Turns out you really can buy anything with your Amazon Prime account: including hatred (shipping still free).
Memoirist Damian Barr, told BuzzFeed News that the online bookseller is “promoting hatred, abuse, and self-harm by featuring guides for the ‘treatment’ of homosexuality. His account in Maggie and Me of abuse while growing up gay in Scotland in the 1980s earned him awards and international acclaim.
Buzzfeed reported: There are numerous examples of such books on Amazon that advocate so-called reparative therapy, including A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, Healing Homosexuality, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, and How a Gay Boy Became a Straight Man. “Amazon has a responsibility to their customers to not profit from or promote self-harm and hate crimes,” said Barr. “If you read the comments below you can clearly see the book had caused harm to parents as well as children. Amazon is profiting from the pain of the people affected by this book.”
Back in December the non-profit Proof Wins Out (PWO) set out to boycott Apple, Google, and Amazon for continuing to carry an app encouraging users that they can “recover” from same-sex attractions through prayer.
Apple capitulated instantly while Amazon and Google lollygagged and now this.
In an open letter in December, TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen said , “Every respected medical and mental health organization in the world considers attempts to change sexual orientation potentially dangerous. The American Psychiatric Association says that sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) can lead to “anxiety, depression, and self-destructive behavior”, including suicide.
The American Psychological Association says, “There is simply no sufficiently scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed. Such ‘therapy’ is considered so detrimental that fourteen states and the District of Colombia ban practicing it on minors.”
The app was targeting LGBTQ young people in order “to change [them] from gay-to-straight through prayer and therapy.”
“Every minute this heinous product is available on these platforms, the potential exists for it to harm LGBT youth,” Besen said then. “We demand that Google and Amazon immediately stop selling and promoting this app, which dehumanizes LGBT people.”
That means the books too Amazon.
