Gay ‘conversion therapy’ works, insists Israel’s education minister Rafael Peretz
- Rabbi blasted over claim he converted gay people, which prompted call from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding ‘clarification’
Israel’s education minister voiced support on Saturday for so-called gay conversion therapy, drawing disapproval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government’s religious-right-wing tilt has worried liberals at home and backers abroad.
Conversion therapy, an attempt to alter sexual orientation through psychological, spiritual and, in extreme cases, physical means, has been widely discredited in the West and condemned by professional health associations such as the American Medical Association as potentially harmful.
Rafael Peretz, an Orthodox rabbi and head of the ultranationalist United Right party who assumed the education portfolio in the Netanyahu-led coalition last month, said in a television interview he believed conversion therapy can work.
“I have a very deep familiarity with the issue of education, and I have also done this,” he told Israel’s Channel 12 TV.
Giving an example of a gay person he said he had tended to, Peretz said: “First of all, I embraced him. I said very warm things to him. I told him, ‘Let’s think. Let’s study and let’s contemplate.’ The objective is first of all for him to know himself well … and then he will decide.”