transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] We will hear argument first this morning in case 24-539, Chiles versus Salazar.
Speaker 2:
[00:08] Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this week's episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about Chiles v. Salazar, a case that was decided just a few weeks ago in a ruling that challenges Colorado's 2019 law banning therapists from trying to talk gay, trans, and queer minors into becoming straight. As you'll hear, a case was brought by a therapist who had teamed up with a right-wing non-profit to argue that the Colorado ban on conversion therapy infringed on her First Amendment rights. The central question in the case was whether or not a state can regulate the speech of a talk therapist. And in an 8-1 decision, the court ruled that the issue required so-called strict scrutiny, which means the case now goes back down to the lower court for an intensive review that presumes the law in question is unconstitutional and will likely lead to it being struck down. This is five-to-four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
Speaker 1:
[01:08] Welcome to five-to-four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have sent our civil rights to the far side of the moon, like the Artemis spacecraft. I'm Peter, I'm here with Rhiannon.
Speaker 3:
[01:19] Hey everybody.
Speaker 1:
[01:20] And Michael.
Speaker 4:
[01:22] I love space shit. I do. I eat that up. I think it's so cool.
Speaker 1:
[01:26] It's cool. And I guess it's the Artemis too. Yes, the Artemis too. We tried to grab on to the one bit of good news that has happened all year for the metaphor this week. It's been cool. I watched a news segment about how they can't get farts out of the space shuttle.
Speaker 3:
[01:46] There's no way.
Speaker 1:
[01:47] You can like, they can do like scrubbing technology, but like inevitably space shuttles all become filled with farts.
Speaker 4:
[01:54] They smell like farts, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[01:55] Yeah, and so they just, it's just like a, just a big farty little spaceship.
Speaker 3:
[01:59] We can go to the far side of the moon, but we can't get farts out of the spaceship.
Speaker 1:
[02:04] Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[02:05] That's correct.
Speaker 1:
[02:06] I mean, that.
Speaker 3:
[02:08] Well, that just like ruins, you know, as a kid I wanted to be an astronaut.
Speaker 4:
[02:12] You're like, no, not so much.
Speaker 3:
[02:13] Not anymore.
Speaker 1:
[02:14] Well, you have to, the key is to be the one with the worst farts. That way it's like kind of funny, right? That way it's something you're doing to everyone else.
Speaker 4:
[02:21] Right.
Speaker 3:
[02:22] That way you're bullying people.
Speaker 4:
[02:23] Yeah. That's right. So you assert your dominance in the-
Speaker 3:
[02:29] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[02:30] I want to be one of those things where like, the president is interviewing you, right? And he's like, how's it going? And everyone's like, Peter's ruining it. Peter's ruining it with his terrible farts.
Speaker 3:
[02:42] There's a video going around today of Pete Hegseth, just ripping farts at the podium at a press conference. It's like not real, but it's very funny. You wish it were real, you know?
Speaker 4:
[02:53] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[02:54] Well, there's been, just to go on another fart-related tangent, there have long been rumors that President Trump is losing control of his faculties.
Speaker 4:
[03:07] He's shitting his pants.
Speaker 3:
[03:09] He just smells like shit constantly because he'd be shitting, dude.
Speaker 1:
[03:12] That he poops his pants.
Speaker 3:
[03:13] He'd be shitting in every room he's in.
Speaker 1:
[03:17] I just hope that's true.
Speaker 4:
[03:18] Oh, it's true in my heart, at the very least.
Speaker 1:
[03:20] There's always a tell-all that comes out of every presidency, right? And I want the Trump one to focus primarily around the fact that he's shitting his pants all the time.
Speaker 3:
[03:29] This is not hard to believe. I believe it straight up.
Speaker 4:
[03:32] There was a video a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, where he was talking, I think he was in the Oval Office, and you can hear what sounds like a very wet fart, and you can see someone behind him be like, huh? Make like a little face and look at him like, oh. And then the press conference ended like very abruptly after that.
Speaker 1:
[03:53] Right, right, I remember that.
Speaker 4:
[03:55] And it's like, oh, he shat his pants.
Speaker 1:
[03:57] Our producer just wrote us a note. Is there a gassy Supreme Court justice? Thank you, Ali, for trying to tie this into the Supreme Court.
Speaker 3:
[04:05] She said, bring it home, y'all, bring it home.
Speaker 4:
[04:07] I think Clarence comes.
Speaker 1:
[04:08] Thanks for not just writing, move on, please. Please stop this. This has to stop. We don't have a gassy Supreme Court justice anymore. It used to be Brier.
Speaker 3:
[04:19] It was Stephen Brier, that's right.
Speaker 4:
[04:21] Take a shit during oral argument.
Speaker 1:
[04:23] During Zoom oral argument, which is so cool, dude.
Speaker 3:
[04:26] During COVID, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[04:27] You gotta hand it to him for that one.
Speaker 4:
[04:29] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[04:32] The absolute audacity to be like, I'm gonna take a shit.
Speaker 4:
[04:38] All right.
Speaker 1:
[04:39] This week's case, folks. Chiles v. Salazar. It's a case from just a couple of weeks ago about conversion therapy. A conversion therapy, of course, pseudoscientific therapy intended to convince a gay or transgender person, usually a child, that they are in fact not gay or transgender. Colorado has a law that prohibits licensed therapists from doing conversion therapy for all of the reasons that you might expect, right? Puts children in danger. It's not real science.
Speaker 3:
[05:12] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[05:13] Made up bullshit, right? But an entrepreneurial homophobic therapist challenged the law, saying that it violated her First Amendment freedom of speech. She wanted to tell these kids, switch back, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[05:33] And this is her right.
Speaker 1:
[05:34] Yeah. And the Supreme Court, in an eight-to-one decision.
Speaker 4:
[05:38] Eight-to-one.
Speaker 1:
[05:40] Says she's got a point.
Speaker 3:
[05:42] Yeah. Kaylee. Kaylee.
Speaker 1:
[05:44] Kaylee Chiles.
Speaker 3:
[05:45] Kaylee Chiles. Kaylee. Kaylee wants to be a therapist.
Speaker 1:
[05:49] Imagine having a therapist named Kaylee. I'm good. You know, I'll figure it out myself.
Speaker 3:
[05:58] I'm gonna go ahead and walk myself back from the ledge. Thank you so much. Um, yeah. Yeah. All right. Before we get into Kaylee, this fucking clown-ass piece of shit asshole loser, let's talk about conversion therapy. I'm sure listeners know this, but like Peter said, conversion therapy is defined broadly as a group of so-called therapies, right? Different methods of giving this kind of therapy, but it's a therapy that seeks to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender expression. Like Peter said, conversion therapy, when it's used, is often used against, used to harm children, right? Because it's usually family members, parents, guardians who are trying to intervene on a child's expression of their sexual orientation or their gender identity. Conversion therapy, broadly known in the science, in the literature on therapy, as harmful. This is dangerous to children. But overall bad. We'll talk about some stats and associated kind of like the research on conversion therapy in just a little bit. So Colorado, along with many other states in the past, I would say decade or so, but in Colorado's case, it was in 2019, the state banned conversion therapy for children. The act, quote, prohibits a licensed physician specializing in psychiatry or a licensed, certified or registered mental health care provider from engaging in conversion therapy with a patient under 18 years of age. The Colorado law defines conversion therapy, basically how I just did, efforts to change an individual's sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings towards individuals of the same sex. Colorado passes this law and it looks like the 23 other states and the District of Columbia that have passed similar laws. It has this ban on conversion therapy for kids, but it also gives a religious exemption. There's a religious exemption in the law that says, yeah, licensed mental health providers can't do conversion therapy for kids, but not religious counselors. State of Colorado doesn't have anything to say about how a religious counselor might give their counseling. So Colorado passes this law, and in comes Kaylee Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado, and she's filing a lawsuit pre-enforcement. The law hasn't gone into effect, and Kaylee Chiles is already filing a lawsuit, saying, wait a minute, this is viewpoint discrimination, this is against my First Amendment right to give talk therapy with my own personal viewpoints without any hindrance from the state of Colorado. Now why would Kaylee, why would Kaylee Chiles have this lawsuit ready to go pre-enforcement, right? Well, just one step behind Kaylee Chiles, who's behind her? But the ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom, that fucked up conservative legal organization that has astroturfed cases going up to the Supreme Court all over the country. But importantly, listeners will remember, the ADF is also the organization that engineered 303 Creative, the case about the supposed web designer who was asked to make a wedding website for a gay couple, and another Supreme Court case, Masterpiece Cake Shop, which was about a baker who was asked to make a cake for a gay couple. Now, not only has Alliance Defending Freedom astroturfed and basically, you know, Lego built all three of these cases, along with many more, but just to note that this like homophobic, transphobic bullshit in terms of Supreme Court cases, specifically astroturfed by the ADF, those three also all came out of Colorado. Weird shit that the ADF is up to in that state. So let's talk a little bit about Kaylee Chiles, this perfect little plaintiff that the ADF found and used to take this case all the way up to the Supreme Court to challenge conversion therapy bans for minors. This lady has probably never talked to a trans kid, right? Or a gay kid for that matter. Her website about her counseling practice says that she gives therapy to patients that are 16 and older, so she doesn't even really do kid therapy, right? How often has this come up in her therapy, if at all? I actually really doubt it. She says in the case, in the briefing, that she's a practicing Christian who views her career as an outgrowth of her faith. She says she doesn't, quote, try to help her patients change their attractions, behavior, or identity. She believes instead that her clients can accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace. Okay? So.
Speaker 1:
[11:10] It's like, I'm not trying to change them because I don't believe that what they have is real. I don't believe that being gay is real. I don't believe that being trans is real, so.
Speaker 4:
[11:21] I don't think that was in her, you know, her coursework. That doesn't strike me as some-
Speaker 3:
[11:27] I highly doubt it. I highly doubt it, but so, yeah, whatever, her website and her sort of like public pronouncements throughout the case are all these Christian girl autumn quotes or whatever. But she also just wrote an op-ed for Fox News. Obviously, we know we're covering this case on this podcast. The monster wins. She fucking won, right? And right after the case comes down, she writes an op-ed for Fox News, folks. Not only celebrating and praising the Supreme Court and saying, you know, this was the right decision and I won, and this was my First Amendment right, and blah, blah, blah, but says, quote, this victory calls for further action. I plead with counselors to rethink gender ideologies claim that it's possible to be born in the wrong body and to recommit to protecting young people. She goes into supposed research that says that gender dysphoria is basically just a phase, just a passing thing that kids go through, and actually gender-affirming care leads to children doing harmful drugs and getting surgeries that have no proven benefits. So this is who this woman is.
Speaker 1:
[12:42] Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I thought this is about her free speech.
Speaker 3:
[12:46] Right.
Speaker 1:
[12:47] And all of a sudden she's like, actually the course of care that I'm recommending is the only responsible one.
Speaker 3:
[12:53] That's right. Exactly. So this is who this person is, taking a case up to the Supreme Court, completely astroturfed by some of the worst actors in the legal system in this country, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it gets ping-ponged up and down the appellate system until it lands here at the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1:
[13:14] All right. Let's talk about the law here. The fundamental legal question is about free speech, right? Therapists say things to their patients. So, is the government allowed to regulate what they say, or is that an unconstitutional violation of free speech, or somewhere in between? There's really no question that this law regulates what a therapist can legally say. It is a restriction on their speech, right? But what kind of restriction is it? Right. The court scrutinizes certain kinds of restrictions more than others. Specifically, the big question is whether this qualifies as viewpoint discrimination. If a law treats different viewpoints differently, that is considered viewpoint discrimination and is presumptively unconstitutional. Neil Gorsuch writes the majority here. He says that this is viewpoint discrimination. The law forbids any therapy aimed at changing someone's sexuality or gender identity but does not forbid affirming someone's sexuality or gender identity. That is viewpoint discrimination and therefore it is presumptively unconstitutional, per Neil Gorsuch. I think at a glance, you might think that makes sense. The therapist is allowed to say one thing but not another. Therefore, the law is discriminating based on viewpoint. The problem with that, where this gets thorny, is that a therapist isn't really expressing viewpoints in the traditional sense, right? They are providing medical care. Yes. Therapy isn't really an expression of the therapist's beliefs. The therapist is obligated to provide counsel with the goal of improving the patient's condition, right? Yes. Gorsuch himself starts off this opinion by quoting the plaintiff who says that she does not quote, impose her values or beliefs on her clients. When she says this, I feel like she is conceding the central point. She's saying, look, I'm just offering therapy. I'm not imposing my beliefs. But if you're not trying to impose your beliefs, if you're not offering up your beliefs, then you're admitting that it's not really a meaningful First Amendment issue, right? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[15:34] Then it's not speech that's contemplated in the First Amendment to be protected from government intrusion.
Speaker 1:
[15:40] Right. When a doctor suggests that you take a couple of Tylenol, they might be expressing their viewpoint in a sense, right? But not in a way that implicates the First Amendment, right? They're not expressing a personal belief in the same way that someone who's holding up a protest sign is or something like that, right? Talk therapy isn't exactly the same, but it's very similar in the sense that the therapist's goal is not to express their views, it's to help the patient, right? So think about the Pandora's box that this is opening up. States regulate the so-called speech of medical professionals in all sorts of ways. Justice Jackson brings up a couple of good examples in her dissent. Many state laws prohibit doctors from encouraging suicide. They prohibit doctors from telling anorexic patients to eat less. These rules also discriminate based on viewpoint, right? If you believe the majority.
Speaker 3:
[16:36] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[16:36] The idea to be a little technical is that these laws are prohibiting substandard care.
Speaker 3:
[16:43] Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[16:43] Right.
Speaker 1:
[16:44] If that's all viewpoint discrimination, it makes it really difficult to prohibit substandard medical care, especially in the therapy context.
Speaker 4:
[16:53] Right.
Speaker 1:
[16:54] Now Gorsuch does not really have a good response to this. What he says is that this functionally creates a First Amendment-free zone, where the state can just escape the First Amendment by labeling things substandard care, right? And that's why he doesn't like this whole idea that the medical profession is outside of the protection of the First Amendment.
Speaker 5:
[17:16] Right.
Speaker 1:
[17:17] But I think that sort of dodges the issue, which is that if states are allowed to regulate medical care at all, they need to be able to declare some care to be substandard, right? If they can't do that, they can't really regulate medicine effectively.
Speaker 3:
[17:33] Any professional licensing, right? We as lawyers have ethical obligations, right? Certain things that we can't say in court, right?
Speaker 1:
[17:45] Got to be nice to the judge.
Speaker 3:
[17:46] That we can't say to clients. You know, all of these things.
Speaker 4:
[17:50] It's my First Amendment right to suborn perjury. Sorry.
Speaker 3:
[17:53] Right, right. There are standards of...
Speaker 1:
[17:55] I will say, you should be allowed to curse the judge off. I don't want to get sidetracked here, but it's a First Amendment issue when this lady is trying to do weird abusive shit to children, but I can't tell a judge to fuck off when he's being rude.
Speaker 3:
[18:12] Yeah, yeah. Don't, it's fucked up.
Speaker 4:
[18:15] No, and I think what this really highlights what's going on here, what they won't say is that at least for the six conservatives, is that they just disagree with what the medical consensus is, right? They disagree that trans identity is a real thing, that it's good and helpful to affirm trans and gay and queer identities, right? They just disagree, and they don't like it. They don't like that they don't get a say, they don't get to put their finger on the scale here, because they're Christo-fascist pricks.
Speaker 1:
[18:48] Now, there is one glaring example of the court's hypocrisy that again gets raised by the dissent, and it's in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the case about abortion rights from the early 90s. That case held up informed consent laws. Informed consent laws are these laws that require doctors who are providing an abortion to basically recite to the person receiving the abortion or planning to receive the abortion the risks of the abortion, except not recite the actual risks as the doctor understands them, but as the state is mandating, right? Mandatory statement by the doctor when providing certain medical care. So this seems like a pretty obvious contradiction. Why is this therapist not being allowed to do conversion therapy a free speech issue, but the state can require doctors to read a statement about the risks of abortion, right? Right. Gorsuch's response to this is a little bit technical. I'm just going to explain it. I don't think it makes sense if you understand it. But he says, well, that's different because it's not just speech. It's incident to conduct. It's because the abortion is like a physical medical procedure. The speech is tied up with that in a way that makes it less of a speech issue. Incomprehensible. There are several times where he was making his little arguments, and I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? You're just saying words, dude.
Speaker 4:
[20:25] Also, especially in the trans context, let me tell you where that speech sometimes leads. Right. It leads to conduct. It leads to lots of conduct.
Speaker 1:
[20:36] Usually in First Amendment jurisprudence, it's worse to make someone say something than it is to prevent them from saying something. That doesn't get factored in here. The other lingering question, which listeners may have thought of by this point, is whether this would make malpractice by therapists basically protected by the Constitution.
Speaker 3:
[20:59] To receive substandard care from a medical professional is now protected by the First Amendment.
Speaker 1:
[21:07] Right. Gorsuch says that it wouldn't. His reasoning, again, is just nonsense. He says, well, that's different because in a malpractice case, you have to prove damages, which quote, provides breathing room for free speech. But with this law, you get fined just for speaking without anyone having to show damages. The implication here is that Colorado can't ban conversion therapy because it's protected by the First Amendment, but you could maybe sue if a therapist does it.
Speaker 4:
[21:42] This is bizarre. You have a First Amendment right to commit a tort, essentially, like, that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1:
[21:50] I do not understand it. Either speech is protected by the Constitution or it is not, right? It's just nonsensical to me. And I think what's happening is that when you try to apply the First Amendment to medical care like this, the whole framework for state regulation of medical care just starts falling apart. And Gortuch is just trying to, like, hold it together with his hands and some duct tape and tell you that it's fine.
Speaker 3:
[22:14] Right. Yeah, I feel like what's at issue here, but, like, what nobody is really talking about, even if you disagree with the majority, as we do, but there's a sort of tension between the state's power to regulate medical care and medical procedure and that kind of thing. And the First Amendment, that, like, this tension actually doesn't need to be there, right? Like, there's a sort of mass societal benefit to the state being able to regulate medical care in this way, which does mean restricting some forms of speech, because that's better for everybody in society, right? But what you see here with, like, overweighing or, like, overemphasizing or boosting the importance of the First Amendment on these scales is that you see conservatives discount the collective benefit of the state's regulatory power, the collective benefit to society as a whole, and prioritize the right of a single individual over all of that, right? And that's what's at tension here, but, like, isn't really discussed.
Speaker 1:
[23:19] Yeah. One last thing to point out here is that Gorsuch makes it clear that this only applies to talk therapy. It does not apply to any physical conversion therapy techniques, right? Things like shock therapy, right? Because those are conduct rather than speech.
Speaker 3:
[23:35] This is so bizarre.
Speaker 1:
[23:36] Now, obviously this is good, right? Because at least some forms of conversion therapy are remaining restricted.
Speaker 3:
[23:45] Sure.
Speaker 1:
[23:46] But I don't know if this logic actually follows, because if you're saying that a therapist providing care is expressive in the First Amendment context, I don't see how other forms of care aren't the same thing.
Speaker 4:
[24:00] Right.
Speaker 1:
[24:00] Right? Like, if I think as a doctor that a certain surgery would help you, isn't performing that surgery a way of expressing that viewpoint? Right? Obviously, this is silly. But I think this is where the opinion should lead.
Speaker 4:
[24:14] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[24:14] Right? If you're being intellectually honest about it, right? If what you're saying is that my medical opinion about what care you should receive, is like a First Amendment issue, then I think it should carry over into physical care. But Gorsuch just says, no, that's different.
Speaker 4:
[24:32] Yeah. They can be very forgiving about what counts as expressive conduct in other scenarios, right? When it comes to religious liberty, it's like providing your employees insurance that covers birth control. Right.
Speaker 3:
[24:47] Is making a website not conduct? Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[24:51] When they want to, they can be like, you squint and really try to see it. That's expressive. That's First Amendment expression. Other times, they're like, no, because they're unprincipled hacks.
Speaker 1:
[25:07] Yeah. I do love the idea of surgery as a First Amendment thing. It's like, I have a constitutional right to do the surgery on you. We were talking about this earlier, but this is funny. This case seems to provide doctors with a First Amendment basis for providing you with medical care, but you don't actually have anything in the Bill of Rights that would allow you to refuse medical care, right? Because of what they've done to the 14th Amendment, where substantive due process is hollowed out, your right to bodily autonomy doesn't really exist in the Constitution, right? But doctors now have constitutional rights to fuck up your shit. The last thing we should clarify here is that this case does not technically strike this law down. What it says is that it is subject to strict scrutiny. It says this is viewpoint discrimination, and a law that engages in viewpoint discrimination must be subject to the highest level of scrutiny. So it is presumptively unconstitutional, but they kicked it down to the lower court to make the final determination. So it probably will get struck down. I think it's as good as dead at this point, but technically they did not strike it down. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[26:45] Moving on to the other opinions here, there's a concurrence. We'll talk about Jackson's really great dissent. Peter mentioned at the top, this is an eight-to-one decision, meaning two liberals, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined the majority in the holding, that this is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. And Kagan writes a concurrence that Sotomayor joins. This concurrence, it's very short. Most of the time, Kagan is talking about why she agrees that this is viewpoint discrimination and the court's holding is correct. And then says right at the end that she's writing separately to just make this point, to make a small point, which is, if this was a different law at issue in Colorado, then it would be a different case and it would be a different question that the Supreme Court doesn't need to get into today. She basically says, yes, this law is the state doing viewpoint discrimination and that is squarely a violation of the First Amendment. She says, it would be different though, if the law were written as viewpoint neutral. That would be more complicated, she says. And, quote, full consideration of that question can wait for another day. We need not here decide how to assess viewpoint neutral laws. Amazing. Thanks, Elena. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:
[28:14] I think that she's trying to do a thing that's like, you could write one of these laws in a neutral way, right? Like, as a sort of message to the states, right? Like, maybe there's a way around this. But how do you do, how do you forbid substandard care in a neutral way?
Speaker 3:
[28:31] That the Supreme Court and you, Elena Kagan, are defining as the expression of a viewpoint.
Speaker 4:
[28:38] Right, the fundamental problem that the majority hates is that there's a lot of research in medical consensus that certain viewpoints are harmful to patients and certain viewpoints are helpful to patients. And that's it, that's just, that's all there is to it. And Kagan wants to like wish that away and pretend like we can get around that. But if you want to provide helpful care that's in line with the medicine, with the medical consensus and with the science, like that's going to be, that's going to necessarily require a viewpoint, right? And if you want laws mandating that, those laws are going to discriminate based on viewpoints. That's just the way it is, there's no way around that.
Speaker 3:
[29:22] Right, and it's this really fucked up like, again, definition and confusion of what viewpoint and the expression of ideas and what expressive conduct is. You know, Keegan says, for example, if the First Amendment prohibits anything, it is the official suppression of ideas. This isn't the expression of an idea, the service, it is the delivery of medical care, right? Like she goes sort of like high and mighty and hoity-toity, you know, real elevated language about viewpoint discrimination and the importance of protecting against, you know, the state doing viewpoint discrimination. She says, a law drawing a line based on the ideology of the speaker, disadvantaging one view and advantaging another, skews the marketplace of ideas our society depends on to discover truth. Not everything is the marketplace of ideas.
Speaker 1:
[30:16] Also, sometimes the marketplace of ideas is in the past. And we made a purchase. We purchased the best one.
Speaker 3:
[30:22] You don't experiment on kids in a medical context in the marketplace of ideas. We saw somebody say this online and I think it's so on point, right? It's such a lawyer and judge brain thing to do, which is to just count all conduct as something that happens in the marketplace of ideas, right? In the civil discourse, our society supposedly holds so dear, right? This is just not the case. It's an appointment with a medical professional.
Speaker 4:
[30:55] Right.
Speaker 1:
[30:55] Some fucking therapist telling a 14-year-old they're not really gay. It's not the marketplace of ideas. That's a real thing that's actually happening.
Speaker 3:
[31:02] That's right.
Speaker 4:
[31:03] The whole point of licensing is that there are certain things we do not want to leave up to market mechanisms. There are certain things that are so dangerous or so high-risk or require such baseline quality in order for the social needs to be met, that we don't subject them to the market mechanism. We don't say, let the market sort out what helps and what hurts. If a few kids commit suicide, then we just know, don't send your kid to the suicide doctor. What the fuck? What the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 3:
[31:40] It's bizarre.
Speaker 1:
[31:41] Like, disadvantaging one view and advantaging another. Okay. We're not allowed to make decisions about what types of medical care work better than others?
Speaker 4:
[31:50] Yeah. When a doctor tells you not to smoke cigarettes.
Speaker 1:
[31:53] What are you talking about? This is like, I just don't understand this and you could just see this immediately falling apart in any other context when there's just some therapists who's like, jump off a cliff. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 5:
[32:05] You're right.
Speaker 1:
[32:05] There's nothing to live for. How do you prevent that without a law that's like, yeah, you can't encourage your patient to commit suicide, of course.
Speaker 4:
[32:11] Telling your bulimic patient like, you're looking great. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it because, whew.
Speaker 5:
[32:16] Right.
Speaker 4:
[32:17] Fire, right?
Speaker 1:
[32:19] Right. It's just silly and yeah, I do think, we'll talk about the Jackson descent in a minute, but I do think this is part of our new segment called Moron Alert. Kagan and Sotomayor, perhaps this is a moron alert. What's going on here? What exactly is happening? Were you negotiating something here? The only thing I can think of, and Kagan does make this relatively express in her opinion, is that she's like, look, this is bad for our side now. But, but there are other laws where perhaps this would benefit the left, right? She doesn't say the left, but there are laws that restrict gender-affirming care for trans kids, right? They just challenged one last year in Tennessee in Scrumetti. And she's sort of saying, hey, under this precedent, maybe some of that stuff's unconstitutional, right? So maybe we can take advantage of this. Which I think in a very theoretical way, you could say is maybe true. Maybe you could go challenge SB1 or whatever that Tennessee bill was, and say, hey, we've got a free speech claim here. But a big hint that that wouldn't work, is the fact that this exact court upheld that exact law last year, right? And even if they were going to be even handed, right, with their rulings about these laws, it still wouldn't make fucking sense. It still wouldn't make fucking sense that medical care is like a free speech issue.
Speaker 4:
[33:58] I think that's a good segue to Jackson's dissent because I think she's very sharp on this issue. She really highlights the question. And so, listener, you might be thinking that we've done a good job of explaining why the majority is so stupid here. But you don't really understand the paradigm that should be in place, right? And I think Jackson does a good job of this, where she takes Casey, which we talked about, which was like that sort of statement that doctors have to give to someone who wants to have an abortion, and another law, a California law, that wanted every clinic in the state to put up a sign saying that California will pay for abortions for indigent people, and that was struck down. And she says, well, what's the difference here? What's the difference between these two cases? And in Casey, what you're looking at is the provision of medical care. You're talking about a doctor in a patient alone in a room, talking about the patient's health, right? In the clinic case, Nifla is the name of the case, she says, you're talking about speech as speech, right? You're in a waiting room. You're not with a doctor. You might not even be there for an abortion or abortion-related services. You might even be there for medical services. You might be there to help your friend, right? You're bringing a friend in or something, and yet you're receiving speech. You're receiving state-mandated speech. So she says, that's a regulation of speech as speech, and that gets all the First Amendment scrutiny that we give to any forced speech or owners regulation of speech, viewpoint discrimination. But on the other hand, when you are providing medical care, the state has broad police power, has always had broad police power to regulate medical care. But this goes back to before the country even fucking existed, like they were, the police power of the state to regulate medical care predates the American Constitution. And sometimes that incidentally touches speech. Sometimes that gets to speech related activities because doctors talk to their fucking patients. Of course it gets to speech. But that gets a much lower standard of scrutiny because it's nestled within this well-established framework of regulating medicine and making sure physicians give adequate standard of care, right?
Speaker 3:
[36:25] Right.
Speaker 4:
[36:26] It's so simple. This is something like a first-year law student should be able to grasp and make this distinction very easily. I imagine all our lay listeners grasp it and are like, that makes sense. And of course it makes sense because it's right and the majority is stupid and the concurrence is fucking stupid. Like Jackson's dissent is very long, probably much longer than it needs to be because it's very thorough. But it's like really, there's not much more to it than that. There's not much more to it than like, look, you can regulate medicine. You've always been able to regulate medicine. Sometimes that incidentally touches speech and that's not a complete free zone for the First Amendment, but it's a much lower level of scrutiny.
Speaker 1:
[37:07] Right. Right.
Speaker 4:
[37:08] The end. Like, what are we doing here? And Jackson hints at this, but I don't think she articulates it as well as it should be articulated, which is that there are ways to engage in strictly protected First Amendment activity related to the provision of care here, right? Like you could write an op-ed for Fox News, just for example, right? If you want to change public opinion about this, you can write an op-ed. If you want to change lawmakers' opinions, you can petition your representatives. If you want to change the standards that the AMA, the APA or your local regulatory bodies promulgate for care, you can petition them. You can run your own study. You can put out research saying, hey, look, this is actually harmful. Those are protected activities. They're expressive activities. That's engaging in the marketplace of ideas. That's not giving medical care to an at-risk minor, right? They're just not even in the same fucking universe, and it's offensive that eight Supreme Court justices are willing to pretend like it is.
Speaker 3:
[38:14] Yeah, and just to explain really quick, police power in this context refers to the state's regulatory power, the state's power to promote and protect people's safety, to promote the general welfare, right?
Speaker 1:
[38:28] The general power of the state.
Speaker 3:
[38:30] That's right. Yeah, it doesn't mean specifically in this context, like law enforcement.
Speaker 1:
[38:35] Right, right. I'll also add, Kagan and Sotomayor didn't just concur. They signed on to the majority.
Speaker 4:
[38:41] Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:
[38:42] Where Gorsuch is like, he's making like, loose allegations that this is what censorious governments do. This is like, this is, you know, this is, and that they are maintaining orthodoxy, right? Which is, I feel like a word that every right-winger learned five years ago and has just never stopped using, like, orthodoxy. Oh, there's an orthodoxy here. It's like, right, the, you talk, once again, it seems like every time you say orthodoxy, you're just talking about what I would describe as the prevailing medical consensus.
Speaker 3:
[39:12] Yeah. Right.
Speaker 4:
[39:13] Right.
Speaker 3:
[39:14] Medical standards. That's what you mean.
Speaker 4:
[39:15] Right. I think it's worth saying, like, since we did a moron alert for Kagan and Sotomayor, like, the moron alert went up, yeah. Yeah. Like, what steps has Jackson taken here to avoid becoming a moron? And I think, you know, there's sort of two realities, right? There's the reality of, like, the legal fiction. There's the reality that, like, you read in the briefs and, you know, you pretend prevails in court, like, stare decisis, controls. We follow our precedents. We use logic to derive rules from past rulings and apply them to new facts. And then there's fucking reality, right? Then there's the real world, where there is, like, a Christian fascist right-wing movement seeking to impose broad control over not just the government, but the culture over people's individual choices, their gender expressions, their lives, right? And at some point, you just have to choose which reality you're going to live in. And Sotomayor and Kagan have chosen to live in this bullshit fake reality. And Jackson clearly does not. She lives in the real world. Right.
Speaker 1:
[40:34] Let's talk a bit about, like, the practical outcomes here. I think it's worth noting that this doesn't really apply to a ton of therapists. The reason being that most conversion therapy exists in a ministerial setting, not a licensed therapy setting, right? And that's already protected by freedom of religion, right? So, you know, 90-plus percent of parents who are trying to de-gayify their children or whatever are sending them to the minister and being like, hey, can you just engage in some classic pastoral bullying? Please, please abuse my child until he no longer likes Lady Gaga. That's what they're doing. He loves it. That's such a dated reference, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:
[41:24] I know. That's for our age.
Speaker 1:
[41:26] Whatever the gay kids are listening to now. The Troye Sivan? What do we think? Is that right?
Speaker 3:
[41:35] No, I think that's even more- Oh, fuck.
Speaker 1:
[41:37] You know what? Forget it. So the universe of therapists impacted by this, relatively small. There's not a ton of demand for this necessarily, and then you need licensed therapists who actually want to do conversion therapy, which is not all licensed therapists.
Speaker 4:
[42:00] It's a very left-dominated field, in my experience.
Speaker 1:
[42:05] Yeah, well, it's like as you're talking to people in order to help them.
Speaker 4:
[42:09] Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:
[42:09] Very left-dominated.
Speaker 4:
[42:10] There's a baseline requirement of empathy, which is incompatible with the conservative worldview. Right.
Speaker 1:
[42:16] There's a tangential outcome here, which is that it seems like therapists can claim the First Amendment mantle, and that means that therapy will be subjected to strict scrutiny. And what that really means in practice is that courts will be analyzing medical treatments, right? Analyzing the efficacy of therapeutic treatments. So rather than, you know, sort of deferring to state laws, which themselves have avenues for input from different medical organizations, for example, from actual experts, we now have judges intervening to make the decisions about, like, what therapy survives strict scrutiny and what doesn't. To me, that's just obscene, and that's not to defend, you know, I mean, deferring to state laws has its own problem, right? Red state laws about therapy are not good. But what happens here is that you now have judges being the arbiter of how good these state laws are and what therapists can and cannot say, what qualifies as substandard care and what doesn't. Just a miserable outcome.
Speaker 4:
[43:28] Any judges listening, I'm sure there are so many. Let me give you a little tip, strict scrutiny analysis. The state has a compelling interest in seeing that medical care is consistent with the prevailing medical consensus of proper care. This law is narrowly tailored to that by requiring the provision of care in accordance with the prevailing medical consensus on what is the minimum standard of care. There you go.
Speaker 3:
[43:53] Boom.
Speaker 4:
[43:54] Boom. Do it.
Speaker 1:
[43:57] Hear that, you fucking nerds.
Speaker 3:
[44:02] Colorado fought this case and a bunch of other states joined in too. They filed an amicus brief. These are states that have similar laws on the books as Colorado, banning conversion therapy for minors. And in their amicus brief, they say this is within our traditional and historical and long-respected regulatory power, right? They say in the brief, quote, Prohibiting licensed health care professionals from providing conversion therapy, a quote unquote treatment resoundingly found to not be an acceptable medical or professional practice because it is ineffective and harmful, is consistent with this tradition and does not run afoul of the First Amendment. Right? They say the state, we have this police power, we have the power to protect public health and welfare generally. This is just so squarely within what the state can regulate. It's, you're dumb.
Speaker 1:
[44:59] Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[45:02] It's just, at a certain point, there's like nowhere else to go with it. It's so stupid. It's so obviously results-driven. It's so embarrassing that Kagan and Sotomayor signed on to this.
Speaker 3:
[45:12] One dissenter. One dissenter.
Speaker 4:
[45:15] There's just nothing else to be said.
Speaker 1:
[45:17] I think it's worth talking a little bit about what the research says about conversion therapy. The Trevor Project has a good rundown. Quoting them, research shows that LGBTQ plus youth who experience conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year. The practices are also associated with an extensive list of long-lasting social and emotional consequences including depression, anxiety, suicidality, substance abuse, a range of post-traumatic responses. I'm trailing off. There is more. Now, you know, I think most people listening know that or suspect that. They continue, every major medical and mental health association in the United States, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association has condemned these practices. I think most people would have suspected all of that, but the point is, if every prominent medical organization says that these practices do not work and are dangerous, right, if the data shows that, and you still can't call that substandard care, what the fuck are we doing?
Speaker 4:
[46:27] Right, right.
Speaker 1:
[46:29] Then the last thing I want to say is I think that there's like, I think that this case is sort of weird because they already have a carve out.
Speaker 4:
[46:39] Right.
Speaker 1:
[46:39] Because churches can already do this. Because ministers can already do this, right?
Speaker 3:
[46:44] Yes, there's a religious exemption in the law.
Speaker 1:
[46:47] Right. So it's like, what are they doing here?
Speaker 3:
[46:51] All Kayleigh Chiles has to do is say this is religious counseling in this session. I will be doing religious counseling and the patient know that, right? And still opt in and she would be fine.
Speaker 1:
[47:02] Right. So I was thinking about this because what much of the conservative legal movement has been building toward is almost like a parallel state, right? Where they are favored, right? But what I think they're going for here is really the replacement of the secular state, right?
Speaker 4:
[47:18] Right.
Speaker 1:
[47:19] The existence of the secular state is offensive to them.
Speaker 4:
[47:22] Right.
Speaker 1:
[47:22] It's not enough that they have exemptions from the secular state.
Speaker 4:
[47:26] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[47:26] The secular state needs to be hacked at over and over again because they don't believe in it. They don't believe in a secular society. They believe in one where religion is dominant.
Speaker 4:
[47:38] And one specific religion, evangelical Christian.
Speaker 1:
[47:43] Right. And I don't want to get out over my skis with this particular case because it is, I think, relatively small stakes in practice by the standards of these types of cases, like compared to something like Scrometti last year, for example.
Speaker 4:
[48:00] Right.
Speaker 1:
[48:00] But you can see what they're going for here. You can see that they are not settling, right? They're dedicating resources to just to cornering this tiny little slice of secular society.
Speaker 4:
[48:16] It's not enough to have an exemption from the prevailing medical consensus. They need to be able to directly challenge the prevailing medical consensus and say, well, I don't believe that.
Speaker 1:
[48:24] They need to be able to snap their fingers and say, it's not real. There is no prevailing consensus, right? Everything is up for debate, right? Of course, it never cuts in the other direction. When it comes to what a woman who wants an abortion needs to hear, there's no debate anymore, right? They are looking to dominate civil society in every facet. Next week, Patreon episode, we're going to be talking about the birthright citizenship case, which looks like perhaps it'll be a win for the good guys. There was a very bizarre and chaotic oral argument that we're going to discuss in detail. There's media coverage. There's like a meta discussion. What this means, is the Supreme Court-
Speaker 3:
[49:19] Iranian sleeper cells mentioned.
Speaker 1:
[49:21] Iranian sleeper cells mentioned. But you can't catch me, folks.
Speaker 2:
[49:25] You can't catch me.
Speaker 1:
[49:27] I'm too sleepy. I'm Iran's sleepiest cell, baby.
Speaker 3:
[49:31] And I got birthright citizenship, baby.
Speaker 4:
[49:33] I was born here. It's over for you, hoes.
Speaker 1:
[49:40] Watch me glide through customs, bro. You can't do anything about it. Follow us on social media at 5-4Pod. Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/5-4pod, all spelled out, for access to premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack, all sorts of shit. See you next week.
Speaker 4:
[50:03] Bye, everybody.
Speaker 1:
[50:04] Adios.
Speaker 4:
[50:07] 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Allison Rogers. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.
Speaker 5:
[50:30] That's part of what they're testing about the Apollo, or sorry, about the Artemis spacecraft, is how much does it stink like farts?