Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Part I

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SCOTUS Takes Up Conversion Therapy Case from Colorado: There is More to the Case Than Many Admit — Including a Word Game to Target Christian Conviction

Colorado, California, in total, about 20 states prohibit by law so-called conversion therapy when it comes to minors, those who are 18 and under now. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States has taken a case on appeal. That case comes from a counselor, a therapist there in the state of Colorado who says that it is unconstitutional that she is prohibited from offering professional services to young people who say they want to overcome or make right in terms of their understanding of sexuality and gender, their own understanding of their sexual orientation and their own gender identity, which is to say these are young people who are seeking out this particular kind of counsel, this kind of therapy as it’s defined. But the state of Colorado says that it is illegal.

As the L.A. Times reports it, “The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a free speech challenge to laws in Colorado, California, and 20 other states that forbid licensed counselors from seeking to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of minors.” The woman in this case is Kaley Chiles. She’s identified as a licensed counselor there in Colorado. She says that the law in Colorado infringes upon her free speech as the L.A. Times says, “She said her clients seek Christian-based counseling to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with their physical body.”

The state of Colorado not only says that’s illegal, it is going to defend that case in court and now in arguments before the nation’s highest court. The mainstream media are piling on in this and it just shows you how sexual revolutions, moral revolutions take place. CNN’s report is by John Fritze begins, “The Supreme Court on Monday said it would review a Colorado law that bars mental health professionals from practicing conversion therapy for minors, a discredited practice that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

So you’ll notice the way that is reported by CNN. This is a news report, but it has this editorial statement. It defines conversion therapy as a “discredited practice that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” Later in the same CNN report we read this, “Critics say conversion therapy, which attempts to convert people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning into straight or cisgender people, causes serious emotional harm and can have deadly results.” Now, just so we know what we’re talking about here, California became one of the first states to outlaw what the state identified as conversion therapy in 2012. Colorado came along about 2016, all told, as I said, more than 20 states have similar laws on the books. The case coming from Colorado is sure to have effects in California and elsewhere as well as in the state of Colorado once the Supreme Court hands down a ruling.

The argument that is being made by the counselor in this case is a free speech argument. She’s arguing that her right to free speech is infringed upon by this law and by that she means that when the state tells her what therapeutic response she has to give and what words she has to use and what words she can’t use, that is an infringement upon free speech. As Christians, we recognize it is a good thing that the Supreme Court has agreed to take this case. The Supreme Court is faced with hundreds of those who are appealing to the court, hundreds of cases the court could take. It takes only a limited number. It tells us a lot that at least a sufficient number of justices decided to take this case that considered it this important. The second thing to remember about the Supreme Court is that it rarely takes cases without precedential value.

That is to say they’re not really just interested in one law in one state, they’re interested in the larger constitutional question. This case has to do with the state of Colorado, but regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in this case, the ruling is going to have enormous effect and the value of the case as precedent is going to be celebrated by one side and limited by the other side. Neither side is going to argue that it’s not important. Adam Liptak of The New York Times goes back to the current law there in Colorado, adopted in 2019, and we are told that in this new law, Colorado allows treatments that provide “acceptance, support and understanding.” The next sentence, “It exempts therapists engaged in the practice of religious ministry.” So okay, let’s just talk about that for a moment. Is there a religious liberty aspect to this?

Not if the person identifies as a minister or that the person’s engaged in religious ministry. I’m using the terms in the legal way they’re expressed here. So this law at least should not be deployed against a church or a pastor, nor an officially explicitly Christian counseling kind of ministry. But that does not mean there’s not a religious liberty aspect here. The religious liberty aspect has to do with the fact that citizens hold religious liberty rights and in this case, this counselor could well be claiming religious liberty rights as well as free speech rights, or at least Christians should understand that an infringement upon the ability of a counselor to operate on the counselor’s religious beliefs, and to speak words consistent with those religious beliefs, that is a form of the violation of religious liberty. The law, as it now stands in Colorado, actually involves that language in which the counselors are told what kind of language they can’t use.

They can be accepting and affirming. They can’t speak critically of someone’s sexual orientation, even if that person feels that they want to overcome a sexual orientation. Again, the law adopted in 2019 says that counselors may provide treatments that offer “acceptance, support, and understanding.” So those three words, acceptance, support, and understanding that is to say the state of Colorado has taken sides. So even before Colorado, the state of California adopted similar legislation, about 20 other states. And of course this maps out pretty much as you would expect in red state, blue state America. And you’re looking at the states that have adopted this kind of law. And you also have states, of course, that have taken action to restrict so-called gender affirmation or gender reassignment therapies with minors. And the fact is that you’re looking at two different worlds, two different moral universes, and about half the states are in one moral universe.

The other half the states are in another moral universe. And you’ll also notice the issue after issue, red and blue America pretty much map out the same. Okay, so now I want to get beyond this court case to the underlying issue and the use of the term conversion therapy. So basically conversion therapy is being used in the Colorado law and in the public media discourse, the term conversion therapy is really referring to any effort to say that a person might need to change the way he or she thinks about sexuality, sexual orientation, sexual attraction. And of course you’re also talking about not only the L and the G and the B, but also T. You can understand why this gets complicated, but you also understand the agenda of the sexual revolution is to say it’s not even legitimate to make a contrary argument. And they’re arguing that it is a form of harm if you try to use any kind of counseling or therapy or even any kind of argument because again, it comes right down to the words that are acceptable and words that are unacceptable.

In order to say, tell a person engaged in homosexual behavior, they ought not to engage in such behavior. But in this case, of course, it even comes down to the right of a counselor to offer counsel to someone who comes and says, “Perhaps I’m engaged in a behavior I think is wrong. I have a set of sexual attractions I believe is wrong. Can you help me to deal with that?” The state of Colorado says, “No, there is only one way you can counsel and that is acceptance, support, and understanding.” Okay, this is where the entire world of the therapeutic is used against orthodox Christianity and honestly is used against any classical understanding of male and female and any moral understanding of sexual behavior because the argument here is that it is a form of harm. It is a form of injury for anyone to tell anyone that their sexual orientation or their sexual feelings or their sexual beliefs or their sexual activities would be wrong, at least in terms of LGBTQ issues.

Now, this is a big fight. You have to go back to the 1970s to understand this was a fight in the American Psychiatric Association. It was a fight in the American Psychological Association. And you’ll notice you had these professional organizations back in the early 1970s in the case of the American Psychiatric Association, that association, the association of the mainstream psychiatrists in the United States of America, they said in the early 1970s, that homosexual feelings are a form of mental disorder. They came back after just about a two or three day meeting and completely reversed their position. Let me just point out that’s not science, that’s not science, that’s politics. Now, the use of the term “conversion therapy” is an extension of the efforts of the sexual revolutionaries to just discredit and indeed disallow this kind of language or this kind of argument, particularly when it comes to minors, to young people, to children and to teenagers.

Part II

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‘My Passport Denies My Existence’: Watch This Language Game and Recognize It

But let’s ask some basic theological questions. What do we think about conversion therapy? Well, there have been some things that have been done in the name of conversion therapy that I think most biblically minded Christians would say are not right. That is to say there are some persons who have believed they can somehow use some kind of threatening behavior, they can use some kind of really harsh therapy to try to bring about a change in sexual attraction. I think biblically minded Christians understanding the way sin works, they understand that it is not so easily addressed as that, but biblically minded Christians have to look at the word conversion therapy and recognize, well, you know that first word, it’s a lot more interesting to us theologically than it is to us in any kind of therapeutic context. We’re talking about conversion because that is at the center of the Christian gospel.

We believe that we are indeed born again by the power of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ when we come to faith and belief in him and repentance of sin, and we believe that we are called to a new way of life and that we have the indwelling Holy Spirit to aid us in making progress towards sanctification, which is to say that if you’re a Christian, you can’t be against conversion therapy, especially leaning in first to the conversion part. Furthermore, given our understanding of the gospel and the Christian life and sanctification, progressive sanctification, we do believe that Christians have the responsibility to align our sexual desires, our sexual interests, our sexual identity, and furthermore all of course relationships and behaviors, we need to align them with Scripture. And we understand that when in a fallen world there is a pattern of same-sex attraction, that’s wrong, and we say that categorically, we say that without hesitation.

We don’t say that it’s just easily undone, but we certainly can’t buy into the idea that it can’t be reversed, it can’t be alleviated, that persons can’t move into wholeness, that Christians empowered by the gospel and dwelt by the Holy Spirit cannot be obedient. That is a false teaching the Christian Church needs to recognize as such. So when we see a law in this case or say a professional structure against conversion therapy, the first thing we need to acknowledge is not everything called a therapy is consistent with Scripture, but when you talk about conversion therapy, the way that it’s being legally defined, that is actually striking at the heart of the Christian gospel, striking at the heart of what we believe is a biblical understanding of holiness and wholeness.

And so we need to recognize this kind of law is an infringement on religious liberty. And of course, even as they carve out an exemption here for explicitly identified religious counselors, and for the church context, you need to recognize that culturally this is a way of trying to coerce the entire society towards the full acceptance and celebration of everything, LGBTQ+++.

I want to go back to that CNN report by John Fritze because it includes the language we need to theologically dissect here for a moment. “Critics say conversion therapy which attempts to convert people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning into straight or cisgender people causes serious emotional harm and can have deadly results.” The language I want to center in on is where we are told that conversion therapy attempts to convert people who identify as, and the words are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning into straight or cisgender people. Now remember the word cisgender is an invented word–insidiously so–in which it is suggested that cisgender just needs to be put alongside say transgender as a way of saying some people their gender identity identifies with or is corresponding to their physical form, their biological sex. But in other cases, that is not so. Cis means in alignment with, which means if you’re not transgender, you’re not tempted in a transgender direction, you are cisgender.

Now, of course, the use of a term there is a way of trying to say they’re just equal choices in an array of human experience and in an array of identity politics. But the thing I want to point out here is that the critics say that conversion therapy, this CNN report uses the language to say, is to convert people identify as LGBTQ++ into straight or cisgender people. Now, that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. Let’s just back up a moment. We need to recognize identity politics when we see it and call it out for what it is. This is the assumption, and this is one of the deadly lies of the age. This is the assumption that every single one of us is identified by certain markers and they establish an identity and a solidarity. And there’s something that in this case, of course, have great political power.

So you’re talking about changing people who identify as blank, blank, blank into straight or cisgender people. That is not exactly what Christians hope to see. We do hope to see persons gain victory over misunderstandings of their gender identity. We urgently want to see them gain victory over sex attraction to someone of the same gender. We want them certainly to stop patterns of sexual sin and get over them. We hope and pray and work for a realignment of their sexual desires and sexual interests into that which are consistent with Scripture.

But it’s not that we can buy into just our own form of identity politics and to say, you once were this. Now you’re something else. The identity politics is something we need to identify as problematic, sinful at the core because the identity politics that’s being played here, it’s not consistent with the Christian gospel that says, number one, here is the great distinction between those are lost and those who are found, those who are in Christ and those who are not, those who have been born again and those who have not, those who are new creatures in Christ and those who are not.

And of course there are other distinctions including male and female, but my point is this, wholeness and holiness means consistent with those things and we cannot lie about sin. And one of the things we must not do is turn sin into just another arena of identity politics. And so at least in part what we mean there is that when someone comes to us and says, “I’m gay,” we want to say to them, “That’s not the most important thing about you.” And instead, we see a human being made in the image of God who is involved in a pattern of sin and a deceitful pattern of sin. We don’t underestimate how deceitful it is. We also understand that in a sinful world, desires and dreams and attractions and expectations and behaviors can all get wrapped together and the world can turn that politically into identity politics.

We understand it as a pattern of temptation and a pattern of behavior, a sinful pattern of temptation and a sinful pattern of behavior. And so we as Christians understand that by the power of Christ, we not only must preach against such things, we must also fight against such things, and that means we encourage one another to righteousness and we seek in the ministry of the church through the ordinary means of grace to encourage Christians regardless of all of these issues or whatever pattern of sin may afflict the Christian into victory over that sin and to sanctification progressively, by the power of Christ, and under the glory of God. One of the most insidious lies of the world, it’s an insidious lie of the devil, is that we simply are our sin and that nothing can change that fact. We simply are who we are and nothing can change that fact.

That is a direct denial of the power of the gospel. In this sense, the gospel is not just of course good news to those who are struggling with such issues, whether they be gender identity issues or sexual orientation or sexual attraction issues. It’s good news for every Christian because every one of us is a sinner saved by grace, and every one of us is called to holiness and to gaining victory over temptations and to confronting the reality of sin, and looking to the sanctification that comes by the preaching of the word of God by the power of the gospel, by the indwelling spirit, and thus we understand that is normative Christianity and there’s not a carve out for sexual identity politics. So as Christians, we understand that in a sinful world with the corruption of sin all around us, there is something real in a pattern of attraction to the wrong sex or confusion over one’s gender identity.

There’s something real there, but we as Christians understand there’s something even more real and that is the power of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I can just say at this point I want to be very honest. I think I just need to say that I don’t think there’s any form of secular therapy that can make a whole lot of genuine headway here. On the other hand, I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ, not only can, but does.

Part III

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‘My Passport Denies My Existence’: Evaluating the Backlash to the Effects of Trump’s Executive Order on Gender

But next, just because we’re on this issue, there’s something else and it’s coming up again and again right now in public conversation. I want us to see it and I think once you see it, once you hear it, you’re going to recognize it because you’re going to see it and you’re going to hear it over and over again. It’s the argument coming and it’s based upon the gender ideology, the sexual revolutionists and their ideologies. It is based upon the use of some Marxist categories and some therapeutic categories, those things mixed together. And yes, appropriately, some of this just comes down to critical theory and the intersection with identity politics, and here’s where the water hits the wheel, and here’s what I want you to be able to see. I want you to be able to hear this when you hear this. 

So in a report just this week in USA Today, Kathleen Wong, the headline is “Trump Gender Policy Muddies Passport Assignments.” And by the way, this gets to the fact that the executive order handed down by President Trump in terms of the US government recognizing two and only two genders, male and female, thus defined, that is going to have implications for passports because passports include an identity, a name and a photograph, and a gender identity of male or female, and thus the Biden administration and even before that, the Obama administration in bringing about changes to allow for some kind of non-binary or complete reassignment in terms of the gender on a passport, that’s not going to be possible now, and so we’re being told this is going to create all kinds of problems.

For one thing, you’re going to have certain American citizens who will have a driver’s license from one state that would probably be a more liberal blue state, and a passport from the federal government, and they would have conceivably different gender identity indications, and that could lead to, of course, problems in terms of saying, getting access to some countries, the usefulness of the passport in that kind of context, and we’re being told that it’s a muddled policy that’s by the description of some of the critics. Listen how the story begins “In early January while flying from West Virginia to New York City, Ashton Orr was flagged by airport security and accused of using a fake ID. Orr’s driver’s license had been updated with a male sex designation, but his passport still listed female.” The article goes on to say that she identified as a man, explained transgender identity.

You can pretty much figure where this goes. “Shaken from the incident, Orr decided it was time to update the passport and applied for expedited renewal, sent along important material, documents like birth certificate on January 16. That’s when the Trump executive order came down just days later.” Here’s what we have. “The LGBTQ+ advocate was given two options, withdraw the passport application or receive one with biological sex at birth as designation,” and we’re being told that this means the citizen is being forced to rearrange an upcoming trip to Ireland in March for a medical procedure. Okay, fill in the gaps on that. Okay. Here’s where I want you to hear the words. “It’s very isolating and concerning,” Orr told USA Today, “Receiving a passport that misgenders me is not just a clerical error. It’s a profound denial of my identity and my existence, so I’m in this situation where I either have to choose one horrible thing or the other horrible thing.”

Okay. What do I want us to hear? Three things there. Number one, misgender, number two, profound denial of identity, and the next phrase about a denial of existence. Okay. Those are three things you just need to listen for, and I particularly want to get to the last one about denying existence. 

The first thing is misgender, and you can understand that that’s a new category. George Washington didn’t have to worry about it, neither did your grandparents. It’s a thing now where a misgendering is supposedly in a transgender context where you say the wrong gender and fail that means to acknowledge the new gender identity. If you do that, you’re being charged with misgendering. Again, the word itself points to a huge moral problem. Christians understand that. The second thing is a denial of identity, but the third I want to focus on that is a denial of my existence.

This comes up again and again and again where we’re being told that holding views contrary to the LGBTQ+ revolution means that we are denying the existence of whole classes of people. This is where we have to come back and say, we’re not denying their existence as people. We’re denying their existence given this claimed identity at the intersection of the sexual revolution and identity politics, but we understand how powerful this is. This is how the sexual revolution has been driven by using this kind of language and forcing it as a new morality to say that if you deny that I am a woman, when you know you’re looking at a biological man, then you’re being told that you’re denying that person’s existence. That is nonsense. That is a psychotherapeutic. It is a critical theory. It is a cultural Marxist combination of mush, but it is politically powerful.

It is very potent, and that’s why it shows up in this kind of argument, and it could well be directed at a Christian pastor, at any Christian. It is being directed, of course, it’s students who are studying in schools and colleges and universities. You’re being told that if you don’t join the revolution, you are denying the existence of entire classes of people, and here’s the point. We are not denying their existence. We are actually affirming their existence, even if they’re confused about their existence. And regardless of what they say about themselves, we see them as human beings made in the image of God, male or female, and we understand that we owe to them the truth and we owe to them not entering into a lie. We don’t underestimate the difficulty of these issues. We don’t underestimate the deep-seatedness of these problems, but that just throws us again on the fact that there is no answer to any of this in terms of human brokenness and human sin, but the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not just for them, but for us as well. 

We have to fight back hard against the accusation that we’re denying someone’s existence when what we’re actually trying to do is to treat them as a fellow human being made in the image of God with honesty and truth.