Chana Wilson captures tomorrow's challenge:
Last fall the state of California adopted a ground-breaking bill, S.B. 1172. It was the first in the nation to ban licensed therapists from performing gay conversion therapy on minors under the age of 18. Known by various names -- ex-gay therapy, reparative therapy, sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) -- conversion therapy's goal is to turn a gay person straight.
The bill's opponents have filed two separate appeals on the grounds that the law violates the First Amendment right to free speech. On April 17 the Ninth District Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Pickup v. Brown and Welch v. Brown.
Practitioners of conversion therapy employ a variety of methods. Some use aversion techniques, including inducing nausea or vomiting or providing electric shocks when the individual becomes aroused as a result of same-sex erotic images. Others use talk therapy to search for childhood wounds that supposedly led to the patient's homosexual cravings. These therapists may also attempt to address and "correct" gender-nonconforming characteristics. But whatever the techniques, conversion therapy is based on the belief that homosexuality is a pathological and abnormal condition.
As a state-licensed California psychotherapist, like my colleagues, I am not allowed to subject patients to practices based on discredited views, such as the belief that homosexuality is a mental illness or a pathology. That belief is outdated by four decades; it's been 40 years since homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973.
S.B. 1172 only governs licensed California therapists. It does not apply to ordained clergy or pastoral or religious counselors who are not licensed mental health professionals. They are still free to attempt to "pray away the gay."
State licensing boards and the courts already enforce speech-based restrictions on mental health professionals: Therapists are barred from false, deceptive or harmful statements. The government absolutely has the power to protect children from treatments by state-licensed mental health professionals that are ineffective, harmful and abusive. In the case of conversion therapy, national mental health organizations of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and marriage and family therapists, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have all concluded that efforts to change sexual orientation are both ineffective and harmful. Such treatments can result in anxiety, hopelessness, self-hatred, isolation, increased substance abuse, grief, guilt and suicide.
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