Conversion Therapy Now Has Constitutional Cover
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that conversion therapy is free speech. I take a closer look at the groups who want to defend malpractice and why the Supreme Court got it wrong.
On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors amounts to government censorship.
If you read only the headlines, you might think this was a straightforward free speech case, but it is far from it. This Supreme Court case is truly about the legal facilitation of homophobia and transphobia, threatens the safety of LGBTQ youth across the country, and fundamentally misunderstands what psychotherapy actually is.
I have previously blogged about “conversion therapy” as a destructive, systematic social influence program aimed at attempting to make those who are LGBT act straight or behave cisnormatively.
My former cult, the Moonies, had a program. So do Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Aesthetic Realism, and dozens of other groups that fulfill my BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™.
Even the biggest group in the US, called Exodus, disbanded because they realized that it doesn’t work and, in fact, is traumatizing. Some of these programs are like boot camps. If an individual therapist is homophobic and the child’s parents hire that person to “fix” their child, it isn’t therapy. It’s an abuse of power, and I believe the therapist should be brought before an ethics board.
I am reminded of a woman I know who was recruited into Opus Dei as a minor. As she deteriorated and wanted to leave, she was sent to a psychiatrist who was in the cult.
That psychiatrist gave her medication, but never encouraged her to think for herself or empowered her to make her own decisions. I focus on Opus Dei because it was this cult that helped fund the Federalist Society, which put the 6 extreme justices on the Bench.
Moving back to the case at hand, we turn to the recent Chiles v. Salazar, brought by Kaley Chiles, a Christian counselor in Colorado, and represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The case argues that Colorado’s 2019 law, which prohibits licensed mental health professionals from practicing conversion therapy on minors, violated her First Amendment right to free speech.
The Supreme Court agreed, finding that because the law allows counselors to provide clinical support to a minor undergoing gender transition but prohibits counseling aimed at changing a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity, it discriminates based on “viewpoint.”
This is an absolute mischaracterization of what clinical practice is and how it differs from speech in the public square.
The Asymmetry Argument
Essentially, the Supreme Court majority focused on what they called an asymmetry in Colorado’s law.
The existing statute prohibited treatment that “attempts or purports to change” a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity (i.e., conversion therapy), but it did not restrict treatment that assists minors exploring their identity or undergoing gender transition.
To the Court, this asymmetry meant the law was taking sides, as though one viewpoint were permitted, and another was suppressed. That, the majority decided, constituted viewpoint discrimination, a constitutionally protected right.
Even Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, who are among the Court’s more liberal members, joined the majority. It is shocking to me that these Justices could vote for this decision.
Only Justice Jackson dissented. Her opinion cut to the heart of the issue, and in her dissent, she noted that this is not a debate between equals in a public forum. This is a licensed professional providing clinical treatment to a vulnerable minor patient.
Jackson wrote that conversion therapy can cause “lasting psychological harm” and that states have historically had broad authority to regulate what medical professionals can and cannot do with their patients.
She noted that Chiles, the Christian counselor, “is not speaking in the ether; she is providing therapy to minors as a licensed healthcare professional.”
Justice Jackson was the only one in the Supreme Court who got it right.
The Research Weaponized and Mischaracterized in This Case
Earlier this year, I spoke with Dr. Lisa Diamond, a professor at the University of Utah, on my podcast about her groundbreaking research on sexual fluidity.
What Diamond found over decades of study is that human sexuality is not fixed at birth and locked in forever. It can shift over a lifetime, often in surprising and deeply personal ways. Her book, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, published in 2008, explored the popular “born this way” narrative.
Diamond was always careful to distinguish her findings from what conversion therapy proponents claim. Sexual fluidity is a natural, unforced developmental process, and not something that can be manufactured through coercion.
As she told me, “Change that is motivated by fear, shame, and disconnection is a completely other thing. It’s toxic. It’s destructive.”
And yet, her and Professor Clifford J. Rosky’s research was directly cited by Kaley Chiles’ legal team in this Supreme Court case, arguing that because sexual orientation can change over the years, bans on efforts to change it are unjustified.
This is a profound distortion of Diamond’s admirable scholarship, and Diamond and Rosky rightly responded to this mischaracterization in a brief to the Court.
In their brief, they explained that Chiles’ legal team had quoted their research out of context, cherry-picking sentences while ignoring passages that explicitly state why conversion therapy is harmful, ineffective, and ultimately leads to a sharp increase in suicide attempts.
Their research was designed to expand our understanding of human sexuality, not to provide ammunition for people who want to coerce vulnerable minors into suppressing who they are.
Every Major Medical Organization Says This Practice Is Harmful
The scientific and clinical consensus on conversion therapy is not ambiguous. Rather, it is as close to unanimous as professional medicine gets.
The American Psychological Association concluded in its 2009 Task Force report that there is no evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation, and that such efforts can pose significant harm.
The American Psychiatric Association has opposed conversion therapy since 1998, stating that it is based on the false assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder that can be treated.
The American Medical Association opposes conversion therapy for sexual orientation or gender identity. They emphasize that conversion therapy techniques have included electric shock, deprivation of food and water, and chemically induced nausea, and that even talk therapy versions lead to an elevated suicide risk.
The Court acknowledged these concerns but held that they did not permit Colorado to ban one side of what it characterized as “an ongoing moral and religious debate.”
This framing is deeply wrong. This is not a debate of opinions or viewpoints, but a clinical question with a clear answer.
But if the mainstream medical and scientific community is this united, who exactly was arguing the other side at the Supreme Court?
I took a look at who else filed amicus briefs on the other side of this case supporting conversion therapy. They are organizations that are, at best, ideological or religious advocacy groups, and at worst, purveyors of medical misinformation dressed up in professional sounding names.
