LGBTQ prohibition vs Free Speech
Numerous “blue states,” including California, New York, and now NSW in Australia, have passed laws making such professional help an ethical violation that can strip therapists of their licenses and livelihoods.
No matter that many men and women would like to leave “pride” behind, for religious or family or personal reasons. No matter that many people struggle with same-sex attraction or that it is often a direct result of trauma. The LGBTQ activists insist that “conversion therapy” never works and is always harmful. Any psychological distress people who struggle with same-sex attractions experience is caused by some combination of social stigma, internalized homophobia, or “minority stress,” the claim.
Now this issue is about to come to a head.
This fall, the US Supreme Court will hear a landmark case concerning therapy bans: Chiles v. Salazar. While it will affect all states, the leading complaint stems from Colorado, where a Christian counselor is challenging a statute regulating speech inside her office. This case is extremely important for Bible-believing Christians to follow because its outcome will affect faith. But unlike most legal battles, this time there is actually something you can do to help.
You Can Check In Anytime You Like, But You Can Never Leave
This case is more than the garden-variety attack on religious liberty and free speech we’ve come to expect from the Sexual Revolutionaries: It case also represents an effort to block any exits from the LGBTQ “community.” These activists assert that no one can change his or her sexual orientation or sexual identity, under any circumstances, ever.
As Christians, most of us realize this is not true. Many of us are personally acquainted with people who have made the journey away from an LGBT identity and toward something else. Yet states like Colorado are making it nearly impossible for people who are troubled by their sexual feelings to receive the professional help they want and seek.
Even the name itself is a psy-op: “Conversion therapy” suggests that these therapists are no better than snake-oil salesmen and their clients are ignorant dupes. Therapy bans threaten the licenses of such therapists and leave their prospective clients stranded.
The rationale for the Colorado statute is that the legislature has determined “conversion therapy” to be “below the standard of care.” The government’s right to protect people from “discrimination” is at odds with individuals’ fundamental constitutional rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.
We could frame the question this way: Are the alleged harms associated with “conversion therapy” sufficiently serious and sufficiently likely that the State of Colorado should be allowed to restrict what therapist and client discuss inside the therapist’s office? This is what the Court will decide.
Biblical Truth vs. Politicized Pseudo-Science
Behind this legal conflict between First Amendment rights and protection from discrimination lies another, deeper layer of conflict. The two sides of the case have competing theories about how both individuals and society ought to regard same-sex attraction.
Bolstering each of those competing theories are still further competing theories about what same-sex attraction is and why some people experience it while others do not. Behind it all is disagreement over an even deeper issue: human nature itself. What does it mean to be human? What will make us truly happy?
The worldview behind the therapy bans directly conflicts with what the Bible says.
That theory holds simply that people are born gay: In legal language, sexual orientation has been deemed to be an innate immutable trait, comparable to race, eye color, or left-handedness. If sexual orientation is indeed innate, then attempting to change it is futile at best, cruel at worst.
Therefore, under this theory, a person who wants to change his sexual orientation is kidding himself. Most likely, he suffers from “internalized homophobia,” which “encompasses the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that arise from the belief that queerness is bad, wrong, sinful, or inferior to being straight.”
Therefore, any therapist who claims to be able to help change the client’s patterns of attractions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors is not helping him; she is feeding his delusion. Therefore, the State has every right to prohibit this “treatment.”
But what if the assumptions behind this theory are incorrect? We have sound, practical, evidence-based arguments that this radical, recently cobbled-together theory is false — and powerful biblical motives for clinging to the truth, which the Constitution guarantees us the right to act on in every sphere of life, including professionally and publicly.
We lay out the case against the LGBTQ lobby’s concocted psychological claims and what we can do as citizens to defend our religious liberty.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is the founder and president of The Ruth Institute , a global nonprofit organization leading an international, interfaith coalition working to defend the family and build a civilization of love. She is also the author of The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
