Attorneys Fight ‘Censorship, Plain and Simple’ Over Reparative Therapy Bans

First Amendment advocates appeared in court this week to overturn two laws aimed at trapping minors in the LGBTQ lifestyle by barring counselors from having consensual discussions with children who do not want to identify as transgender.

Attorneys from the Alliance Defending Freedom sued Kansas City, Missouri, and Jackson County—the county-level government overseeing Kansas City—after they passed ordinances outlawing so-called “conversion therapy.” The 2019 Kansas City statute bars medical experts from helping anyone under the age of 18 who wants “to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.”

The statutes impose fines ranging from $500 to $1,000 for each so-called “offense.”

“It’s censorship, pure and simple,” Hal Frampton, senior counsel and director of the Center for Conscience Initiatives at Alliance Defending Freedom, told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Wednesday. He further noted that Democrat-controlled local governments are aiming to regulate the contents of “a private conversation between a counselor and a willing client who is looking to find a way through his gender confusion.”

Reparative therapy sometimes allows those who do not wish to suffer from gender dysphoria, or be attracted to members of the same sex, to lessen these thoughts over time. But Frampton said its practitioners face a mountain of lies and misrepresentation over what they do.

“One of the falsehoods that we have to deal with in these cases is the lie that if you just have a conversation about this, it will somehow harm the child,” potentially even triggering the child’s suicide. “The research simply doesn’t bear that out. There’s no evidence that having conversations is remotely harmful. In fact, the emerging evidence is that it helps children better understand who they are and who God made them to be,” he pointed out.

However, studies have found that undergoing transgender procedures does not help, and sometimes affirmatively hurts, patients’ mental health.

While the statutes punish those who try to reduce unwanted same-sex or transgender ideation, they praise those who take the opposite position. The Jackson County ordinance specifically cites the fact that local hospitals and centers provided transgender counseling or services to 300 children a year.

At least one of them, Children’s Mercy Hospital of Kansas City, injected minors with cross-sex hormones.

After Missouri passed a SAFE law, Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, had to send letters to Children’s Mercy and Planned Parenthood Great Plains in Kansas City threatening them with legal repercussions unless they would comply with the law and cease and desist carrying out transgender procedures on minors.

The hospital insisted it would comply with the law. But the KC Care Medical Center’s website still refers minors to “Gender Pathways Services at Children’s Mercy Hospital.” While Children’s Mercy does not appear to carry out such procedures, its website still tells parents, “Gender identity is usually firmly established and can be stated by your child” by the age of seven.

Missouri, home of whistleblower Jamie Reed of The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, has noted that “nearly all children who came to the Center here presented with very serious mental health problems,” including autism, ADHD, serious depression, and psychosomatic blindness. 

“There are essentially two paths here. There’s path one, where a counselor helps a child through their confusion, has open and honest conversations with him, and the child develops comfort with his natal sex,” said Frampton. “As we know, the overwhelming majority of children with these concerns will [outgrow them] if they’re given the chance.”

“The second path, and the one that Kansas City is essentially forcing counselors to send kids down, is the path towards medicalized transition and dangerous drugs and surgeries that we know, in the end, do not actually make people happier and carry inordinate risks.”

More than 20 states ban free-speech on sexual preference and/or gender identity, including Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Walz and Whitmer are Democrats.

The Supreme Court will soon decide whether state stifling of consensual free speech will stand. Justices agreed in March to hear a case against Colorado’s free-speech ban—just a year and a half after justices declined to hear a challenge to the same law in Washington state.

“We’re very encouraged that the Supreme Court … agreed to take that case,” Frampton told Perkins, hoping the justices will “hand down a decision affirming that, yes, indeed, counselors have a First Amendment right to have these conversations with struggling kids.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand.

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