Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is not a biologist and doesn’t know what a woman is, but she’s quite certain that Christian counselors don’t have freedom of speech or religion if it interferes with recruitment to the sex cult.
Fortunately, Jackson was on the wrong side of an 8-1 Supreme Court smackdown of Colorado’s law banning so-called “conversion therapy” for minors. Well, it was a rebuke of lower courts, at least, as the justices sent the case back down for further consideration under strict scrutiny. Yet the Court clearly signaled the law fails that test. DC and 27 states ban the practice.
First of all, the term “conversion therapy” is the Left’s euphemism for counseling that aims to steer young people away from unwanted same-sex attraction and behavior. Grooming kids to “become another gender” is fine under Colorado’s law (and with leftists generally). Helping them avoid it is intolerable — even though studies show the vast majority of kids grow out of gender dysphoria.
Second, and much more importantly, this case was a layup — Colorado’s 2019 law clearly infringed on the First Amendment. With the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Kaley Chiles, a Christian licensed therapist from Colorado Springs, challenged the law on free speech grounds, though I’d argue that religious liberty is also essential because Biblical Christianity upholds creation norms rather than social contagions.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in Chiles v. Salazar. “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same,” he wrote. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
He continued, “It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth. However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.”
In fact, Gorsuch concluded, “Colorado law does not just regulate the content of Ms. Chiles’ speech. It goes a step further, prescribing what views she may and may not express.”
Colorado has a history of this. You may recall that it’s the home of Jack Phillips, the famous Christian baker who simply didn’t want to decorate cakes celebrating behavior he believes the Bible says is sinful. For years, the state persecuted him, demanding that he bake the cake. Phillips and the ADF won 7-2 at the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the Rainbow Mafia has persisted with its legal harassment.
In both cases, Colorado aims to compel speech in favor of the sex cult.
Back to Not a Biologist Jackson, she pointed to — wait for it — The Science™. Reading her dissent from the bench to show the vehemence of her opposition, she claimed that the states banning “conversion therapy” do so “based on the medical profession’s broad consensus that this medical treatment … is ineffective and harmful.”
Is that the same compromised medical profession I wrote about yesterday? The discredited establishment that has been dangerously wrong about so many things, not least of which is gender pathology?
Jackson’s 35-page dissent went off the rails in other ways, too. “Our precedents do not compel this conclusion,” Jackson wrote. “Speech uttered for purposes of providing medical treatment may be restricted incidentally when the state reasonably regulates the speaker’s provision of medical treatments to patients.” This isn’t reasonable regulation.
She warned that the majority’s opinion “could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers.” She fretted, “In the worst-case scenario, our medical system unravels as various licensed healthcare professionals — talk therapists, psychiatrists, and presumably anyone else who claims to utilize speech when administering treatments to patients — start broadly wielding their new-found constitutional right to provide substandard medical care.”
Transing the kids is substandard, unsafe, and evil, but Jackson supports it wholeheartedly.
She concluded, “It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”
That is preposterously wrong.
Even Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a concurring majority opinion, tacitly rebuked her colleague’s argument. “The case is textbook,” Kagan said. “The law distinguishes between two opposed sets of ideas — the one resisting, the other reflecting, the State’s own view of how to speak with minors about sexual orientation and gender identity.” The state’s view doesn’t matter; it may not compel agreement.
On this point, Gorsuch was even more pointed, writing, “The First Amendment rests … on a simple truth: The people lose whenever the government transforms prevailing opinion into enforced conformity.”
Enforced conformity is what the Left calls “unity,” and it’s inherently anti-American.
