MS. STEVENSON: We have no facts about that in this case, but I wouldn’t disagree that it’s possible.JUSTICE ALITO: Isn’t it a fact that it’s happened in the past?... “Three generations of idiots are enough”?
Those few quoted words invoke an infamous case, Buck v. Bell, where a state had seen fit to sterilize a "feeble minded woman" without her consent. The Supreme Court did not object to the state's approach to medical science.
MS. STEVENSON: That’s certainly a concern. If there were evidence in the record that a standard of care wasn’t based on patient safety, that would be highly relevant.
Justice Alito didn't ask about whether the motive was correct — whether medical scientists were sincerely pursuing patient safety. He was concerned with whether the goal was pursued in a truly scientific manner and was not skewed by politics and ideology.
JUSTICE ALITO: Isn’t that a reason to apply First Amendment scrutiny when what’s being regulated is pure speech, rather than just accepting the medical standard of care and medical consensus as the end of the matter, allowing rational basis review where anything goes?
The lawyer must resist this idea that the therapy is "pure speech." The idea she uses is that these are "words used to deliver medical treatment" (which are different from words expressing the opinion that conversion therapy is good (or bad)):
MS. STEVENSON: No, Your Honor. When we’re talking about words used to deliver medical treatment, the issues are the same whether it’s words or medical practices that don’t involve words. This statute, for example, doesn’t stop anyone from sharing opinions about conversion therapy or how the consensus on it was reached. In this case, there’s no evidence of any motive by the Colorado legislature or any medical association to reach this conclusion based on anything other than protecting minors and a decades-long record of research.
Justice Alito returns to the idea that medical consensus can be wrong and the classic example of eugenics, but the lawyer for Colorado declines to engage:
JUSTICE ALITO: Was there a time when many medical professionals thought certain people should not be permitted to procreate because they had low IQs?MS. STEVENSON: I don’t know that, but I’ll accept the premise.JUSTICE ALITO: Was there a time when many medical professionals thought every child born with Down syndrome should be immediately put in an institution?MS. STEVENSON: I don’t know that, Your Honor.JUSTICE ALITO: Thank you.
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33 comments:
My younger brother, born in 1957, was Downs. Yes, my parents were informed that he should be institutionalized. Ms. Stevenson is at best ignorant.
As a therapist, I laugh at the idea that talk therapy is a "medical" treatment. Medical treatments hopefully have some basis in science and talk therapy does not.
The idea that there is some sort of non-biased perspective is dangerous.
Leftists on X are already melting down accusing these therapists of some forced physical torture as a form of conversion therapy.
Is there any proof that is actually occurring?
Any proof at all?
I guess I don’t understand how conversion therapy is awful but transgender surgery is essential.
The people who want to a conversion therapy and the people who want to schools and children to collude on sex changes without parental consent are very overlapped on the Venn diagram.
When you look for evil the best solution place to start is with the people loudest in proclamation of their goodness.
Every word a licensed therapist utters in therapy is literally medicine. Freud, Jordan Peterson, doesn't matter. And to think that Western science holds tribal Medicine Men in contempt.
Extremely topical (H/T instapundit). What Dusty fails to understand is that the gayification-ratchet was only ever intended to work in one direction.
Our health care industry is absolutely corrupt. Standard of Care is the lowest only protection doctors have from lawyers so the people who control healthcare are the people who write the Standards of Care.
Guess who writes the Standards of Care.
Peachy said, "Is there any proof that is actually occurring?
Any proof at all?"
The proof would be large numbers of conversion therapists having been shot in the neck, but all those stories are strangely missing from the news.
There was a time, not long ago, when the UK thought gay men should be castrated. That is what Colorado is essentially doing now.
I am sad that Taylor Swift is letting this happen.
I am Laslo.
"I guess I don’t understand how conversion therapy is awful but transgender surgery is essential."
Polluting the hormonal environment and slicing off healthy reproductive organs are essential elements of the Marxists' long-term strategy.
Chop it off for Palestine!
@Laslo, TayTay wants babies and basketball hoops...literally heckin' tranz-genocide.
In CO - even if you are the willing seeker of "conversion therapy" through verbal therapy - the left demand it be made illegal.
But if you are not a seeker of gender confusion therapy - even as a minor in the clutches of Public Education - your child might be subjected to age-inappropriate sexual topics and gender confusion grooming ...in secret.
... if the Democratic left damn well please.
Medicine is hard enough without it becoming politicized. What I don't understand is why this particular issue has become the cause celebre of the left.
Gender (e.g. sexual orientation) is sex-correlated.
There are two classes in the transgender spectrum including homosexuals and simulants, where the former is bigendered and relatively stable, and the latter is an aggressive form of transvitism including surgical, medical, and psychiatric corruption.
Conversion therapy is for simulants. Gender affirmation is sex-correlated.
Performing human rites for social, clinical, criminal, political, and climate progress, to remove a "burden", has a liberal consensus following progressive principles. There are precedents.
cause celebre of the left.
Capital and leverage. Notice the effort to socially distance simulants from homosexuals in the transgender spectrum.
Also, sexual orientation (e.g. pedophilic) progress. #NoJudgment #NoLabels #LoveWins
Keep women affordable, available, reusable, and taxable, too.
Push women to the back of the bus, girls under the bus, and babies... "burdens" aborted, sequestered in sanctuary states. Womb farms, perhaps. Women should know their place.
The gayification-ratchet is part of a larger nihilistic anti-life/anti-natalist/anti-existence global cultural pattern that:
- Extensively promotes birth control to prevent life from forming.
- Promotes abortion in the event of conception.
- Exerts extreme cultural pressure to deform life if born and sterilize it as young as possible.
- Culturally glorifies homosexuality to reduce fecundity in the event sterilization fails.
- Heavily promotes the most anti-social and self-destructive behaviors in modern culture to put fertile people on a path to death preferably before they reproduce.
- Failing all the above, threatens and publicly pronounces a desire to kill children (Jay Jones) and works tirelessly to disenfranchise fertility at the cultural, economic and political level.
To all of the above, we are here.
Ross Kaminski makes a good point. this gives the state power over view-point discrimination.
The privacy of a counseling room. The left want to control what goes on - and pick and choose and censor conversations.
Penis envy makes a comeback.
So in CO it's legal for a therapist to tell a kid, "Maybe you're trans," but it's illegal to say, "maybe you're not trans?"
Did I get that right?
Original Mike said...
"Medicine is hard enough without it becoming politicized. What I don't understand is why this particular issue has become the cause celebre of the left."
My view: it's a tactic with two goals: disrupting cultural norms, and discouraging reproduction. Bottom line: State control.
RideSpaceMonkey says:
The gayification-ratchet is part of a larger nihilistic anti-life/anti-natalist/anti-existence global cultural pattern that:
Is primarily promoting more and more heterosexual sexual profligation by:
- Extensively promotes birth control to prevent life from forming.
- Promotes abortion in the event of conception.
Reverse psychology??
Was there just a total lack of preparation for questions by Alito and Thomas?
Phillip K Dick could have probably written a pretty good short story on the 'birth control / abortion / transgender sterilization surgeries / M.A.I.D. / assisted neuroses' philosophies as being a subversive plot driven by eugenicists, to engineer a longer-term process of beneficial natural selection, and create a more perfect society of stable, productive people.
Bob Boyd -
"So in CO it's legal for a therapist to tell a kid, "Maybe you're trans," but it's illegal to say, "maybe you're not trans?"
Did I get that right?"
That's what the Kings on the left desire. Yes.
Plus any possible way to stop Christians from having any influence at all - anywhere, is also an unstated goal of the left.
Remember when CA prisons were caught sterilizing female inmates without their consent? In most cases destroying young women's health and ability to have children later, at young ages. and then lying about it?
Yeah - good times! Go Team D go.
Somewhat surprising to see the misquote “idiots” instead of “imbeciles”. I’d have thought Buck vs. Bell was sufficiently infamous by this point.
Achilles said, "The idea that there is some sort of non-biased perspective is dangerous."
That should be chiseled on the wall of every legislative chamber in America.
Schizoid psychopathy/high functioning autism are not treatable. Not by talk therapy and not by chopping off parts. The only hope is on prevention, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Stevenson is a liberal partisan. Of course, she didn't know about Alito asked.
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