OPINION:
Common sense is making a comeback.
It took a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, but licensed counselors will soon be able to help minor clients, at least in Colorado, recover their natural sexuality instead of being forced by law to steer their clients into sexual confusion.
The justices didn’t address the sheer immorality of such laws, under which thousands of youths have been subjected to cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and mutilating, irreversible sterilizations. The court was not asked to do so.
The plaintiff, Kaley Chiles, had urged the court to affirm her right to engage in talk counseling with her clients, making it a freedom of speech case.
The court agreed, ruling 8-1 that a Colorado law amounted to viewpoint discrimination because it prohibited her from counseling clients away from, instead of toward, LGBTQ behavior.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was famously stumped when asked what a woman is, wrote a dissent. She insisted that although people can go gay or transgender, they can never go straight. Ever. She is sure about it.
This would be news to countless people who know firsthand that it’s not only possible to change but also that reparative counseling is a godsend.
The court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar right after the International Olympic Committee concluded that women are entitled to their own sports events without having to face bigger, stronger, faster males who can hurt them and steal their medals.
In another commonsense move, the NCAA in February barred male athletes from competing in female events, complying with an executive order issued by President Trump.
If this keeps up, then we should expect an announcement soon from the National Academy of Sciences that gravity is still in effect and the Earth is round.
About half the states, all run by Democrats, have laws that say therapists may steer sexually confused youths into gay sex and transgenderism, but not away from it — even if the client wants that. The statutes are framed as bans on “conversion therapy,” a term invented to cast reparative talk counseling in a negative light.
Even more dishonest are the terms “gender-affirming care” and “sex assigned at birth.” The first describes the exact opposite of what it does, which is to deny a person’s actual sex and instead promote a delusion. The second term conveys the idea that no one is really born male or female but gets assigned a sex by a hidebound medical establishment.
From this comes the fiction that gender is a state of mind that has nothing to do with biology.
All this was mainstreamed thanks to the elite intelligentsia’s abandonment of common sense. Since the 1970s, denying reality has become the currency of the helping professions. One guild after another, including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, caved to the LGBTQ activists’ pressure to stop believing their lying eyes and turn instead to approved fictions.
All professional groups not explicitly faith-based soon followed, with teachers unions leading the charge to indoctrinate schoolchildren.
By the time marriage was redefined to make either the bride or groom expendable, the social revolutionaries and liberal judges were ready to redefine sex itself. That was when the transgender movement picked up the torch of the sexual revolution, saying, “It’s our turn!”
It was a bridge too far, coming with more coercion, complete with pronoun mandates, the “right” of drag queens to read to children in public libraries and parents losing custody of children whom they refuse to falsely regender.
This issue is about much more than imposing a new sexual ethic. It’s about using government power to force people to lie, a dangerous abuse common in totalitarian nations.
The sexual revolutionaries got this far largely with unquestioned faux “scientific studies” such as the Kinsey reports and cover from a legacy media pushing leftism in general and the interests of the Democratic Party in particular.
Speaking of Democrats, they still haven’t received the commonsense memo — or they have decided to ignore it. They are doing so even after the TV ad about Kamala Harris backing taxpayer-funded inmate sex changes proved devastatingly effective for Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.
In December, 211 Democrats in the House voted against the Protect Children’s Innocence Act (HR 3492), which would have made it a felony for doctors or providers to perform surgeries, administer puberty blockers or provide cross-sex hormones to anyone younger than 18.
Who could credibly oppose this? Yet even if it had been titled the Protect Kids from Dangerous Quacks Act, Democrats still would not have gone for it.
After the bill passed the Republican-controlled House with 216 votes, with only three Democrats voting yes, it died in the Senate, where Republicans abandoned it in the face of a threatened Democrat filibuster.
Some observers said the Republicans didn’t want to expend political capital on it, but think about Democrats forced to talk nonstop about protecting the right of quacks to experiment on children. It might not come across to voters as good policy.
Neither would the Democrats opposing photo IDs for voting or proof of citizenship for new voter registrations. Surveys show huge majorities of Americans favor these election safeguards in the SAVE America Act, now stalled in the Senate.
Common sense seems to be breaking out on important matters. It would be nice if it breached the don’t-rock-the-boat world of Congress’ upper chamber.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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