Around New England

Church’s Anti-Same-Sex-Attraction Program Criticized — Though It’s Still Legal

June 25, 2018

The pastor of an evangelical Protestant church in Laconia, New Hampshire is offering a faith-based 12-step program to overcome same-sex attraction and other “hurts, habits, and hangups,” but it has struck a nerve with some pro-homosexuality advocates.

New Hampshire recently enacted a law that prohibits so-called “conversion therapy” seeking to change sex orientation or gender identity, but it exempts churches. The law, House Bill 587, takes effect January 1, 2019.

Pastor Shawn Dutile, who leads LifeQuest Church in Laconia, said the new law wrongly assumes that attraction to members of the same sex is something everyone who experiences it wants to have and that it can’t be changed. 

“I think those assumptions are fundamentally false and can’t be proven,” Dutile told the Laconia Daily Sun.

New Hampshire state Representative Ed Butler (D-Hart’s Location), a co-sponsor of the anti-conversion-therapy bill, criticized the program, which is called Celebrate Recovery.

“It’s unfortunate there are religious teachings that tell us that we are somehow wrong in our identity,” Butler told the Laconia Daily Sun. “I know that that’s not correct. I know that I, as a gay man, am as healthy and productive a citizen as someone who is not gay or transgender or lesbian or bi-sexual or non-binary.”