FREEDOM TALK WITH PHIL
They Handed Sex Offenders a 1972 Joke and Called It Treatment
A satirical questionnaire, a state letterhead, and a sermon about “empathy” — the Minnesota syndicate’s idea of rehabilitation.
By Phillip C. Parrish | Freedom Talk with Phil | September 16, 2026
Liz Collin did not invent this. A Minnesotan handed her two photocopies and a sick feeling. Title on the page:
How Long Have You Been a Heterosexual?
Twenty questions. Minnesota Sex Offender Program letterhead. Offenders told to complete it. Then a state spokesperson, calm as a funeral director, explaining this is not shaming. This is empathy.
Here is the part they left in the grave. That worksheet is a fifty-four-year-old joke. The man who wrote it has been dead since 2003. He did not write it for men a Minnesota court already declared sexually dangerous. The program did not say that. The spokesperson did not say that. The pictures went out without the author’s name.
That omission is not a typo. That is how this state now thinks.
The nightclub pianist they turned into a treatment module
Martin Rochlin was born in the Bronx in 1928 to Russian immigrant parents. Piano prodigy. Juilliard. Master’s in music from Columbia by twenty. Judy Garland hired him as rehearsal coach on A Star Is Born. He worked rooms with Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Martha Raye, and his friend Billie Holiday.
Then he changed lives. Doctorate in psychology, USC, 1966. In 1972 he became the first openly gay clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. He fought to take homosexuality off the list of mental disorders. Colleagues later called him the patriarch of gay-affirmative therapy in Southern California. He died at home in Baywood Park on October 20, 2003. Seventy-five years old. Cancer.
In 1972 he wrote a short satire. Take every loaded question thrown at gay people — What caused it? Is it a phase? Have you tried the other thing? Why do you flaunt it? Would you want that for your children? — and fire the same questions at heterosexuals. Not a diagnosis. A wince. Feel how stupid the interrogation is.
Rochlin’s own point was simple. If you take the questions seriously you feel defensive, maybe ashamed. Now imagine it is not an exercise.
College workshops have passed that sheet around for two generations. Students who miss the satire get angry. That is how you know it is satire.
It is not a risk tool. It is not relapse prevention. It is not medicine for men who used children. It is a consciousness-raising gag from the Nixon years.
Minnesota laminated the gag, stamped MSOP on it, and billed the taxpayer for treatment.
What the syndicate said — and what it hid
The tipster called it brainwashing. Degrading heterosexuals. A social experiment in rehab clothing. That reader saw the fruit. They did not name the tree.
The spokesperson sang the official hymn:
The document is an exercise used in an MSOP treatment module… not meant to “shame heterosexuals” but to give MSOP clients insight into the attitudes, beliefs, and intrusive questions gay people often face from others and to teach empathy.
They described Rochlin’s purpose and refused his name, his year, and his genre. If you admit it is a 1972 parody, you have to explain why the parody belongs in a civil-commitment file. If you call it “our module,” you hide behind empathy and pray nobody owns a library card.
Liz Collin has been doing the work the metro desks will not touch — men parked in Shakopee, surgeries on the state dime, women inmates told to swallow the policy. She put the pages in the light. The rest of the job is naming what the pages actually are. Origin is not a footnote. Origin is the indictment.
Look who is taking the quiz
MSOP is not a seminar. It is Minnesota’s civil-commitment warehouse for men already finished with their criminal sentences whom a court still will not turn loose. Moose Lake. St. Peter. Hundreds of clients. A price tag that would fund a small school district. Almost nobody walks out the front door “cured.”
These are not sophomores discovering a theory. A large share of this population offended against women and children. Their deficit is not insufficient enthusiasm for a parade. It is a documented lack of empathy for victims, antisocial sexual thinking, and the habit of treating a human being as a prop.
Now open the state’s own question sixteen: the great majority of child molesters are heterosexual; do you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers?
In 1972 that line was a mirror held up to a bigot. In a room of committed sex offenders it is a permission slip. It invites the predator to move his crime off his own will and onto a demographic. Heterosexuality becomes the suspect. The man who did the thing becomes a student of systems.
Scripture is not confused about this. The problem is the heart that uses another person. You do not heal that heart by assigning the offender a joke about orientation and calling it care. You tell the truth, you restrain the dangerous, and you remember the child. Anything else is a sermon that leaves the wolf in the classroom.
Same machine. Different building.
This page hit because it is the Minnesota model in miniature.
The Duluth Model was born here. Violence in the home recast as a political poster — male power, female victim, always, everywhere. Grants, courts, and batterer programs built around the cartoon. Drunks, the mentally ill, women who hit, and couples who wreck each other without a theory did not fit the poster, so the poster ignored them. Ideology first. The broken person last.
The affirmative-action and DEI regime is the hiring desk of the same church. You do not have to define a woman. You have to recite the module. You do not have to cut reoffense. You have to print the newsletter. Assistant commissioners go blank under oath. Corrections committees park intact males in the women’s prison. A former inmate says the surgeries are being rushed so the men cannot be sent back. The department answers that medical details are private and “necessary” care is required. Necessary according to whom? The committee. Always the committee.
The fraud model is what happens when that religion meets a checkbook. If quality control is political compliance, the daycare shells, Medicaid mills, housing nonprofits, and equity vendors learn the liturgy and loot the treasury. They do not need results. They need the language. A heterosexuality quiz in a sex-offender facility is the small, almost comic version. Feeding public money to operators who can say “community” while the ledger burns is the large version.
Different buildings. Same syndicate habit: the sermon is the product. The victim is the decoration.
Three questions a free people would ask
A constitutional republic does not run treatment on vibes. It asks questions that can get a man fired.
Does this reduce sexual reoffense?
Who wrote it, and for what population?
Why is a satire sitting in a civil-commitment file?
They answered none of those. They answered with a press statement. The men in that program already treated victims as less than human. That is why a judge locked the door. You do not repair that by asking them how long they have been attracted to women.
Empathy for the wounded is the duty. Empathy as a brand is the dodge.
The Minnesota worth handing to your children
Intellectual rot does not always arrive as a riot. Sometimes it arrives as a clean photocopy and a spokesperson who can say “module” without laughing.
Moral decay does not always arrive as an open celebration of crime. Sometimes it arrives as the decision that the real problem with a sex offender is that he has not been chaperoned through the politics of appetite.
That is not the Minnesota farmers, veterans, parish families, and shopkeepers were promised. We were told this was the serious, midwestern, keep-your-word state. The brand sold. The product changed. We now run prisons by gender-identity committee, treatment programs by workshop handout, and human services by the honor system. Then the honor system is looted and the handout turns out to be a joke from 1972, and the machine calls you hateful for noticing.
I want the other Minnesota back. The one where a girl in a women’s prison is not a roommate for a man with a new medical file. The one where sex-offender treatment is about stopping the next victim, not grading the offender’s politics. The one where a church basement, a county shop, and a family farm are not ATM machines for a nonprofit that learned the right words. The one where truth is not a “module.”
Christ is still King whether a state agency puts it on letterhead or not. A man is still a man. A child is still owed protection. A government that cannot tell a satire from a treatment plan cannot be trusted with either.
Martin Rochlin wrote a joke so ordinary people would feel the sting of a stupid question. Minnesota’s government took the joke, forgot the author, forgot the century, forgot the population, and called it care.
That is not compassion. That is a syndicate that can no longer tell the difference between healing a man and re-educating him.
The worksheet is not an outlier. It is a mirror. And unlike Rochlin’s, this one is not funny.
We are going to keep holding it up until they put the joke back in the archive and put the wolves back where they belong.
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Phillip C. Parrish — phillip@parrish4mn.com
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Note: Source material includes the September 15, 2026 Alpha News / Liz Collin post and MSOP-branded worksheet photographs; the program spokesperson’s statement; published remembrances of Martin Rochlin (1928–2003); the long-circulating Heterosexual Questionnaire (c. 1972); MSOP public program data; and reporting on MCF-Shakopee placement policy. The questionnaire is a satirical role-reversal exercise. It was not written as a sex-offender treatment instrument.