Right-Wing Activists Are Pushing For a Constitutional Right to Harm LGBTQ KidsThe Alliance Defending Freedom wants the Republican justices to hold that the First Amendment protects homophobes' legal right to ignore state laws that protect kids.
https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/conversion-therapy-case-supreme-court-chiles-v-salazar/ 🔗Balls and Strikes - Madiba K. Dennie
September 29, 2025
Across 27 states, licensed mental health practitioners are legally restricted or prohibited from subjecting minors to "conversion therapy," which refers to pseudoscientific efforts to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Despite the name, the practice is anything but therapeutic: It does not address any underlying mental illness or disorder, but instead targets sexual behavior and gender expression that does not conform to stereotypes about what men and women "should" be like.
Politicians across the spectrum broadly support legislation to protect LGBTQ youth from these harms—or at least they did, before the recent surge of GOP-manufactured attacks on the LGBTQ community. Since 2012, Republican state lawmakers have sponsored, voted in favor of, or signed legislation banning conversion therapy over 1,000 times, and each statewide conversion therapy ban passed with Republican support. These bans are common, popular, and keep kids safe from a practice that leading healthcare provider associations overwhelmingly oppose as harmful, unethical, and unsupported by science.
But the future of those laws—and the future of the children whom those laws protect—is now at risk. On October 7, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar, a case about whether conversion therapy bans violate the First Amendment.----------
The article is in-depth and too long to quote here. Read the rest at:
https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/conversion-therapy-case-supreme-court-chiles-v-salazar/ 🔗
