The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids in Colorado, one of about two dozen states that ban the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide if it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
So the first amendment gives the right to infringe on the freedom of others?
As long as those others are from groups demonized by the GOP (and it’s a long list), yes.
Child abuse is not free speech.
Apparently some people pay for that which is awful.
Yup. Also see: troubled teen industry
Most parents knew what went on in these places, perhaps not to the fullest extent but at the very minimum abusive tactics commonly referred to as ‘tough love’ or being ‘scared straight’. And when kids complained or reported abuse, it was double-down time because it was seen as evidence of it working.
That shit is totally evil, our society is sick for allowing it. Those camps need to be shit down and the parents who paid for them prosecuted
Agreed! Can we start with my mom? She used a chunk of my brother’s college fund to pay for him to provide unpaid labor and be subject to abuse and neglect in Mexico for months.
Not party line. 8:1. Two “opposing” justices agreed.
Jackson was the sole dissenter.
This is yet another brick in the wall for “the Supreme Court has become a core part of the problem”.
I don’t really get how two of the liberal justices concurred with this. Therapy is a licensed profession, and as with all licensed professions, it comes with restrictions, including on the things that can be said while providing licensed services.
The counselor can spend all day telling people they should convert to the one true faith of the orange monster. She is just not allowed to tell kids they are better off not being themselves when she is professionally counseling them.
I would argue that if Colorado (or any jurisdiction) did not ban a practice known to be harmful, it would be liable for the consequences, too. It would be like the FDA knowing that vaccine save lives and deciding to discourage their use. Oh, wait, I forgot we are in this timeline…
In short, beautiful lemmings, be brave, be bold, be gay, be trans, just don’t forget to be current on your vaxxes. Every time a lemming gets a jab, there is one more clot forming in the arteries of the one that shall not be named!
So, telling someone they aren’t who/what they think they are is ok? Not just telling them but pushing a program of persuasion to change their mind.
They’re going to overturn hate speech laws next. And all advertising restrictions.
Someone needs to start a trans conversion therapy program that tries to make people trans. See how fast that gets banned.
Right? The gymnastics to support conversion therapy on one hand and on the other claim books in the library are making people gay is absurd.
Therapy is not thought or speech, it is treatment. If a treatment is not effective or even makes the patient less healthy, or abuses them, we stop that treatment. Nothing to do with free speech, because we don’t treat based on ideology, we treat based on prior results that we recorded and retested.
If 8 of those judges thought differently, lets make it 3-2 because the other half is bought and paid for anyway, that this is somehow shielding FROM orthodoxy instead of shield orthodoxy itself, they are just completely empty on the inside, no empathy, no humanity, no conscience. Only power fills their hart, meets their needs. fucking disgusting.
Conversion therapy is abuse, plain and simple. 8 supreme court judges voted for abuse. game over. just like last week, just like last month, and just like last year in the divided states of south canada.
The main reason the more liberal justices joined in on this is that the law was badly written.
Conversion therapy needs to be banned, but the how of the ban matters.
Gross.
This is the same sort of ruling that would argue you can’t ban false advertising. How long before some homeopath sues the FTC and FDA for stopping them from claiming health benefits? Won’t be long now till we get new fabulous snake oil cancer cures because the first amendment protects quacks from lying (so long as they “sincerely believe” the lie).
Not anywhere remotely similar, just something I was reminded of. Unilever sued Hampton Creek for selling a sandwich spread they called “mayo”. I don’t know the result of the lawsuit but it came down to some obscure FDA rule saying mayonnaise must contain egg. The Hampton Creek product did not. https://apnews.com/article/-----e836f82fe258403a9d4b39a118d21793
“the 1st amendment is a shield against orthodoxy of thought, that’s why we’re using it to justify the enforcement of orthodox thought”
It’s even more shocking she’s still licensed. She’s using her credentials to legitimize a practice her board absolutely wouldn’t support.
Because the USA is a theocracy where the morals of a religion are held higher than the morals and laws of democratic values such as equality and tolerance, just like Iran and Ruzzia :D Enlightment anyone? No?
Some religious schools like reformatory and Islamic schools carry out duplicate messages: they teach children democratic values such as equality and tolerance, but place religious views next to it that are at odds with these values. This leads to confusion and can reinforce discriminatory ideas, particularly about homosexuality, gender roles and Jewish people.
Schools are required to teach children about democratic values and to comply with them in practice. But on the basis of Article 23 of the Constitution (in the Netherlands at least), schools also have the freedom to place religious messages next to it. According to experts, this leads to “double messages” that are difficult to follow for children, and in some cases are at odds with democratic values.
For example, children now learn that you can decide for yourself how to live your life, but also that they have to obey God. And they learn about the theory of evolution, but also that according to religion it is not correct, and that the world is actually only 6000 years old.
Reformatory schools teach about equality, but in addition, the view that the man is “the head” and the woman is “submissive” to him. It should be cautious about leadership roles.
The Dutch Ministry of Education says that it is “inevitable” that fundamental rights are chafing with each other here, and that democracy also means that children learn to deal with this. Experts call this “naive.”
Renowned theologian Abdullahi An-Na’im says a religious message will always dominate. According to him, there is no level playing field between a religious message and democratic values. “Religion has a psychological and emotional lead in children’s upbringing,” says An-Na’im. “With deep roots in communities, where the state has no reach whatsoever.”
Do we want a multicultural model in which we think very differently about freedoms? Or do we want to work towards a model in which not only equality, but really equality, for example between men and women, is seen as a fundamental starting point? In the latter case, it means that we need to make more work of that. CLEARLY
Dutch News anchor Nieuwsuur has investigated this in the netherlands: The clashing messages in religious education
https://nos.nl/collectie/14003The US is not a theocracy. Conservatives want it to be one—in theory—but they would never agree on which religion would be the one true religion.
You’d think they’d settle on something simple and nebulous like, “Christianity” but the moment they started trying to define that in law the whole concept would fall apart because there’s way too many completely incompatible differences between Christian sects. Not to mention the fact that Mormons (and other niche sects) consider themselves to be Christian while huge swaths of people consider them to be anything but.
The best they can ever get away with is what they’ve got now: Completely unconstitutional (IMHO) exceptions in various laws for “genuinely held religious beliefs.”
Remember: The conservatives on the supreme court really do think that if a doctor has a genuine religious belief that someone should die from a treatable condition, they should not be held to account for letting that person die.
I fantasize about one of these justices going to the hospital for an emergency heart condition and having the doctor refuse to treat them because of a truly genuine, deeply-held religious belief that conservatives should just die from such things since they don’t believe in medicine or science in general.
And then they wonder why the rest of the world looks at the US like a bizarre mix of Enlightenment ideals and medieval dogma. I mean, Locke, Voltaire, and Kant are spinning in their graves right now watching how their ‘right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ has been hijacked by a movement that actively denies science, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ existence in the name of a god nobody can even agree on.
It’s the ultimate paradox: the same country that gave the world the First Amendment (thanks, Voltaire!) now has a Supreme Court majority that thinks genuinely held religious beliefs can override basic human rights like letting a child die because a doctor’s ‘deeply held belief’ says so.
And let’s not forget the irony of a nation built on the idea that government should not impose religion (see: Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration) now trying to turn it into a Christian nationalist state where ‘freedom of religion’ somehow means ‘freedom to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t pray in your direction.’ So yes, the US isn’t an official theocracy… yet? But it’s doing its damndest to feel like one, all while claiming to be the ‘beacon of democracy.’ Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk and his ilk are out here acting like the Ayatollah of some sort of Christian Taliban. If this isn’t a lesson in how fragile democratic values are, I don’t know what is. Europe’s secularism and Enlightenment values might just be the only thing keeping the US from fully regressing into a theocratic dystopia.
How disappointing. Expected, but still. We ban all sorts of other harmful medical or practices, but this gets a pass because the stranglehold religion still has on the US.
My heart breaks the kids who will experience abuse because of this.
so the victims should also have a first amendment right to not be forced by their parents into a religiously-based program.
Don’t you know? Torturing children is a form of speech. Just like corporate funds! /s
Does this mean I can make Conversion Therapy Camps to talk to MAGAs about how stupid they are?
It does!
So, you can say whatever you want, even if your viewpoint is lies. But what about the consequences of what you say? I’m guessing if you were forced through conversion therapy, you could still sue the therapist?
Does this ruling open the door to legalizing speech that lies about a product? Like could I run a cigarette ad telling everyone that smoking tobacco is healthy? I mean, we wouldn’t want to “censor a viewpoint.”
