Appeals Court Upholds Washington’s Conversion Therapy Ban

metroweekly.com:

Reuters.Under the law, which applies equally to all licensed therapists, practitioners who subject minors to the therapy, which purports to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, can be fined, disciplined, or risk having their license to practice suspended or revoked.

But Brian Tingley, a therapist who lives in Tacoma and practices in Fircrest, Washington, said the ban amounted to censorship, seeking to silence him from engaging in “talk therapy” to help clients with “unwanted same-sex attraction” overcome their attractions and help them to live lives consistent with their moral values and religious beliefs.

Healso claimed that the law unfairly targeted him as a Christian, due to his religious beliefs opposing homosexuality and believing that gender is fixed at birth.

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, representing the government, contended that the ban didn’t target “speech,” but rather conduct, and that the state had a vested interest in protecting children from being subjected to a practice that most major medical and mental health organizations have denounced as both psychologically harmful and, more importantly, ineffective at doing what it claims to achieve — namely, radically altering a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.A federal judge previously upheld the ban, but Tingley’s lawyers, with the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom, appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit, which ultimately upheld the lower court’s ruling.“Washington, like other states, has concluded that health care providers should not be able to treat a child by such means as telling him that he is ‘the abomination we had heard about in Sunday school,'” Circuit Judge Ronald Gould wrote on behalf of the.