A federal judge in Brazil has overturned a 1999 ban on psychologists using gay conversion therapy to “cure” gay people.
Anger erupted among the gay and LGBTQ communities in Brazil, according to the Guardian, after Judge Waldemar de Carvalho affirmed evangelical psychologist Rozangela Justino’s determination that gay people can be treated last week. His ruling overturns the 1999 ban on gay conversion therapy put in place by the Federal Council of Psychology.
“This decision is a big regression to the progressive conquests that the LBGT community had in recent decades,” leftist counselor David Miranda told the Guardian on Tuesday. “Like various countries in the world, Brazil is suffering a conservative wave.”
Justino doesn’t feel the same way, however. “I feel directed by God to help people who are homosexual,” Justino said in a 2009 interview, the Guardian reported.
“There is no way to cure what is not a disease,” São Paulo’s Federal Council of Psychology president Rogério Giannini told the Guardian. “It is not a serious, academic debate, it is a debate connected to religious or conservative positions.” The ruling “opens the dangerous possibility of the use of sexual reversion therapies” the Council of Psychology also said in a statement Tuesday according to BBC News.
Gifs and songs lyrics were turned into images of resistance on Twitter.
“That’s what happens in my country. People dying, hungry, the government killing the country with corruption, no education, no hospitals, no opportunities … and the authorities are wasting their time to announce that homosexuality is a sickness,” pop singer Anitta wrote on Instagram.
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