Mikolot Mayim Rabbim

Mobile phone “app stores” have become the new sociocultural battlegrounds. Apple, which owns and operates its iTunes application and media stores, maintains relatively tight guidelines as to what may or may not be sold through their platform. Recently, they banned an application that purported to help homosexuals become heterosexual, through what is known as reparative therapy.

Without taking any particular stand on reparative therapy (about which I should share some ramblings in the future), I found the following comment on a technology web site [slashdot.org], which strongly leans left socially, very much on the mark:

Thanks for injecting some rationality here. This is the thing I can’t understand: if someone wants to change their gender, that’s something that’s seen as acceptable, even if a bit unusual. If someone wants to change their sexual orientation, it’s presumed that someone with an agenda must have brainwashed that person and the community that shares their (original) orientation takes offence. No-one should be pushing this sort of thing on anybody, but I can’t understand why it’s an issue for such software to exist.

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