Governor Walz is still threatening to call a special session of the Minnesota legislature in the aftermath of last month’s mass shooting by Robin (formerly Robert) Westman at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis. He wants them to do something about “gun violence” and to adopt an “assault weapons” ban.
Walz has been threatening to call the special session for a while. Something has caused him to pause. Perhaps it’s the fact that not all Democratic legislators think it’s a brilliant idea. Perhaps it’s the fact that Republicans would offer their own proposals to address the shooting, including this one: “Repeal or amend the Democrats’ prohibition on doctors using their best medical judgment, instead of leaving their hands tied with political decisions made by the Democrat trifecta.”
“The Democrat trifecta” is a reference to the Democrats’ control of the state’s political branches in the 2023 “let’s go crazy” session. In 2023 Democrats adopted Minnesota’s statutory ban on so-called “conversion therapy.” Walz celebrated the law’s passage. Insofar as Minnesota’s statute is one of 23 such state laws, the ban raises a question of general interest.
It’s a sinister law. It limits and deters treatment for mental illness. In the case of minors, it prohibits treatment of gender dysphoria in any fashion that would reconcile a child or teenager with his sex.
I wrote several posts on Power Line advocating repeal of the law in the wake of the Annunciation shooting. I also wrote columns advocating repeal for the Washington Free Beacon and for Alpha News.
That law — it’s insane. The Westman shooting helped me see why. Calling the law a ban on “conversion therapy” is pure propaganda. It’s a lie.
Now comes Dr. Kurt Miceli to take up the issue in the New York Post column “Therapists are banned from talking to kids about accepting their biological sex.” Dr. Miceli is board-certified in both internal medicine and psychiatry. He is the medical director of Do No Harm, the membership organization that seeks to protect medicine from identity politics. I am a member of Do No Harm Action, Do No Harm’s related 501(c)(4).
Dr. Miceli writes in his New York Post column:
After the tragic shooting at Minnesota’s Annunciation Catholic School, families across the country began asking if the shooter could have been stopped.
But Americans should also ask a related question: Why do states ban kids who think they’re transgender from even talking to therapists about accepting their biological sex?
The school shooter in Minnesota identified as transgender. Yet in half the states, including Minnesota, it’s illegal for therapists to help confused kids come to grips with who they really are.
They can only tell these kids to go ahead with a sex change, pushing them toward experimental drugs and irreversible surgeries.
Dr. Miceli adds to and amplifies the points I sought to make in my own comments on the law. I didn’t know this:
The Trump administration has already mandated that federal health-insurance plans cover the kind of counseling that many states bar, giving federal workers and their families guaranteed access to therapy.
But the biggest hope is at the Supreme Court. On Oct. 7, the justices will hear a case challenging Colorado’s ban.
The plaintiff, a licensed counselor, says the law violates her First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.
She wants the court to restore her right to talk to deeply confused kids, and ultimately, help them accept their biological gender.
Fighting for this right isn’t the same as demonizing transgender people, despite activist claims to the contrary.
Nearly 14,000 kids received transgender treatments between 2019 and 2023 alone. It’s only human to admit that many are struggling and need real mental-health care, not drugs and surgeries.
By blocking kids from getting therapy, states like Minnesota are harming and isolating some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
So much for the Democrats’ purported concerns about keeping the long arm of the law out of the physician-patient relationship. As I say, the law is insane. The case to which Dr. Miceli alludes is Chiles v. Salazar. The law may be unconstitutional as well as insane. We will have to follow that case.
