From Will Saletan over at Slate:

But what do you do when the distress is rooted in the client’s deeply held values? One therapist, answering the survey, said it might be OK to help a patient try to modify her feelings if she wanted to stay married. Another argued that the “client ultimately knows best and may have deep religious beliefs that influence them enormously.” A third wrote that if the patient “had a strong faith, then working to help the person accept their feelings but manage them appropriately may be the best approach if [the] person felt they would lose God and therefore their life was not worth living.”

Would you tell such a patient that her understanding of God is wrong? Are you sure her attraction to women is more fundamental than her religious beliefs? Is peace with the lesbian part of her sexuality worth the destruction of her family or her faith? And most important: Do you think you can answer these questions without knowing more about her?

Michael King, the professor who led the British study, tries to do just that. When gay people seek therapeutic escape, he argues, “Mental health practitioners and society at large must help them to confront prejudice in themselves and in others.”

Help them confront prejudice in themselves? Isn’t that just the substitution of one inner war, one purification quest, for another?

He concludes:

That’s the thing about therapy: It’s about real people, and they don’t necessarily fit your grand theory or mine. Conservative evangelists are arrogant and wrong to assume that therapy can alter a patient’s sexuality. Don’t repeat their mistake by insisting that it can’t.