WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a challenge to a ban on “conversion therapy” for minors, avoiding an appeal from a Christian marriage and family counselor who said the prohibition violated his First Amendment rights.
The scientifically discredited practice is used to try to “convert” LGBTQ+ individuals to heterosexuality or to change a person’s gender identity. Washington state passed a law in 2018 barring licensed therapists from engaging in the practice with patients under 18 − joining roughly half of U.S. states with similar laws.
{snip}
Three conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh said that would have granted the appeal.
Under the Washington law, Thomas wrote, “licensed counselors can speak with minors about gender dysphoria, but only if they convey the state-approved message of encouraging minors to explore their gender identities. Expressing any other message is forbidden − even if the counselor’s clients ask for help to accept their biological sex.”
That, Thomas wrote, “is viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.”
Brian Tingley, a licensed family counselor, argued that the law censors the conversations he has with his clients − and he told the Supreme Court that violated his free speech and religious rights. The law, he told the court, “forbids him from speaking, treating his professional license as a license for government censorship.”
{snip}
“States do not lose the power to regulate the safety of medical treatments performed under the authority of a state license merely because those treatments are implemented through speech rather than through scalpel,” U.S. Circuit Judge Ronald Gould wrote for the appeals court.
Tingley is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, which has been involved in several high-profile lawsuits pitting religious and First Amendment claims against LGBTQ+ rights. Last year, ADF represented a designer, Lorie Smith, who wanted to decline to make wedding websites for same-sex couples.
The Supreme Court in June sided with Smith 6-3 along ideological lines.
* Original Article:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/12/11/supreme-court-conversion-therapy-ban-lgbtq-transgender/70985750007/
