If, on the other hand, they specify just how hard and how long they tried; how determinedly they “fought the good fight”; how much self-martyrdom they engaged in; how much they prayed, fasted, and repented, read the Bible, guarded their thoughts, went to church etc.; how, as one Mormon writer put it, they knocked on God’ door till their hands were bloody; they’ll probably be told that that was the problem — that they tried to change by their own efforts instead of relying on the grace of God to do it for them.

Anything rather than admit that the “ex-gay” process is, at best, simply self-deception.

People making impossible claims, to know on intimate terms, “the mind of God’, who rule out reason and logic as “Satan’ talking, or say that demons the cause of homosexuality – all these people should be excluded from discourse at that point.

Bear this Salem Witch Trial reasoning in mind next time Exodus, and fundamentalist lawyers, Alliance Defense Fund, bully schools into enabling the harassment and intimidation of gay students with “Day of Truth’ campaigns, citing the First Amendment. Young people need protection from lunatics like this – and let’s hear professional organisations say this more clearly, too.