JournoList

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When the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Christians in Rome, he probably had no idea that one small section of it, Romans 13:1-5, would become the go-to biblical passage for right-wing politicians in the distant land of Texas in 2000 years or so.

But in recent months, conservative politicians have dusted off this passage for a mind-boggling range of purposes: fending off criticism, complaining about undocumented immigrants, even attacking the current Texas House speaker, Joe Straus. And some of these uses — or perhaps misuses — might surprise the apostle himself.

“Imagine a version of the contemporary web laid out before us, like Gibson’s cyberspace or Stephenson’s Metaverse. Picture an endless plateau, planed flat, with aloof skyscrapers: a gleaming city in draft, a Dubai dispersed. That giant #1 on the horizon is YouTube, that tower of shipping boxes, Amazon. Smaller structures suggest modest websites: businesses, blogs, and more. The buildings roll away, as regular as dominoes, around the horizon. Occasional fissures, venting steam, allude to the catacombs of the dark web.

In this vision, your browser is a pod. You punch in coordinates and zip around at light-speed, passing smoothly through other browsers, whose hulls turn transparent at your approach, as in the Metaverse. Hyperlinks are wormholes: tunnels of swirling light.

One wormhole wings your pod across a digital Atlantic and deposits you in front of a quaint green building on the banks of a pixelated river. Other quaint buildings surround it but are spaced apart to accommodate pods. (It’s as if someone clicked on the edge of a city and dragged it, distending space itself.) You are now at the online shop for Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. It’s never closed, and the door is decoration: you float cleanly through it.”

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US cities lead action to ban anti-LGBT ‘conversion therapy’

“When you are forcing somebody to repress who they really are, or at least the discovery of who they are – that’s not freedom, that’s not the Gospel,” Dylan Gunnels, a LGBT rights advocate and survivor of ‘conversion therapy’ told openDemocracy.

Last month, Gunnels shared his experience with the city council of Columbia, South Carolina, where he lives. He described his own “psychological trauma” after enduring efforts to change his sexuality, saying: “Science shows [it] is more harmful than helpful.”

South Carolina's state capital is a recent example of a trend that has spread across the US – at least 90 cities, counties and other municipalities have now taken action against controversial ’conversion therapy’ practices, which attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Almost half (43) have done so since 2019.

Columbia’s city council passed initial approval on 4 May for an ordinance making it illegal “to provide conversion therapy or reparative therapy to a minor […] if the provider receives compensation for such services”. It was passed in a final vote on 16 June.

These practices have been condemned by dozens of medical associations globally and are “really terrible, discredited and harmful”, said Logan Casey, senior policy researcher at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) civil society group, based in Colorado.

Casey attributes action against ’conversion therapy’ at the local level to “a growth in public awareness”. It “really flips a switch for folks that this is still a contemporary issue, and something needs to be done about it to protect children,” he said.

“It breaks my heart to understand that a young person would be subjected to such things,” Columbia council member Tameika Isaac Devine told openDemocracy.