Another victory for gender dysphoric children, First Amendment speech and religious protections, and truth. Today in Chiles v. Salazar, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling regarding an egregiously bad Colorado law passed in 2019 pertaining to counseling for gender-dysphoric minors. The case has been sent back to the lower court, but SCOTUS made clear that passing constitutional muster will be a Herculean task for those who seek to engage in viewpoint discrimination.
The constitutionally dubious law effectively banned counselors from saying anything that could be construed by a leftist as an effort to change minor clients’ disordered rejection of their objective, immutable biological sex. Even if a counselor realizes that a minor client’s gender dysphoria is caused by sexual trauma, social media propaganda, or autism, affirmation of their disordered feelings is all leftist Colorado lawmakers will accept.
The law permits counselors to say things intended to facilitate minors’ quixotic quest to change their sex or, more accurately, conceal their sex from the public. Facilitating deception is copacetic with leftists.
In other words, the law allows minors to get mental health assistance in changing that which can never change—i.e., their sex—while prohibiting minors from getting mental health assistance in changing that which can and most often does change—i.e., their subjective, mutable, internal feelings about their sex.
In 2022, the plaintiff Kaley Chiles, a licensed mental health professional in Colorado and a Christian, filed a suit in federal court alleging that her First Amendment rights were violated by this law. While devious leftists are fond of referring to ordinary talk-therapy as “conversion therapy” to imply without straight up lying that conservative counselors are electrocuting gender-dysphoric clients, Chiles has made clear how she counsels minors struggling with sexuality:
On matters of sexuality and gender, Ms. Chiles’s clients, including young people, often have different goals: Some are content with their sexual orientation and gender identity and want help with social issues or family relationships, while others hope to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with their bodies. With all those clients, Ms. Chiles seeks to help them reach their stated objectives. And she employs only talk therapy.
Today the Supreme Court—including Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—sided with the plaintiff with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing for the majority,
Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy, as applied to Ms. Chiles’s talk therapy, regulates speech based on viewpoint. …
As applied to Ms. Chiles, Colorado’s law regulates the content of her speech and goes further to prescribe what views she may and may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. The law permits her to express acceptance and support for clients exploring their identity or undergoing gender transition, but forbids her from saying anything that attempts to change a client’s “sexual orientation or gender identity.” …
Her speech does not become “conduct” just because a government says so or because it may be described as a “treatment” or “therapeutic modality.” The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth. Laws like Colorado’s, which suppress speech based on viewpoint, represent an egregious assault on both commitments.
Only ignorant DEI hire Kentanji Brown Jackson, who is still trying to figure out what a woman is, dissented.
Theodore Wold, Director of the Administrative State Project of the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life who has his law degree from Notre Dame, captured succinctly the inanity of Brown Jackson’s “reasoning”:
Today, she was the lone dissent on Chiles v. Salazar, writing that “there is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the power of states.”
So, states have no right to pass laws banning children from changing their sex– but states DO have the right to ban counselors from telling boys they are not girls.
You truly can’t make it up.
Despite the efforts of leftists to memory hole Joe Biden’s luggage-pilfering, cross-dressing, sodomitic, they/them-using Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition (no pun intended) Sam Brinton, he once played an outsized role in “conversion therapy” bans because of his willingness to lie. As I wrote in 2022:
Brinton … is better known—or, rather, infamous for—his nationwide crusade to make what he deceitfully calls “conversion therapy” illegal. So fanatically committed is Brinton to this crusade that he sashays in stilettos all about the country lying about it.
Brinton has claimed that he was a victim of torture via “conversion therapy”—the term those tricksy homosexual activists prefer—but his allegations suffer from shape-shifting and lack of proof.
For example, in 2010 Brinton alleged that just before seventh grade, he was sent to “conversion therapy” where his hands were tied down and “blocks of ice were placed” on his hands while pictures of men holding hands “were shown” to him.
By 2014 when he testified before the U.N.’s Committee on Torture, his story (and delivery) had changed. He still claimed that his hands were tied down and blocks of ice were placed on them, but he wasn’t shown pictures of men holding hands. Oh, no, in this incarnation of his story he was shown “erotic pictures of men.” Additionally, he claimed the torturous therapy occurred when he was ten years old.
When he testified before the U.N. committee at age 26, he was choking back faux-tears even though he’d been telling this story publicly for years. But four years earlier when he was 22, no tears, not a voice quiver to be heard.
Depending on the context, Brinton has alleged that he was either 10 or 12, when he was tortured by “a doctor,” or “not a doctor,” or a “religious therapist,” or a “licensed psychotherapist.” And at various points, he has claimed he was in this torturous therapy for “two to three years,” and yet he says he cannot recall the name of this therapist.
In addition to painful ice treatment, Brinton claims copper heating coils were wrapped around his hands and the heat turned on, “tiny needles” were “stuck into” his fingers, and that he received “electric shocks” by the nameless therapist. Even homosexuals doubt his story.
Btw, this kind of therapy is accurately called “aversion therapy”—not conversion therapy. And no licensed therapists do it on anyone, let alone children.
Talk therapy that seeks to uncover reasons for disordered feelings and dysfunctional behaviors is called counseling.
Leftists will concoct any policy or law, hurl epithets, cry fake crocodile tears, and in some cases even murder innocent people to censor speech they hate.
Chiles v. Salazar has enormous implications for the counseling landscape. Currently, twenty-three states, including, of course, Illinois have “conversion therapy” bans. With the pernicious deep-pocketed Pritzkers—including J.B.’s cross-dressing cousin—throwing their political and financial weight around, we could expect nothing less than evil legislation that harms children. If leftists can’t kill children in their mothers’ wombs, they will destroy them after birth.
Come mid-terms, remember which party socially constructed this “trans” superstition, used public schools to spread it, coerced the medical and mental health communities to promote it, deracinated parental rights, chemically and surgically violated the bodies of minors, sexually integrated private spaces and girls sports, and imposed tyrannical laws that violate fundamental constitutional rights.