this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids in Colorado, one of about two dozen states that ban the discredited practice.

An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide if it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 9 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

The US is not a theocracy. Conservatives want it to be one—in theory—but they would never agree on which religion would be the one true religion.

You'd think they'd settle on something simple and nebulous like, "Christianity" but the moment they started trying to define that in law the whole concept would fall apart because there's way too many completely incompatible differences between Christian sects. Not to mention the fact that Mormons (and other niche sects) consider themselves to be Christian while huge swaths of people consider them to be anything but.

The best they can ever get away with is what they've got now: Completely unconstitutional (IMHO) exceptions in various laws for "genuinely held religious beliefs."

Remember: The conservatives on the supreme court really do think that if a doctor has a genuine religious belief that someone should die from a treatable condition, they should not be held to account for letting that person die.

I fantasize about one of these justices going to the hospital for an emergency heart condition and having the doctor refuse to treat them because of a truly genuine, deeply-held religious belief that conservatives should just die from such things since they don't believe in medicine or science in general.

[–] Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

And then they wonder why the rest of the world looks at the US like a bizarre mix of Enlightenment ideals and medieval dogma. I mean, Locke, Voltaire, and Kant are spinning in their graves right now watching how their ‘right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ has been hijacked by a movement that actively denies science, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ existence in the name of a god nobody can even agree on.

It’s the ultimate paradox: the same country that gave the world the First Amendment (thanks, Voltaire!) now has a Supreme Court majority that thinks genuinely held religious beliefs can override basic human rights like letting a child die because a doctor’s ‘deeply held belief’ says so.

And let’s not forget the irony of a nation built on the idea that government should not impose religion (see: Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration) now trying to turn it into a Christian nationalist state where ‘freedom of religion’ somehow means ‘freedom to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t pray in your direction.’ So yes, the US isn’t an official theocracy... yet? But it’s doing its damndest to feel like one, all while claiming to be the ‘beacon of democracy.’ Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk and his ilk are out here acting like the Ayatollah of some sort of Christian Taliban. If this isn’t a lesson in how fragile democratic values are, I don’t know what is. Europe’s secularism and Enlightenment values might just be the only thing keeping the US from fully regressing into a theocratic dystopia.