It may sound surprising, but it’s true: Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down Colorado’s conversion therapy ban is a victory for sexual and gender minorities.
As a therapist who frequently works with individuals and families affected by these bans, I hear just about weekly from individuals and families who can’t get the therapy they need.
From as far away as Germany, Australia and Saudi Arabia, with faith identities as diverse as Muslim, Orthodox Jew, Catholic and Baha’i, these people have reached out, unable to find professional help to reconcile their faith and sexuality (or gender). These calls also come from closer places like Canada, Oregon and, yes, Colorado, due to policies that have been hostile to self-determination.
Their stories are distressingly similar — therapists often telling them that they can’t or won’t help them, that it’s harmful to live congruent with their values, that they aren’t being “true to themselves.”
Parents are just as often told that if they truly loved their children, they must abandon their deeply held beliefs and wholeheartedly affirm their child’s choices. It’s bad enough when it’s just therapists saying this, but for years now, people have felt the heavy hand of the government itself endorsing this idea as the only acceptable approach. This is what Colorado’s law did, along with many other states and countries.
The deeply felt experiences behind sexuality and gender identity are not the result of a deliberate choice — even if our identity narrative and actions are. The same can be said for the deeply felt experiences behind someone’s faith. Asking people to give up one or the other can feel like asking them which arm they want to cut off.
These individuals and families reach out to faith-based therapists like me from so far away because they don’t know where else to turn.
Sometimes, this is because other therapists, who refuse to support them, lack the cultural competence to understand traditional faiths. Other times, it’s because they don’t understand how a therapist can support clients as they creatively reconcile both their faith and their sexuality or gender experience.
In my experience, many therapists in our modern secular world have never been trained to foster deeper attachment and rich connections between parents and children without requiring affirmation.
It’s also the case that many therapists are simply afraid. They’re afraid of losing their licenses and livelihoods. They’re afraid of having their reputations trashed in the media — and potentially pilloried as cruel, coercive, shaming Nurse Ratched figures rather than caring clinicians who support the values and self-determination of their clients.
When Utah’s conversion therapy law passed, more than one friend or colleague reached out to me, knowing that I have some clients in this population. “I’m so sorry that you can’t practice with these clients,” they would say.
Yet I do what the Supreme Court says Kaley Chiles does: She “does not begin counseling with any predetermined goals; instead, she sits down with clients, discusses their goals, and then formulates methods of counseling that will most benefit them, seeking throughout to respect her clients’ fundamental right of self-determination.”
And unlike other places, in Utah that isn’t illegal. But even when I explained this, many of my professional colleagues would still have that “deer in the headlights” look. They’d pat me on the shoulder and say, “Well, I’m so glad that you work with this population so that I can refer to you.”
Call me strange, but I don’t think it’s a good thing that so many of my colleagues are afraid to provide professional care for sexual and gender minorities — most of whom simply want help reconciling faith and sexuality or gender (not to be “fixed” or “turned straight”).
In states like mine, those fears were unfounded, but in plenty of others, they were perfectly legitimate. And whatever the reason, we have a vulnerable population in dire need of mental health services who aren’t finding the help they need. My messaging inboxes prove it.
This decision is a win for client autonomy, a win for religious therapists who have had their speech chilled and constrained, and a win for religious freedom.
That’s why this Supreme Court decision is such a breath of fresh air. It calls out conversion therapy bans like Colorado’s for what they are: heavy-handed viewpoint discrimination that unfairly penalizes some beliefs and values while officially endorsing others. These laws have unacceptably placed a thumb on the scale, declaring some beliefs right and others wrong.
The court situated their nearly unanimous decision within the rich tradition of First Amendment jurisprudence. As they write, “The Constitution does not protect the right of some to speak freely; it protects the right of all … our precedents have expressly rejected the notion that ‘professional speech’ represents some ‘separate category of speech’ subject to ‘diminished constitutional protection.’”
Speech doesn’t become unfree just because a therapist is speaking or because the government tries to call it something other than speech. The fact that all but one justice agreed should show this isn’t simply partisan.
Justice Elena Kagan, in her concurrence, noted that a more viewpoint-neutral law that outlawed abusive or coercive practices like shock therapy or aversion therapy may well have survived. “If Colorado had instead enacted a content-based but viewpoint-neutral law, it would raise a different and more difficult question.”
She’s right. And I think it was just as harmful to inflict coercive “treatments” in order to make wives more submissive or to get Jehovah’s Witnesses to recant (true stories) as it is to get homosexual people to adopt an exclusively heterosexual identity.
This decision is a win for client autonomy, a win for religious therapists who have had their speech chilled and constrained, and a win for religious freedom.
Yet you don’t have to be religious to celebrate this decision. This is a victory for everyone, but especially for those vulnerable individuals and families who will now have an easier time getting the caring and supportive therapy they have always deserved. As the majority opinion concluded, we all lose “whenever the government transforms prevailing opinion into enforced conformity.”