Conservative Supreme Court Is Poised to Overturn Conversion Therapy Ban: What You Need to Know
Spencer Macnaughton | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter
On Tuesday, the majority conservative Supreme Court of the United States appeared ready to rule against a Colorado law banning conversion therapy for minors in the state. During the oral arguments that lasted roughly 90 minutes, the justices repeatedly questioned the state over whether the law hindered free speech and whether these practices are harmful.
Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan both said the ban seemed like “viewpoint discrimination,” deciding to lean into a Republican dog whistle and disregard the scientific consensus and endless testimonies that have shown for decades that conversion therapy is a discredited practice.
At a time when nearly 40% of LGBTQ young people seriously considered suicide in the last year, it’s abhorrent that these justices are using their power to support a partisan agenda that allows adults to weaponize talk therapy for some religious conspiracy theory that alleges that being gay is something you can change.
The plaintiff in the case is Kaley Chiles, an evangelical licensed counselor from Colorado who argues that the ban violates her First Amendment right to free speech.
Perhaps the least surprising news of the week is that Chiles is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group that has litigated and lobbied against marriage equality and anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws. They’ve been a key driving force behind removing trans people’s access to bathrooms and trans kids’ access to gender-affirming health care in the U.S., and have voiced support or testified in favor of anti-LGBTQ bills in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. In Belize, they defended a law that attempted to keep in place the criminalization of gay sex. The group was founded in 1993 by a group of conservative Christians, including Alan Sears, who co-authored “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.”
Here are some questions that I have that I hope Uncloseted Media or others can answer in the coming days:
Did Chiles knock on ADF’s door? Is she actually concerned? Or did ADF cherry-pick her?
Is Chiles getting paid? And if so, how much?
What are Alito, Kagan and the other justices’ views about LGBTQ people behind closed doors? Are they unbiased enough to adjudicate an LGBTQ-focused case?
But for the moment, my heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who experienced conversion therapy as kids. In our reporting, we’ve heard from Americans who remember being inside therapists’ offices or sitting in pews with pastors as they were encouraged to masturbate to heterosexual porn, to stay abstinent, to try hooking up with someone of the opposite sex against their own will, to try doing stereotypically masculine activities with their dad to turn them straight or to flat out pray the gay away.
It’s such bullshit. And the Supreme Court justices need a backbone.
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Sam Donndelinger and I had a great time at FOLIO’s Eddie & Ozzie Awards. We didn’t win, but it was an honor to be nominated.
LIVE TODAY: SCOTUS is stacked with LGBTQ-themed cases and we’re unpacking them all today at 2pm ET with Law Dorks’s Chris Geidner. Join our Substack Live here:
Conservative writer Bari Weiss named editor-in-chief of CBS News (Al Jazeera)
Christian group ‘deceived’ supreme court about LGBTQ+ research, cited scholars say (The Guardian)
Rainbow crosswalk removed from Miami Beach amid protests (NBC News)
A cop who teaches LGBTQ+ policing classes called a traffic officer a “fa**ot” (LGBTQ Nation)
Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:
🆕 As the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn the conversion therapy ban, we examine how the practice has impacted lives across the country.
🆕 Moms for Liberty has built up a reputation as one of the most active and influential anti-LGBTQ groups in the country, and they’ve gotten there by taking over school boards with harassment, doxing, and general chaos. We investigate the group’s rise to power in Indian River County, Florida.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!
Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com
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