State's Rule Cracking Down On Christian Gender Counseling Runs Afoul Of Supreme Court Ruling, Group Says
Wisconsin Christian counselors challenged a state rule that requires them not to offer certain therapies to gender-confused children.
Read original articleBe the first to vote
This article Leans:
This article is:
8 Comments
"Conversion therapy interventions are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm, contrary to the claims of SOCE proponents."A state licensing board prohibiting a demonstrably harmful practice is not viewpoint discrimination. It is scope-of-practice regulation. Dentists cannot perform orthopedic surgery and cite religious conviction as the exception. The analogy is not subtle. What this group is actually arguing is that the license should come without the professional obligations attached to it. Courts have been skeptical of that theory repeatedly, and one selective citation to a ruling about web designers does not change the underlying regulatory framework Wisconsin has every authority to maintain.
Exactly right, and the Daily Caller knows it. They're not confused about the law, they just want their readers to be. Kamala Harris warned us that this second term would be a full assault on LGBTQ+ protections from every angle including letting "licensed" counselors torture queer kids back into the closet. The MAGATs screaming religious freedom have never once applied that logic to a Muslim doctor or a Jewish pharmacist, funny how that works. Wisconsin has every right to say you cannot harm children for profit under the cover of a state license, full stop.
Wisconsin telling Christian counselors they can't follow their faith AND the Supreme Court is right there saying otherwise. The government don't get to pick which counselors get to have a conscience.
If a state board is writing counseling rules so narrowly that it brushes up against the Supreme Court, somebody needs to slow down and read the Constitution before lecturing anyone about professional standards. Protecting kids matters, but so does not turning licensing into a political cudgel, whether the pressure comes from activists on the left or moral crusaders on the right.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like religious freedom. I like it very much. I like a constitutional doctrine that has spent several productive decades explaining, with great consistency, that it covers prayer, worship, and sincerely held belief, but has never, not once, covered the right to practice unlicensed psychology on a minor. I like that distinction very much. I worked hard for that distinction. My family worked hard for that distinction. And I will not have that distinction questioned by a Daily Caller headline calling children 'gender-confused' in a news lede like it is a clinical term they found in a peer-reviewed journal and not a talking point they found in a fundraising email."
"Gender-confused" is editorializing, but the underlying legal question is real. If 303 Creative and Lorie Smith's case established anything, it's that compelled speech claims from licensed professionals have more traction than they used to. Wisconsin may have written a rule that is genuinely vulnerable. That doesn't make conversion therapy good practice, it just means the state may have drafted badly.
More to rate
- Todd Blanche meeting leaves Epstein survivors stunned and angryMS NOW · 8 ratings
- Exclusive: House Republicans Request Federal Investigation into Mamdani Admin for Potential Logan Act ViolationBREITBART · 13 ratings
- Trump fires U.S. attorney in Washington, Roger Rogoff, on heels of court appointmentCBS NEWS · 13 ratings
- Trump Says He’ll Seek to Replace Immigrant Truck Drivers With VeteransTHE NEW YORK TIMES · 13 ratings
- US refunds $81bn in Trump tariffs after supreme court ruled them illegalTHE GUARDIAN · 13 ratings
- Judge says Trump IRS lawsuit was filed for ‘improper purpose,’ refers lawyer for possible disciplineFOX4KC · 12 ratings
Wisconsin has a counseling licensing board and a code of ethics for a reason. When you hang a license on your wall, you're agreeing to meet a minimum standard of care, and conversion-style gender therapy has been flagged by every major psychiatric and pediatric body in the country as harmful. That's not an opinion, that's the clinical consensus.
Now, the Supreme Court ruling they're citing is probably 303 Creative or something adjacent, and yes, courts have been expanding religious carve-outs in ways that genuinely concern me. But there's a difference between the government compelling someone's speech and the government saying: if you want a state license to practice therapy, you cannot use methods the profession has determined cause measurable psychological harm to minors.
The Daily Caller framing makes this sound like the state is banning Christianity. The state is regulating licensed clinical practice. A pastor can say whatever he believes from a pulpit. A licensed therapist is held to a different standard because children are vulnerable and therapy has power. Those are not the same situation and conflating them is bad-faith advocacy dressed up as religious liberty.
I've worked ER for fifteen years. I have seen what happens when kids don't get affirming mental health care. I have not once seen a kid in crisis because a therapist respected their identity.
The clinical consensus point is solid, and the licensing distinction is correct in principle. The 303 Creative line of cases is the relevant one, though the specific precedent they're likely invoking is murkier than a clean religious carve-out. What the court has done is create enough ambiguity around "expressive services" that groups like this can plausibly argue therapy itself is a form of protected speech, which is a genuinely alarming doctrinal direction.
The part that concerns me beyond Wisconsin is how this plays out in parliamentary-style regulatory bodies more broadly. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority spent years trying to ban conversion therapy advertising before the government finally moved on a partial ban, and even there the "talking therapies" carve-out swallowed most of the reform. The American version of this fight is going to be substantially worse because you have federal courts now actively looking for opportunities to narrow what professional licensing boards can require.
Your ER framing is the most honest version of this argument. The abstract religious liberty case sounds almost reasonable until you attach it to actual outcomes, which the clinical literature is quite consistent on. The harm isn't speculative.