Tag Archives: conversion therapy

Protecting The First Amendement

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On Tuesday, The Daily Signal posted an article about a recent Supreme Court case involving free speech.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court held in an 8-1 ruling on Tuesday that a Colorado ban on “conversion therapy” for counselors unlawfully regulates speech and is viewpoint discrimination. 

Justice Neil Gorsuch, a President Donald Trump appointee, issued the majority opinion. Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—both appointees of President Barack Obama—issued concurring opinions. 

Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—an appointee of President Joe Biden—dissented. 

The Chiles v. Salazar case involved a challenge to a Colorado law that allows licensed counselors to address issues of sexuality and gender only from the state’s approved perspective. 

Kaley Chiles, a Christian licensed counselor in Colorado Springs, used what is called “talk therapy” with patients who voluntarily sought her help. These included minors who said they struggled with issues related to sexuality and gender, and who wanted their behavior to be in accordance with their sex and their religious faith.

In the majority opinion, Gorsuch wrote the state law “prescribes what views she [Chiles] may and may not express.”

“As applied to Ms. Chiles, Colorado’s law regulates the content of her speech and goes further to prescribe what views she may and may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.

The article concludes:

The opinion stated that the government cannot label speech as conduct, as in Chiles’ case it constituted treatment. The opinion added that the “First Amendment is no word game.”

“The fact that the state’s viewpoint regulation falls only on licensed health care professionals does not change the equation,” Gorsuch wrote.

This case deals with an attack on counselors who hold a Biblical worldview on sexuality. In many cases homosexuality can be related to childhood trauma or family dysfunction. If a homosexual person wants to leave that lifestyle, they should be free to find a counselor who will help them along that journey. If an adolescent is confused about their gender identify and his parents want to find a counselor who will help them walk through adolescence with the gender he was born with, the parents should be free to find that counselor. Some of the things counselors are telling our teenage children are not helpful in the long run.

Banning Prayer?

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Yesterday PJ Media posted an article about a move by lawmakers in Britain and Australia to ban ‘conversion therapy’–the practice of helping homosexuals who want to leave that lifestyle. The laws being considered may criminalize such common practices as preaching, counseling, and even prayer. From a Biblical perspective, homosexual behavior is a sin. A homosexual in the church should be free to seek change if that is his desire. As long as no one is forcing change on the person, I don’t see how helping a person leave that lifestyle can be made illegal. However, Britain (I don’t know about Australia) does not have a First Amendment that protects free speech, so that could get interesting.

The article notes:

Arthur Goldberg, founder of the therapy referral service Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) objected to the term. “Conversion therapy is not even a term of art. It’s a misnomer. It’s a pejorative term that talks about emotional trauma and physical trauma,” he told PJ Media. JONAH did not recommend or carry out so-called “conversion therapy.” It gave people “references for therapy for underlying issues which may result in same-sex attraction,” yet a New Jersey judge shut it down on false pretenses.

As ex-gay leader Christopher Doyle explains in his book The War on Psychotherapy, “One of the strategies that far-left advocacy and gay activist organizations use to smear professional psychotherapists assisting clients distressed by sexual and gender identity conflicts is to intentionally conflate professional therapy with religious practice and/or unlicensed, unregulated counseling. They do this by labeling all efforts—therapeutic, religious, or otherwise—to help clients distressed by sexual and gender identity conflicts [as] ‘conversion therapy.’”

The tragic situation in England demonstrates that LGBT activists will not stop at banning “conversion therapy” in the talk therapy setting. Some are explicitly targeting “the pernicious power of prayer.” Christians — and free thinkers who value the ability to dispute the LGBT orthodoxy — need to be on our guard.

It is interesting to me that the group opposing this would include banning prayer. I take that as an acknowledgement that prayer works.