Can someone break this down for me? Obviously I think conversion therapy is stupid and to subject a child to it would be abusive and I’d be in favor of banning that. Is there such a thing as adult conversion therapy? Because if there is such a thing and some people want to have classes or whatever and willing adults want to attend them, that does kind of sound like a first amendment violation to me.
Apologies if above is a stupid question. I know next to nothing about the topic and instead of looking into it, I’m being lazy and hoping someone here can give me the cliffs.
I only read the case quickly, but I think that the laws in question here dealt only with minors. The risk both that a kid is not agreeing to the therapy voluntarily and that they may suffer greater harm from undergoing these treatments at a young age is high enough that I think some greater legal oversight is ok.
As far as adults go, adult conversion therapy is a thing. Like you, I find it slightly less problematic, but I still think that if a certain amount of demonstrable harm can be shown, then the government could regulate it the same way they can regulate speech when a snake oil salesman tries to sell a “miracle” drug to cure cancer or other forms of consumer safety regulations.
Exactly but I would go even further in terms of overall harm to society in that it bolsters the idea of pseudoscientific and quack medicine both of which have serious implications for many policy areas that have nothing to do with LGBTQI+ people.
I would categorize “decline to review, kill the guy” as not actually “going to SCOTUS” because of the “decline to review” part.
I’m not a lawyer, but for a case to be heard by a higher court, there has to be some grounds for the appeal. If an appeal is submitted that doesn’t meet the relevant standards, the court just says LOL no and that’s it.
I probably have parts of that wrong, but I think it’s broadly correct. Maybe death penalty cases have different standards/rules/procedures though?
I think there are lots of types of expression that are probably harmful to society as a whole, but prohibiting them for that reason is problematic. Everyone thinks that speech they don’t like is harmful to a society as a whole.
Just to reiterate, I think that conversion therapy (as I understand it) is idiotic.
While we’re on the subject, piping hot take on conversion therapy incoming:
As mentioned above, I’m not a supporter of it as it is done. Trying to “pray the gay away” or what not is damaging and stupid. But I wonder if conversion therapy is not something that could be done or that some people might actually want.
If one believes that sexuality not binary, but rather on a spectrum, then it would stand to reason that there are some people who “picked” an orientation based on their natural inclination plus societal influences. However, if not influenced by societal expectations or had different influences, maybe they would be (more) bisexual.
If that’s true, I can imagine a form of conversion therapy that might make heterosexual people more open to homosexual encounters or vice versa. And I can even imagine people wanting that.
To be clear, the way to optimally achieve this type of “conversion” from something like 100% hetero to 60% is definitely not what is done in existing conversion therapy settings. I’m not even honestly sure how one would do it. But I don’t think that it would be wrong to consider efforts as a type of conversion therapy, and I don’t think there would be anything wrong with adults participating in it.
I think this is similar to a few Libertarian arguments where some policy could theoretically be done humanely in a vacuum, but only if people were perfectly rational, and actually cared about the wellbeing of others, and were more interested in growth than forcing others to conform.
Those conditions will never be met for anyone. They definitely won’t be met for the folks actually interested in conversion therapy.
I’d mostly agree with this. I guess the more concise way to make my point is that the problem with conversion therapy is not the “conversion” per se. It’s the idea that what you are converting from is wrong and is a problem that needs to be fixed. If you take that out and just made it a way to open up options, then I can’t see a problem with adults engaging in it. But as you say, that’s not really a service that anyone offers (as far as I know).
I think banning conversion therapy might also be a bit tricky in terms of the details. Is some woman trying to convince her hot friend to join in a threesome a form of “conversion therapy”? Obviously, it isn’t the same thing. But how are you going to write a law that some idiot with an axe to grind can’t abuse?