Jon Stewart takes on Rick Perry and Texas GOP with ‘Gaywatch’

Texas’ GOP recently adopted a platform that included, among other things, an endorsement of a controversial therapy that purports to “fix” gay people, known as gay conversion therapy.

Naturally, Jon Stewart had something to say about that on Tuesday’s episode of “The Daily Show.”

“The state that can’t even go a week without an oil pipeline spewing thinks it’s the gays that need repairing?” he said.

But as clinical psychologist Joseph Nicolosi said on CNN, “We are trying to bring out the heterosexuality in you.”

Stewart picked apart various aspects of the therapy, which according to the Advocate, include threatening to hook the patient’s genitals up to electrodes and putting their feces in a bottle, to be sniffed whenever the patient felt attracted to another man.

Despite dismissing feces in a bottle as the “worst Jersey Shore souvenir ever,” Stewart went on to say that the therapy had been discredited. In 1998, the American Psychiatric Assn. issued a position statement which said it opposed “any psychiatric treatment, such as ‘reparative’ or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation.”

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Rick Perry sought to clarify his party’s position on the matter by making repeated comparisons between being gay and being an alcoholic.

While we can’t publish Stewart’s description of what exactly gay men on a bender would be like, you can watch the full video of the segment here.

And Stewart did have advice for the Texans who do not have health insurance, “Maybe it’s time to tell them that your arthritis is making you gay.”