The Supreme Court ruled against Colorado’s conversion therapy ban for minors Tuesday in an 8-1 decision, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joining the conservatives.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter.
Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado, had sued, arguing that the law violated her First Amendment rights by preventing her from helping patients to “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with their bodies.” The law explicitly encourages therapists to support those transitioning or exploring their gender identities.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said that Colorado’s law is textbook viewpoint discrimination.
“On the view Colorado and the dissent advance, a law adopted during that era prohibiting counselors from engaging in the ‘substandard care’ of affirming their clients’ homosexuality would have been subject to only rational-basis or intermediate-scrutiny review — and likely upheld,” he wrote.
Kagan, joined by Sotomayor, concurred. She wrote that when the state suppresses one side of a debate, “the constitutional issue is straightforward.”
Jackson advanced a dissenting theory, arguing that states may infringe on the treatment-related speech of medical providers when it’s part of a larger regulation to ensure that patients get high-quality medical care.
A state, she wrote, may “prohibit a doctor from encouraging a patient to commit suicide, or a dietician from telling an anorexic patient to eat less. Likewise, no one would bat an eye if a State required its doctors to discourage, but not encourage, smoking tobacco.”
“My colleagues’ contrary conclusions are puzzling, for a standards-based healthcare scheme cannot function unless its regulators are permitted to choose sides,” she added.
In a jab at her right-wing colleagues, she cited United States v. Skrmetti, in which the majority upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors. In that decision, the Court ruled that minors could receive certain care — puberty blockers, hormones — but only if that treatment was for diagnoses other than gender dysphoria.
Chiles’ initial lawsuit did not challenge the parts of Colorado’s law that banned the once-common and brutal medical practices, including electroshock therapy, that were part of conversion therapy.
Read the ruling here:
What is wrong with Kagan & Sotomayor in this case? Licensed medical care is heavily regulated, for good reason!
This is a horrific decision. People will die as a result of this. Conversion “therapy” is pseudoscientific torture, no matter how many times they try to repackage it. In the 1950s it was aversion therapy, where LGBTQ people were shocked, force-fed emetics, or tied down on mattresses smeared with animal feces and forced to view same-sex pornography so they’d associate the physical disgust with their natural attractions. No matter what the New York Times argues, the actual scientific organizations are 100% clear that this only harms people.
It is no accident that this decision was handed down on Transgender Day of Visibility. The Right wants a genocide of transgender people (for a start), and they want everyone to know that that’s what they want.
from ScotusBlog
I guess I am out of touch because I don’t have any trouble with the decision. I think Kagan and Sotomayor got it right. the state can’t order doctors to not say something they don’t like.
This is nonsense. Pushing a long and repeatedly debunked medical theory is not a matter of free speech, it shows an appalling lack of understanding about medicine, biology, and psychology, and is, for the Justices, practicing medicine without a license. It’s also a matter of fraud, and is bigoted, hateful, and dangerous, as the number of suicides by persons who have gone through so-called “conversion therapy” is not insignificant.
I don’t care how deeply its adherents believe it, it is simply not true. Sexual orientation can neither be chosen nor learned, and most definitely cannot be unlearned, and all of this has been proved medically; clapping as hard as you can, clicking your ruby slipper heels, and endlessly repeating the falsehood does not change any of that. This weaponization of the First Amendment completely perverts the Amendment - it was not intended to define money as speech. It was not intended to protect the dissemination of falsehoods. It was intended to prevent government censorship of valid political opinions it may have found inconvenient. This perversion of the text is among the most hateful and harmful of the various ways this SCOTUS and its immediate ancestors have twisted and ignored the words, and I’m appalled that only Justice Jackson voted to apply the Amendment as it was written and understood for most of our history.