rights. The justices, rejected a challenge to the 2012 law for the second time in three years, let stand a lower court's ruling that it was constitutional and neither impinged upon free exercise of religion nor impacted the activities of clergy members.
The law
prohibits state-licensed mental health counselors, including psychologists and
social workers, from offering therapy to change sexual orientation in minors.
The Supreme
Court in 2014 refused to review the law after an appeals court rejected claims
that the ban infringed on free speech rights under U.S. Constitution's the
First Amendment.
California
outlawed gay conversion therapy in 2012, calling it ineffective and harmful.
New Jersey,
Illinois, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico and the District of Columbia have similar
laws on the books, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group
for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Gay
conversion therapy methods range from counseling, hypnosis and dating-skill
training to aversive techniques that induce pain or electric shocks in response
to same-sex erotic images, according to California officials.
Such
treatments come from a belief that homosexuality is a mental illness.
Lead
plaintiff Donald Welch, an ordained minister and licensed family therapist,
oversees counseling at Skyline Wesleyan Church, an evangelical Christian church
in the San Diego area that believes sexuality belongs only in a marriage
between a man and a woman.
Welch, along
with a Catholic psychiatrist and a man who underwent conversion therapy and now
aspires to perform it on others, sued the state claiming the law to ban gay
conversion therapy is unconstitutional.
Source:
Reuters.
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