LGBT Conversion Therapy Legalized in Florida

Jonathan Adler reports:

Attempting to "cure" a gay or transgender minor via conversion therapy counts as protected First Amendment speech and can't simply be banned by ordinances, a federal appeals court ruled today.

LGBT activists and psychological experts have been targeting conversion therapy as a fraudulent practice that harms children for years. Some states have begun banning the treatment, starting with New Jersey and California in 2013. Now, it's forbidden in 20 states, and several cities and counties have passed their own laws against it. ...

The ruling also creates a circuit court split. In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that California's law banning conversion therapy for minors did not violate the First Amendment. That court accepted the argument that the state was regulating conduct, not speech, and therefore subjected the law to a lower level of scrutiny than the 11th Circuit. And so this debate over whether conversion therapy is a form of protected speech may ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.

There are two issues here -- the free speech issue, and the underlying medical and scientific merits.

When these laws were pushed thru, the leftists who control the psychiatry and psychology professions argued that the therapies in question do not work. But in their testimony, they were unable to identify any other psycho therapy that works any better!

There is also huge controversy over Abigail Shrier's new book:

What I aim to do, as a journalist, is to investigate cultural phenomena, and here was one worth investigating: Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States. Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of “transphobia” — despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good.

Again we have a situation where a leftist, atheist, Jewish-dominated, free-will-denying profession seeks control over everyone else.

PBS TV just broadcast a show on LGBTQ foster kids have a harder time finding permanent homes. This is really sick. And the Boy Scouts are running out of cash, due to LGBTQ litigation. It was once a fine organization, and it has been destroyed by leftists.

. And again, these issues are not being argued on the medical or scientific merits, because none of that would every justify sex-change surgery on teenaged girls. This is ideological destruction based on religious beliefs.