The weird position Canadian officials have put the nation in regarding several issues could fill volumes. A short list includes:
- Ensuring beer is in every corner store while healthcare clinics close.
- Gasoline prices aren’t high enough. Let’s add layers of taxes on top of rising costs, then top it off with the GST to ensure more hard-earned money enters government coffers.
- After decades of public education about the dangers of smoking, the legalization of marijuana has permitted the smoking of joints through rolled paper, bongs, and pipes.
- Proposing and passing legislation that continues to proclaim protections for speech while empowering authorities to apply punitive penalties to those expressing ideas at odds with government-sanctioned policy.
Figuring out government policy comes with the hazard of shaking your head too hard for too long, asking questions aloud like, “What?!”, or wondering if you are taking crazy pills. Bucking the trend, the Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled 8-1 (only former president Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented) that Colorado’s conversion therapy ban was an infringement on a Christian counsellor’s right to make a living. The ruling rested on the First Amendment’s rights to freedom of speech as expressed in ideas spoken, written, or symbolized. Kaley Chiles, a Christian therapist, claimed that a Colorado law would prevent her from being able to counsel individuals who voluntarily sought her services to either live in agreement with their biological sex or receive counselling on how to redirect one’s sexual desires towards the opposite sex. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said, “Colorado’s law not only bans physical interventions, it also censors speech based on viewpoint.” This one sentence best explains why America’s First Amendment stands out as the single greatest piece of constitutional brilliance in the thousands of years that humans have recorded ideas. Brittany Bernstein, reporting for National Review, wrote, “The Court’s majority found that the law favours one viewpoint by allowing counselors to affirm a client’s gender identity or sexual orientation but preventing counselors from helping clients who don’t wish to take that step.”
Justice Brown Jackson again baffled everyone with her dissent, writing, “First Amendment principles have far less salience when the speakers are medical professionals.” Meaning, one would suppose, that the First Amendment should not interfere simply because a treatment is applied through words rather than instruments. This reasoning led Charles C. Cooke on National Review’s The Editors podcast to say that the First Amendment would not protect a doctor who told a patient to amputate his leg to cure a flu bug. Yet, the good justice said there was no right to practice medicine that is not subordinate to the police power of the states. So, the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that the government doesn’t like. Fortunately, the rest of the Court recognized the constitutional importance of free speech. Although the ruling should have been unanimous, it was a strong endorsement of the therapist’s right to counsel those seeking help for gender dysphoria or sexual orientation questions, even if her counsel does not align with the prevailing cultural philosophy or the state’s policies.
The decision would not have gone this way in any other country, including Canada, where strong conversion therapy laws exist. Most countries no longer protect political speech, never mind speech that contradicts government ideology. As of Jan. 7, 2022, Canada has a nationwide ban on conversion therapy through Bill C-4, which amended the Criminal Code to make it illegal to provide, promote, or profit from practices designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity/expression to cisgender. This ban applies to both minors and adults. A quick summary of Google’s AI Gemini included the following key ideas:
- The law introduced Criminal Code offences punishable by up to five years in prison for causing a person to undergo conversion therapy, and up to two years for promoting, advertising, or benefiting from it.
- It covers practices aimed at repressing or reducing non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour or repressing non-cisgender identities.
- Conversion therapy is banned regardless of whether the person undergoing it consents, as the law deems it inherently harmful and discriminatory. (One can see the heavy hand of government sanction here. Even if a person wants to change their behaviour, seeks to become straight or return to their biological state, government laws prohibit it).
- Exceptions: The law does not ban non-judgmental counselling, such as for individuals exploring their identity or seeking support for a gender transition.
- Removal of Children: It is illegal to take a child from Canada to another country to undergo conversion therapy.
The SCOTUS ruling will not affect practices in Canada. But it should remind Canadians that the conversion therapy law is just the surface of how governments are using their power over individuals’ personal lives to influence behaviour, promote agendas, and reshape society. MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), the proposed C-9 bill, which supporters say will protect places of worship, could be used to target religious groups that do not comply with the ideals expressed in the conversion therapy law. And in Finland, a sitting member of their parliament (MP Päivi Räsänen) was accused of having shared a pamphlet years ago that made the case for biblical marriage. Charged with violating hate laws, Räsänen’s case reached the Finnish High Court. The justices dismissed two of the counts but found her guilty on one. She is now a criminal owing to her opinion on sexual morality. This means that dissent on moral questions in Finland could land you in the pokie. Sounds like tyranny. How silencing, prosecuting, imprisoning, and criminalizing someone for holding moral values that governed civilization for thousands of years passes muster seems unthinkable.
America’s First Amendment stands alone in protecting those who choose to honour long-held biblical views about sexual morality and biological identity. The rest of the world must throw itself at the mercy of its governmental overlords. Politicians will write legislation, and judges will interpret its meaning. Unless consulting or appealing to a higher authority (Natural Law, a Deity, or a constitution), the elitists at the top of the food chain will determine individual rights. As luck would have it, James Madison possessed the insight to recognize the potential danger that governmental authority could present to the individual. As the author of the First Amendment to America’s Bill of Rights, he understood that the U.S. Constitution lacked sufficient protections for individual liberties. Too bad someone did not think of that when Pierre Trudeau was patriating our made-in-Canada charter in 1982. Instead, our liberties get chiselled away piece by piece, and most passively accept it, trusting the self-appointed guarantors of our freedom as they add another link to a chain allegedly designed to protect us. Sadly, as in most liberal democracies that once cherished liberty, the opiate of security and secularism will replace our freedom and soon come for our thoughts.
Dave Redekop is a retired elementary resource teacher who now works part-time at the St. Catharines Courthouse as a Registrar. He has worked on political campaigns since high school and attended university in South Carolina for five years, where he earned a Master’s in American History with a specialization in Civil Rights. Dave loves reading biographies.
