MINNEAPOLIS – Today the Minneapolis City Council voted to enact a ban on so-called “conversion therapy” after holding a public meeting on the subject earlier this week. The ban is an attack on individual choice in health care as well as on the constitutional rights of therapists, patients, and families. Minneapolis’s ban could prevent mental health professionals from helping patients explore all options when addressing questions over sexual orientation and gender identity, something they should be free to do.
“Young people should have access to voluntary, compassionate, client-driven care in the field of sexual identity that pursues the goals of the patient, including living in accordance with biblical teaching on sexuality or becoming more comfortable with their biological sex,” said John Helmberger, CEO at Minnesota Family Council. “Throughout this debate, we’ve heard from men and women with moving stories of how sexual orientation change counseling helped them meet their therapeutic goals. At the end of the day, the Minneapolis City Council just outlawed a type of mental health care with no real justification.”
Nate Oyloe, a pastoral counselor, says people like him could be directly affected by this bill. “As a Minneapolis resident I was horrified to hear my city council is passing a so-called ‘conversion therapy’ ban. As a young person dealing with same sex attractions, I enjoyed the benefit of good psychotherapists and faith-based organizations to help me bring my sexuality into agreement with my faith as a Christian. I was not coerced or harmed by either, in fact I was helped greatly.”
In an op-ed published earlier this year in the Star Tribune, Oyloe wrote that efforts to ban this type of counseling would “threaten thousands of people who have experienced real change in their sexual identity.”
Minneapolis city leaders have no business denying the city’s residents the freedom to get the counseling they want, not just counseling the city approves of. As legal challenges around the country indicate, this type of ban is a fundamental violation of the rights of patients to set the goals of their treatment, and on the free speech rights of mental health practitioners.
