Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, the three creepiest creepers on the (illegitimate Republican partisan hack) Supreme Court, would love to let Washington state torture LGBTQ+ kids with fake, discredited “conversion therapy,” which has been widely exposed as torture. Specifically, it’s extremist religious torture. Whether it’s talk “therapy” or whether it also has physical components, there is no justification for it. It’s child abuse.
Oh yeah, and it doesn’t actually work. Many if not most people who once claimed to be “ex-gay” and worked in the field have ended up renouncing their work and coming (back) out of the closet as LGBTQ+ people, because nobody actually changes their sexuality or gender identity by trying to pray it away. Often these religious snake oil salesmen get caught in the act while they’re working in the conversion torture business.
As Truth Wins Out, a nonprofit that fights the vile consumer fraud of conversion therapy, points out, every major medical and mental health organization rejects the practice. (Full disclosure: we used to work there!)
Washington state banned it in 2018. One lunatic charlatan “ex-gay” practitioner named Brian Tingley was upset about that, so he hired the Alliance Defending Freedom hate group to stomp its feet for him. (Raise your hand if you want to go see Dr. “Tingley” today. Nope? Also he is not a doctor.)
Well, good news! For once, this fascist Christian Supreme Court has told ADF and its client to eat an entire bag of dicks and sent them packing. Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts joined the liberals in refusing to grant cert to Tingley’s case.
Tingley argues WAAAAAAH MY FREE SPEECH (to torture LGBTQ+ kids) WAAAAAAH, and that it is very unfair not to let him conduct his marriage and family therapy practice according to his discredited idiot beliefs (religious groups are actually exempt from the law):
Tingley, his lawyers say, “believes that the sex each person receives at conception is not an accident or error but rather a gift from God” and that sexual relationships should only occur “between one man and one woman mutually committed through marriage.”
Cool, and what medical licensing authority gave Tingley his certification in dispensing God’s gifts to children? The University of Fuck Off?
In his long, bitchy, maundering dissent, Clarence Thomas agreed that WAAAAAAAH MY FREE SPEECH, WAAAAAAAH.
Thomas wrote that there is “a fierce public debate over how best to help minors with gender dysphoria” and that the state had “silenced one side of this debate.”
Whatever. Abusive conservative Christian weirdos are free to stand on any street corner and publicly debate “ex-gay” torture. They’re just not allowed to prey on minor children with it in Washington and a number of other states.
ADF is the legal hate group that chases whinyass fundamentalist Christians like ambulances, and files literally fake lawsuits for its clients in an effort to convince hack judges to inflict their sick lifestyles on the rest of America. ADF is currently trying to get the completely safe abortion drug mifepristone banned, in a case that’s being argued by Erin Hawley, wife of the Senate’s top seditionist. It’s also the place where extremist freak Speaker Mike Johnson used to work.
NBC News has more background on this case, including arguments from Tingley’s lawyers why the Supreme Court should stand at attention and do what the religious right is demanding right now, even though lower courts just keep telling them to pound sand.
It’s seldom that this incarnation of the Supreme Court does anything halfway decent. Relish these few and far between moments, because there’s probably something disgusting right around the corner.
[NBC News]
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