Last week Amazon celebrated another record Prime Day, its two-day sale event with boffo offers that generate lots of transactions and revenues.
But if you are a troubled soul looking for advice and counsel through a certain genre of books, you were out of luck.
In yet another example of Big Tech’s efforts to act as the Speech and Ideology Police, the giant online retailer has banned from its site books that address homosexuality – namely, how to leave the lifestyle, if you so desire. Titles specifically prohibited are those by the Catholic psychologist considered the “father” of study and guidance in what LGBT advocates disparagingly call “conversion therapy” – the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi – as well as books written by individuals who have actually abandoned the gay way of life, by choice.
According to reports in pro-gay publications, the move was the result of a lobbying effort by a British LGBT activist named Rojo Alan, who said he spend three months pleading with Amazon to remove the titles. He used social media to apply pressure by enlisting others in his cause and getting fellow advocates to bombard the books with bad reviews.
“I had been working on getting these books pulled,” Alan told Pink News in the U.K. “I contacted Amazon regularly to speak to them about the books, about how unethical they are.”
Were it not for the exceedingly strident efforts of LGBT absolutists – like Alan and the Human Rights Campaign – to normalize the homosexual lifestyle and carve out special rights for them, the Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter could be dynamic vehicles for speech rights and the open exchange of ideas.
Instead they cave in to the bullying.
Counseling individuals who do not want same-sex attractions and seek help for it is not new, nor is it extreme, as LGBT advocates want everyone to believe. But opponents of such treatment have succeeded in demonizing it, even getting it criminalized in some states.
One man who once lived in the gay lifestyle, Joe Dallas (who has also had his books banned by Amazon), counsels those who want to change through his Christian ministry. He criticizes psychological quackery that attempts to “convert” gays with efforts to get them to behave more masculine and participate in “manly” endeavors like sports, such as those depicted in the recent film Boy Erased.
“You’ll see some bizarre ‘treatment’ methods in Boy Erased. People are ordered to dress, sit, walk, and carry themselves a certain way. Behavior is regimented. Participants sit in a chair to be yelled at and shamed by the leaders. Evidently, dunking a person underwater (not as a baptism) is part of the cure as well,” Dallas wrote. “Like I said, bizarre – also unrecognizable to any of us who do this kind of work.”
Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly) LGBT lifestyle proponents have tarred all counselors with this extremism label. Dallas explains his non-coercive approach:
While we never do, nor have, referred to it as “Conversion Therapy”, I and others have for decades had the honor of consulting with and walking alongside people who are same-sex attracted, want their behavior to match their beliefs more than their desires, hope to (in many cases) preserve their marriages and (in other cases) desire to explore their potential for heterosexual response.
We don’t yell at people. We don’t hit them with Bibles. We don’t (as some people amazingly charge) offer shock treatment as a bonus. We take Biblical principles and help people apply them to all aspects of their lives, sexuality included. We talk, we listen, we advise.
Seems that would be reasonable to most people, except for those who militantly advocate their alternative lifestyle and who believe they must stamp out all views that conflict with it. And the Big Tech companies like Amazon stand with the speech jackboots.
Meanwhile, as Daily Wire pointed out, the massive retailer – which killed former book superstore Borders and may be about to wipe out its last major competitor, Barnes and Noble – stills sells titles that promote suicide. You can also buy Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as well as pro-Stalinist works and those that incite global Jihad against non-Muslims on Amazon. You don’t hear anyone pushing for the removal of those volumes that push destructive (and often anti-homosexual) ideologies.
You would think those books remain on Amazon because the company reasons that people can choose whether or not they buy them. Unfortunately that logic does not apply with regard to the LGBT movement and its anti-Christian passions.
“Amazon’s decision is no surprise since today’s culture is caving to the goals of the LGBTQ political movement, which have always included the silencing [of] any disapproval of homosexuality,” Dallas told The Christian Post. “It would be awfully naive to think it will stop here. First, the LGBTQ movement will convince the culture that telling homosexuals they can change is dangerous. Then they’ll convince the culture that calling homosexuality a sin is dangerous. Then the government will tell the pastors of America what they can or cannot say on this subject, and the culture will approve.”
And Amazon’s size and monopolistic dominance over bookselling will lead the way.