When Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito once asked whether “medical consensus has ever been politicized,” he revealed more than skepticism. He laid bare the high court’s moral drift.
That drift became tragically clear in the U.S. Supreme Court’s March 31 decision in Chiles v. Salazar, an 8-1 ruling that found Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors likely violated the free speech rights of a counselor challenging the law.
Every major medical organization — including the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — has reached the same conclusion: Attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity are ineffective, unethical and deeply injurious.
The data are unequivocal. Youths subjected to such “treatments” face sharply higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. There is no serious debate among those who practice medicine responsibly.
Yet the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, echoing the ideological posture of religious extremism, has again chosen suspicion over science. By treating Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy as a potential violation of free speech, the justices elevate theology over medicine and transform cruelty into constitutional virtue.
‘Competing views’ line suggests a false equivalency
Credit: Barry M. Cole
Credit: Barry M. Cole
Speech in a therapist’s office is not ordinary speech; it is the medium of treatment. When that speech is used to reinforce self-hatred or to convince a young person that they are disordered, it ceases to be protected expression and becomes professional malpractice.
The state has every right, and indeed a duty, to protect minors from such harm. We already regulate doctors who prescribe quack remedies or offer false hope. Mental health professionals should be held to the same standard.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s repeated references to “competing views” suggest a false equivalence that mirrors old debates over evolution or climate change.
When consensus is overwhelming, dissent does not make science uncertain. It simply exposes the persistence of ideology in the face of fact.
What makes this moment especially disheartening is the court’s selective skepticism. Only last year, in upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care, the same justices deferred to legislative judgment and dismissed the authority of medical experts.
Now, when legislators in Colorado act to protect LGBTQ+ youth, those same justices appear poised to favor the individual conscience of a counselor over the collective expertise of an entire medical field. The hypocrisy is glaring.
The underlying message is chillingly consistent: When science affirms LGBTQ+ lives, it becomes politicized; when it restricts them, it becomes truth. It is the intentional blending of religion and politics and the evisceration of science.
Do not force medieval notions on 21st century USA
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
As a scholar of literature and culture living in the Deep South, I am struck by how history repeats its cruelties under new names. Once, gay men were institutionalized in order to “cure” them. Now, the court sanctions the position that telling a teenager to suppress who they are is protected speech. The violence is subtler, but the injury is the same. The language of liberty has again been twisted to excuse oppression.
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community who has witnessed the destructive influence of conversion therapy firsthand, I can attest to the vicious nature of this backward ruling. It will ruin lives in the name of religious indoctrination. If we allow parents to place their children in such institutions, we are participating in psychological torture, plain and simple.
Parents have a duty to protect their children from harm, and any pseudoscientific attempt to rewrite their sexual or gender identity amounts to religious extremism disguised as therapy. It ignores decades of research, disregards the consensus of the medical field and treats vulnerable youths as political pawns.
If Justice Alito truly wishes to consider all sides of this consequential ruling, he should speak with LGBTQ+ individuals who survived conversion therapy and with former practitioners who administered it, only to realize they were suppressing their own identities. For many, the impact of the pseudoscience of conversion therapy has scarred them for life.
Such repression has led to a disproportionate number of suicidal ideation and attempts, and categorically dismissing science is complicity with the tragic consequences of forcing medieval notions on 21st century America. This is not abstract harm, as young lives are shattered by ideology masquerading as treatment.
Conversion therapy is not speech worth protecting. It is psychological abuse sanctified by rhetoric. It is heartless allegiance to dogma that refuses to fully consider the human impact. If the court truly believes that liberty includes freedom to harm, then we have drifted far from both the Constitution’s spirit and the nation’s conscience.
Protecting children from harm should not be politicized. Protecting children from harm must remain a societal priority despite this ruling. The tragic consequences of Chiles v. Salazar will come into focus soon enough.
History will not look kindly on this ruling.
Barry M. Cole, Ph.D., is a novelist and instructor of African American literature whose research centers on marginalized communities throughout the world.
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