The Supreme Court today chose not to review a Washington State law, SB 5722, that bans ‘conversion therapy’ for minors. This widely discredited junk psychology is best known as an attempt to align the subject’s sexual orientation with the counselor’s religious beliefs.
Medical research has shown that conversion therapy causes kids mental anguish. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that people who underwent the procedure had “serious psychological distress, had significantly higher rates of depression and substance use problems, and attempted suicide more.”
To hear an appeal or grant certiorari, a minimum of four Justices must elect to do so. In this instance, only three of them, Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh did. Thomas and Alito wrote dissenting opinions. The other six, including the other three conservatives, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett, did not. They gave no reason — as is the norm.
What was Thomas’s beef? He agreed with Brian Tingley, a licensed family counselor, who had brought the original suit. Tingley argued that the law censors conversations he has with his clients − and he told the Supreme Court that violated his free speech and religious rights. The law, he said, “forbids him from speaking, treating his professional license as a license for government censorship.”
In his lengthy dissenting opinion, Thomas wrote:
"There is a fierce public debate over how best to help minors with gender dysphoria. The petitioner, Brian Tingley, stands on one side of the divide. He believes that a person's sex is "a gift from God, integral to our very being.'"
This rationale is a distraction. In America, there was once a fierce public debate about slavery. So fierce that 620,000 Americans died in a Civil War fought over the issue. Yet today, slavery is constitutionally a non-starter. And only the lunatic fringe thinks it should be legal.
More importantly, it is the voter’s legislative representatives who enact laws. If the citizens do not like those laws, they can elect different representatives.
It is also absurd that someone’s religious beliefs should direct medical care. Is there a Christian cancer treatment?
Thomas reveals his hand — probably unconsciously — when he goes on:
"The State of Washington is on the other side of the divide. Its view is that the State should 'protec[t] its minors against exposure to serious harms caused by' counseling to change a minor's gender identity, Note, Wash. Rev. Code §18.130.180 (2018), and, as a result, that counselors should only affirm a minor's chosen gender identity,"
Thomas clings to the religious fundamentalism's discredited claim that people ‘chose’ their sexuality and gender identity. Bullshit. Nobody, including the LGBTQ living in fundamentalist religious communities, 'chose' to be what they innately are.
Thomas also tries some ‘free speech’ sophistry. In his opinion, he noted, "This question has divided the Courts of Appeals and strikes at the heart of the First Amendment." I am unfamiliar with what other Appeals Courts have ruled. But I can find no record of one supporting conversion therapy (Please comment if you know something). Let us also note that the Ninth Circuit’s opinion was unanimous.
Thomas added:
"Under SB 5722, licensed counselors cannot voice anything other than the state-approved opinion on minors with gender dysphoria without facing punishment. The Ninth Circuit set a troubling precedent by condoning this regime."
Let us note that, while the state passed the law, the rationale for the ban was medical. The state based its position on science and reams of published data on the subject. Not some old book written in an an antique language, subject to best guesses about what a lot of it means.
Alito, another SCOTUS crusader, piled on:
"It is beyond dispute that these laws restrict speech, and all restrictions on speech merit careful scrutiny."
This piety is so fecking hypocritical. Where is Alito’s concern about anti-free speech laws that prohibit doctors from discussing abortion with their patients or that mandate they must lie to them? Or what about the laws that forbid drag queens from reading to kids? What if the case involved a religious therapist trying to talk kids into being gay?
In the Ninth Circuit's written decision supporting the law, Judge Ronald Gould dismissed arguments the ban encroached on any constitutional amendments.
"Washington's licensing scheme for health care providers, which disciplines them for practicing conversion therapy on minors, does not violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments. 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."
Free speech prohibits the government from restricting what a citizen can say. Nothing in the Washington law prohibits Tingley from getting on his soap box and saying anything he wants about sex, sexual orientation, and gender identification. The law merely prohibits religious sadists from torturing our youngest and most vulnerable citizens for being who they are.
Thank God the Supreme Court agrees.