Around 7,000 delegates at the Texas Republican Party’s convention ratified a new platform that also included moves to the right on other policies including immigration. US states New Jersey and California ban licensed therapists from conducting conversion therapy on young people, and the new policy is thought to be partly a response to that move. Republicans supporting the policy have said that it is intended to give potential patients the freedom to choose. The policy won a vote on Thursday and was confirmed in another vote on Saturday. The counselling has been condemned by health organisations including the American Psychological Association. Defining homosexuality as an illness is an attempt to discredit growing social acceptance, the association has said, and can harm those that undergo it.

I do know that “reparative therapy’ is widely acknowledged to be ineffective and sometimes harmful. In my view this is because homosexuality is not a “choice” but probably a biologically-based tendency. Since I’m a hard determinist and don’t believe in “free choice” anyway, there are only two sources of homosexuality, as there are for all behaviors: genes and environment (the latter includes both nongenetic effects on physiology, like developmental influences, and external influences mediated through interactions with other people). All the gay people I’ve known have said the same thing: from a very early age they felt inexorably attracted to people of the same sex. To me, that bespeaks an underlying biochemical or genetic basis and not some kind of “choice” produced by social influences.

The idea that being gay is a choice comes largely from religions’s stupid insistence on libertarian free will as well as Biblical proscriptions against homosexuality. What I don’t know, and wonder about, is whether gay people who really want to change their sexual orientation will be unable to find help in New Jersey and California. One the one hand it seems that people should at least be able to talk about such feelings, but on the other I recognize that perhaps it is a useless and harmful endeavor to do anything more than talk about it. After all, if reparative therapy doesn’t work, then trying it violates the oath of “first doing no harm.”

If you’re anything but completely blind in America, you’ll know that this country is moving inexorably towards more rights for gays, and that includes marriage. And really, the only opposition to this movement is based on conservative religion, as there’s no convincing reason why gay couples can’t have the same privileges as straight ones. Will it “erode traditional male/female couples”? I wouldn’t care if it did, but I doubt it anyway since how you couple seems to me determined by genes and internal environment rather than what you see around you in society. And those straight couples that dissolve because one member decides he or she is gay, well, those shouldn’t have been couples in the first place.

By making such a stupid and retrograde statement, the Republicans are ensuring themselves a loss in next year’s elections, and wedding themselves to the intolerant past rather than a progressive future.