Just as a related fight is hitting the U.S. Supreme Court, the lower 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has confirmed that talk therapy for minors with gender confusion issues is, in fact, protected speech.
“The Sixth Circuit has rightly ruled that laws restricting counselors and clients to only one viewpoint violate the First Amendment. Talk therapy is speech, and the government has no authority to restrict that speech to just one viewpoint,” explained Mat Staver, chief of Liberty Counsel, which repeatedly has fought such First Amendment violations.
“The ruling allows therapists to engage in professional, compassionate counseling giving children a path to alleviate their mental health issues. Counselors and clients should have the freedom to choose the counsel of their choice and be free of government censorship.”
The court’s 2-1 decision said talk therapy counseling used to treat minors with unwanted gender confusion is speech protected by the First Amendment. The appeals court panel issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking a 2023 Michigan law that banned minors from talk therapy, which is often misnamed as “conversion therapy.”
The dispute in Catholic Charities v. Whitmer involved a coalition of church groups as well as a private counselor.
They charged that Michigan’s law, HB 4616, was a speech-based restriction “because it barred any therapy seeking to change minors’ sexual orientation or gender identity to align with their birth sex,” Liberty Counsel reported.
But the law did allow “counseling that assists with accepting a person’s gender confusion,” which means on a hot-button social fight, the state wanted to allow only one side’s arguments to be presented.
Violations of the law for therapists included possible loss of a license and fines up to $250,000.
“The plaintiffs here offer counseling in the form of ‘talk therapy’: literally, spoken words and nothing more,” explained Raymond Kethledge, a circuit judge, in the majority. “We hold, therefore, that HB 4616 is subject to the strictest of scrutiny, under the First Amendment, as a content- and viewpoint-discriminatory restriction upon speech.”
The decision revealed the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their First Amendment arguments.
The ruling found Michigan discriminated “based on viewpoint.”
The opinion said, “The Michigan law codifies ‘a particular viewpoint—sexual orientation is immutable, but gender is not—and prohibit[s] the therapists from advancing any other perspective.’ For when the government targets ‘particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant.’”
Michigan pushed forward the argument, as have other leftist governments, that its speech restrictions regulated “conduct,” not actually speech.
U.S. circuit courts now are split on the dispute, the Supreme Court heard arguments weeks ago on a similar fight in Colorado. That decision, when it comes, could impact all 23 state-level speech bans across the country.
“Justice Amy Coney Barrett also scrutinized how a state can just ‘pick a side’ when there are competing medical views,” Liberty Counsel reported.
The legal team has been on the fight since 2012 when California led the charge to censor speech.
The Supreme Court already has struck related laws when it killed California’s attempt to regulate the speech of crisis pregnancy centers.
In leftist Colorado, LGBT radicals including homosexual Gov. Jared Polis have decided to fine counselors for even attempting to help a minor overcome unwanted gender confusion issues.
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