England and Manchester United footballer George Best was well known for his wit, even when he was down on his luck. Asked what happened to all his money, the former football star shrugged and replied: “I spent an awful lot on booze, birds and cars. And the rest, I just squandered.” 

Best knew a lot about frittering money away. So does the state government of Johor, apparently.  

Consider its latest idea of salvation for its “sinners.” Early this week, Fared Khalid, the chairman of the state’s religious affairs committee announced that Johor would soon set up a “rehabilitation centre” for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) practitioners. 

In what would be “a first of its kind” for the country, the centre would “rehabilitate” same-sex partners for “going against” Islamic teachings.

Meanwhile, assets were “being prepared” while there would be “dormitories” for both “male and female” trainees. The facility would be up and running by July. 

Mercifully, no estimates of the money required for such an experiment were mentioned. What exactly constituted the sinister sounding “rehabilitation” wasn’t specified either. In truth, few details were proffered.

Indeed, it’s hard to know what they might be because no known case of spontaneous “conversion” has ever been documented. 

It’s not because of a want of trying. Alan Turing was a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and code breaker who may have been primarily responsible for the Allies’ victory in World War 2. It was Turing who headed a team that cracked the German’s famously unbreakable Enigma code. It allowed the Allies to dominate the seas by taking out German U-boats that had been decimating Allied merchant shipping.

You’d think that would have deserved a medal, if not a peerage, at the very least. Nope. The British government actually prosecuted Turing for being homosexual. Under a klieg-glare of publicity, he was found guilty and forced to undergo hormonal castration. Not unreasonably, it precipitated his suicide in 1954. 

In 2004, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a seriously belated but no less public apology on behalf of the British government to Turing’s family for “the appalling way he was treated.” 

Whether this cuts any ice with the fire and brimstone types is moot. Ditto the Christian right wing who are all for castration, hormonal or otherwise. 

But I digress. 

When in clerical garb, our politicians aren’t especially well read. OK, “clerical garb” wasn’t necessary. It’s also likely they haven’t heard of Turing, nor one suspects, could they have cared less. 

They might, at least, then consider the following facts. 

Homosexuality, for instance, isn’t “unnatural.” A 2019 paper in Nature, for example, observed such behaviour across 1,500 species. 

Finally, conversion therapy – trying to fix someone’s sexual orientation or identity – has never succeeded. Not once. The methods used have ranged from the religious to the grotesque – counselling, religious intervention, surgical or hormonal castration, electroshock therapy and nausea-inducing drugs, to name but a few. In short, nothing’s worked or seen to have worked. 

Instead of re-confirming that the earth does, indeed, travel around the sun,  Johor would do well to save its time and money for more useful things. 

ENDS