Rising Tory star Philippa Stroud ran prayer sessions to 'cure' gay people.
Philippa Stroud, the head of the Centre for Social Justice, which is credited with having formulated as many as 70 of the Tory party's policies, founded a church that tried to "cure" gay people by driving out their "demons" through prayer.
And yet it is said that this woman has heavily influenced David Cameron's thoughts on subjects such as the family.
This should be enough to make people wonder if the Tory party actually have changed at all. At the beginning of last month we had Chris Grayling secretly taped suggesting that people who ran bed and breakfasts in their homes should "have the right" to turn away homosexual couples. And now we hear this.Abi, a teenage girl with transsexual issues, was sent to the church by her parents, who were evangelical Christians. "Convinced I was demonically possessed, my parents made the decision to move to Bedford, because of this woman [Stroud] who had come back from Hong Kong and had the power to set me free," Abi told the Observer.
"She wanted me to know all my thinking was wrong, I was wrong and the so-called demons inside me were wrong. The session ended with her and others praying over me, calling out the demons. She really believed things like homosexuality, transsexualism and addiction could be fixed just by prayer, all in the name of Jesus."
"T" said he moved to Bedford because he believed the church could help him stop having homosexual thoughts. "I was trying to convince myself that a change was possible but, at the same time, a part of me didn't believe it was possible," he said. "The church's approach was not that it was sinful to be homosexual but that it was sinful to act on it. The aim is to get a person to a position where they don't have these sinful emotions and thoughts."
"T" said it was only after he "took a break" from the church that his depression lifted. "It was the church's attitude towards my sexuality that was the issue," he recalled.
David Cameron is very good at portraying the Tory party as some kind of new happy-clappy all inclusive party that has banished the kind of thinking that the Tories embraced when they passed Section 28. But, when one scratches beneath the surface, one finds that there are many examples which give a clear indication that their thinking hasn't actually changed at all and that they remain as bigoted and narrow minded as they always were.
Phillipa Stroud is merely the latest example in a long list of warnings.
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