Gay ‘conversion therapy’ faces a legal fight in New Jersey case

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit over whether gay “conversion therapy” violates state consumer-fraud law is set to begin Tuesday in New Jersey.

Lawyers for four gay men and two of their mothers will tell a jury that their clients were tricked into believing counselors with Jews Offering Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) could relieve the men of their same-sex attraction.

Instead, the men and their mothers suffered emotional distress as a result of the therapy — which also failed to alter their gay orientation — in violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.

“Conversion therapy is fraud, plain and simple,” said David Dinielli, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is part of the legal team representing the plaintiffs in Ferguson v. JONAH.

The lawsuit has national implications: The District of Columbia and three states — including New Jersey — have banned reparative or conversion therapy for teens and children, due to concerns that it is harmful and ineffective. The Illinois legislature passed a ban Friday, and more than a dozen states are considering similar bills.

Federal legislation to ban conversion therapy for all people, nationwide, has been introduced in Congress.

“Love doesn’t need a cure,” said Rep. Ted W. Lieu, the California Democrat who introduced the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act in May.

Opponents of the bans say the therapy has been misrepresented for political purposes and the New Jersey case was launched to shut down debate on the issue of fluidity and change in sexuality. They also argue the bans represent an unwarranted intrusion into the relationship between a patient and his therapist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wants to make this a test case, but it is “misusing the civil litigation system for essentially a political purpose,” said Maggie Gallagher, chairman of the board of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF). “There are lots and lots of people who have found this counseling helpful, and so the claim that it’s fraudulent is going to be fairly easy to overturn.”

The FCDF’s founder, Charles S. LiMandri, is a lead attorney for the defendants, which include the religious nonprofit group JONAH, its cofounder Arthur Goldberg, and affiliated counselor Alan Downing.

JONAH, named for the biblical prophet who fled God but repented and returned to fulfill his mission in Nineveh, was founded in 1998 to help Jews and others to address sexual issues, including “the false identity of homosexuality,” JONAH co-founder Elaine Silodor Berk said in an open letter issued a few years ago.

“Anything that the Torah forbids, the human being is able to control,” she wrote, citing the words of Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky.

The JONAH defendants are “not your typical target” in consumer fraud, Mr. LiMandri told the Associated Press in February. “They’re just trying to help people who are in distress get help if they want it.”

Defense briefs note that JONAH clients sign consent forms with a no-guarantee clause.

Mr. Dinielli, who spoke at Mr. Lieu’s May 19 press conference on his bill, said the four male plaintiffs — Michael Ferguson, Benjamin Unger, Sheldon Bruck and Chaim Levin — were raised in religious families “and were desperate to change from gay to straight.” But they were misled by JONAH and its affiliated therapists, who said “conversion therapy could heal them.”

Nothing in the therapy worked, including group sessions in which one client was told to hit an effigy of his mother with a tennis racket and a “sleep-away camp” where clients were encouraged to reenact traumatic events from their past “to reclaim their supposedly lost masculinity,” Mr. Dinielli said.

New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter F. Bariso Jr. already has ruled that homosexuality cannot be described as a mental illness, disease or disorder, and lawyers for JONAH may not present certain people as experts or cite “success” statistics because JONAH has not tracked or maintained records on outcomes.

The jury will hear testimony on whether the defendants acted unlawfully, whether plaintiffs had ascertainable losses, and whether there was a causal relationship between the unlawful conduct and ascertainable loss. The case could involve constitutionally protected religious liberties if the jury decides that JONAH viewed homosexuality as “disordered” due to its religious views, Judge Bariso wrote.

The trial is expected to last for several weeks.