was the driving force behind reparative therapy. He invented, refined, and used this innovative counseling method to help thousands of men overcome the effects of sexual abuse and other deep-seated childhood traumas.

These men told my father that his scientifically sound practices helped re-orient their sexuality away from obsessions with pornography, and helped them reduce their unwanted same-sex attractions.

The books Amazon banned are the continuation of my father's legacy and of the changes that can take place through his methods. The books have hundreds of endorsements, from typical readers to past presidents of the American Psychological Association.

Nicolosi added later in the essay:

Conversion therapy is broad, ill-defined, has no ethics code, no governing body, and is typically practiced by unlicensed individuals. My father had nothing to do with these or any similar practices, and as a therapist myself, I wholeheartedly condemn such a concept.

What my father did do was use his psychological training and his Judeo-Christian worldview to help men overcome traumas that they—and he—believed were leading them into a life that did not reflect the men they were truly designed by their creator to be.

Writing for The Federalist, Glenn T. Stanton, director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family, declares Amazon's book-banning is akin to a "new fundamentalism."

He continues:

But the real "sin" of those who offer such help—a number of other such authors have since had their books banned by Amazon as well—is that they don't encourage the clients to get all happy about being gay. As anyone knows today, not being all-in for all things gay will not be tolerated. The dissenter will be punished, and severely. Those books, those very ideas will be judged intolerable, and made unavailable to anyone. ...

Understand that the larger topic here is not the ban on owning a book about a particular kind of counseling or self-help. And it's not just about wholesale prohibition on one's opposition to homosexuality. It is all about not being all-in on the thing itself. Mere disagreement is not allowed. ...

The gay community, a supposedly oppressed and marginalized group, wields an extravagant amount of power today, and does so without regard for the rights of anyone who chooses to not support them. When you can dictate what books someone can have access to, that's power. When you do so and get no blow-back by hardly anyone (if anyone at all) in the mainstream press that claims undying commitment to the secular sacredness of the freedom to read, that is a frightening amount of power.

Daren Mehl, founder of Voice of the Voiceless, an organization established "to defend the rights of former homosexuals, individuals with unwanted same-sex attraction, and their families," notes that Amazon currently offers for sale "at least 10 books that facilitate suicide."

He points out the irony between this reality and claims gay conversion therapies spur increased suicides among those undertaking such practices to alleviate same-sex attraction.

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