Minneapolis

The Door That Only Swings One Way

On Monday, in a Minneapolis federal courtroom, an association of Christian counselors asked a judge to stop Minnesota from disciplining its members under the state’s 2023 counseling restriction while their lawsuit proceeds. The statute, Minn. Stat. § 214.078, forbids licensed mental-health practitioners from engaging in “conversion therapy”—including talk therapy—with minors or vulnerable adults if the practice seeks to change sexual orientation or gender identity. Violations can cost a license. The same law expressly permits counseling that offers “acceptance, support, and understanding,” or that provides “assistance to an individual undergoing gender transition.”

That is not a rumor from a pamphlet. It is the text, set out in the complaint filed by the Christian Counselors Freedom Alliance and summarized this week by Courthouse News Service. The Alliance, represented by True North Legal, argues the law is nearly identical to the Colorado statute the Supreme Court reviewed in Chiles v. Salazar this March. In that 8–1 decision, the Court held that purely verbal talk therapy is protected speech and must be judged under strict scrutiny—the highest constitutional test. The Court did not erase Colorado’s law outright; it sent the case back. But it left little doubt that a state may not license only one side of a conversation.

What the Court Already Said

Courthouse News reported that the federal judge hearing the Minnesota motion signaled an uphill battle for the state’s defense of the ban, even while hesitating to grant a preliminary injunction at once. The suit is an as-applied challenge: an injunction would protect the Alliance’s members rather than strike the statute for everyone. The state asked the court to leave the status quo in place, citing medical organizations that reject such counseling as illegitimate. Those are facts about a hearing, not a final judgment. The judgment, when it comes, will have to live with Chiles.

Mercy Is Not a Monopoly of the State

Lucid’s opinion, labeled as such, is simple. A free country may regulate force and fraud. It may not, under the banner of medicine, tell a willing patient and a licensed counselor which hopes they are allowed to speak aloud. If a young person asks for help to live at peace with his or her body, the state that forbids that conversation while blessing the opposite one has not discovered science. It has discovered a creed and borrowed a licensing board to enforce it.

The Alliance is not asking Minnesota to evangelize the waiting room. It is asking that the First Amendment still apply once the door is closed. After Chiles, that should not be a close question. Whether the injunction arrives this month or later, the principle is older than the statute: the state does not own the soul, and it does not own the speech by which a soul tries to tell the truth about itself.

References

• Courthouse News: Judge signals uphill battle for Minnesota’s conversion therapy ban
• Complaint: Christian Counselors Freedom Alliance v. Minnesota (D. Minn.)
• True North Legal: Motion to halt Minnesota’s counseling-speech ban

Photo by nullrend via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; cropped and color-adjusted.