Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 8-1 that Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” for minors regulates speech and must face strict First Amendment scrutiny. The justices vacated a lower court’s decision upholding the law and sent the case back for reevaluation under that tougher standard.

• The Colorado law banned all counselors and therapists from any effort to “change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
• Even counseling regarding “unlawful conduct or unsafe sexual practices” was forbidden from “seek[ing] to change sexual orientation or gender identity.”
• It specifically did not ban, as the Supreme Court noted, “[a]cceptance, support and understanding for the facilitation of an individual’s coping, social support and identity exploration and development,” or “assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.”

Counseling that seeks to help homosexual teenagers change their sexual desires has existed for years, but major psychological and medical organizations have attacked such practices. Colorado, 23 other states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws prohibiting such counselors from helping teenagers fight and change sexual perversions.

• These state laws generally apply only to counselors, psychiatrists and other regulated mental health providers. They do not currently restrict religious ministers, clergy or faith-based counselors from providing such guidance.
• Yet as the Supreme Court held, licensed counselors, psychiatrists and other regulated mental health providers still possess free-speech rights under the First Amendment.

This specific holding means state laws may not bar these professionals from offering talk therapy to help teenagers address unwanted same-sex attractions.

This Supreme Court ruling is a victory for free speech in America after years of drastic defeats. It is also a victory for the thousands of Americans who experience an unwanted same-sex attraction they want help with.

“Before the plague of homosexuality, there is the spirit of fornication, which tears marriages and families apart!” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in our September 2017 issue:

Many don’t even learn the concept of marriage and family. We would not have the homosexual problem if we were building God-plane families. Upside-down families are the primary cause of homosexuality.

It is no coincidence that same-sex attraction is rising in America even as the nation’s family structure is destroyed. Yet there is hope for people engaged in sexual perversions who want to repent and experience the full, wholesome life their Creator designed them to have.

Every last American—young, old, counselor, counselee, atheist, Christian and otherwise—urgently needs to learn and live the way they were created to live, revealed in the Bible, and in terms of marriage, sex and family, explained in The Missing Dimension in Sex, by Herbert W. Armstrong.