The Michigan Conversion Therapy Ban Violates Human Nature and Religious Freedom

Michigan has seen a surge in LGBTQ political activism in recent years, resulting in the passage of consequential legislation. As with similar laws around the country, this legislation ostensibly aims to provide a “shield” for persons who claim an LGBTQ identity, but is really a “sword” used against those who reject progressive ideology on matters of sex and gender. The threat such bills pose to religious freedom is enormous. 

Enshrining LGBTQ Identities in State Law

In March 2023, the Michigan state legislature and Governor Gretchen Whitmer codified a deeply misguided 2022 Michigan Supreme Court interpretation of the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA). In that case, the court found that the provision forbidding sex discrimination also prohibits discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity.” In August 2022, the Grand Rapids-based Christian Healthcare Centers (CHC) filed a lawsuit in federal district court challenging the decision, which is now on appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The Religious Freedom Institute filed an amicus brief on behalf of CHC.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), representing CHC in the case, released an initial statement noting that the court’s interpretation of ELCRA threatens CHC and other religious medical practices by requiring them “to hire people who do not share their faith, to prescribe cross-sex hormones to facilitate efforts to alter a patient’s biological sex, and to use pronouns that do not accord with a person’s biological sex.” Civil rights law is intended to protect against invidious discrimination in key sectors of society, not to advance certain understandings of sexual behavior and gender expression while punishing others. And, yet, that is precisely how civil rights laws that identify “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classes end up working out in practice. The amended ELCRA thus contradicts what a civil rights law is and what it is for. 

In July 2023, Governor Whitmer also signed into law HB 4616 and 4617. Together these bills ban “conversion therapy” for minors who identify as LGBTQ. But the term is defined to cover virtually any therapeutic practice or treatment that refuses to propel a child down the path of living out his or her perceived “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” Put another way, Michigan law dictates that an LGBTQ-affirming course of action is the only permissible response in counseling minors. Here, again, we find a measure intended to advance certain understandings of sex and gender while punishing others, this time under the guise of a mental health regulation.

Challenging Michigan’s Ban on “Conversion Therapy”

In response, a group of Catholic therapists, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, filed a case in federal court “to protect their ability to provide compassionate, professional counseling to children experiencing discomfort with their biological sex.” They argue that counselors are now banned “from helping children talk through the underlying causes of their gender confusion,” and instead are mandated “to assist children with a ‘gender transition’—a regime of puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries designed to make their bodies resemble the opposite sex.”

Becket’s filing includes a passage that sheds light on what is at stake for dissenters from the state’s progressive ideology:  

Plaintiffs have helped clients address . . . issues of gender identity and sexuality. For example, Plaintiffs have had clients as young as 10 to 12 years old who said they were questioning their gender identity and felt like they were someone of the opposite sex. As with any other issue, Plaintiffs gently help these clients explore why they feel this way. By helping clients address underlying trauma and heal from past experiences, Plaintiffs have helped clients change their behavior and gender expression in ways that better align with the clients’ own unique goals for their lives—including by accepting and embracing their biological sex.

The meaning of “conversion therapy” in Michigan law is a key problem. Banning the practice, so defined, takes off the table the thoughtful and compassionate approach attributed here to the plaintiffs. There are deeper issues at play, however, that need sorting out in order to capture the full measure of religious freedom threats this “conversion therapy” ban represents.

Conflating Inclinations and Expressions in Creating Identity

House Bill 4616 provides that “a mental health professional shall not engage in conversion therapy with a minor.” House Bill 4617 amends Michigan’s Mental Health Code to define conversion therapy as 

any practice or treatment by a mental health professional that seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behavior or gender expression or to reduce or eliminate sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward an individual of the same gender. 

Much could be said here, but the inclusion of “efforts to change behavior or gender expression” as forms of practicing “conversion therapy” is part of a broader progressive strategy, years in the making, to conflate psychological inclinations and outward expressions in the areas of sex and gender. The primary purpose is to demand that both be affirmed and regarded as irrefutable aspects of an individual’s identity.

Outward expressions and inward inclinations can certainly be connected, but they are not the same. And, yet, Michigan law now declares that therapy aimed at helping clients turn from certain outward expressions is illegal when those expressions are rooted in a child’s perceived “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” (The definitions of both of these terms also require scrutiny and clarification as they often reflect circular logic and devolve into little more than confusing language games.)

An individual’s experiences of sexual attraction are shaped by numerous factors that, while not wholly mysterious, are also not fully understood. Likewise, a person’s experiences of comfort or distress with his or her bodily sex, and how to relate to social norms around masculinity or femininity, also defy simple explanation. These complexities and ambiguities, however, have not prevented our society’s elites from unleashing a multi-decade movement to treat these dimensions of the human experience as unquestionably legitimate, and even preeminent, sources of human identity.

Radical individual autonomy is central to this movement. It directs individuals to look within themselves for their true identity and to act in accord with what they find with little or no further reflection. Submitting to a transcendent authority—as Christians, Jews, and other people of faith do—becomes unintelligible and even dangerous to those who subscribe to this ideology and the sexual revolution it has helped to fuel.

Identity, Morality, and Religious Liberty

When it comes to law, as well as social norms, it is time to stop treating behaviors and expressions as if they are, in themselves, innate and immutable aspects of the identities they purportedly reflect. In the context of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” such an approach is particularly troubling. Human desires and inclinations, and their fulfillment, are not good merely because they are experienced, named, and acted on. They must be examined based on standards beyond the self. In other words, no exclusively inward turn will settle these questions. And no law should try to force therapists to act otherwise. 

Michigan’s ban on conversion therapy essentially compels religious therapists to treat certain psychological inclinations—and their expressions—as incontrovertible goods to be encouraged when counseling their child clients. It obliges them to compromise their professional judgment and commits them to a flawed view of the human person. For Catholics and many other people of faith, human beings are not merely subject to our desires and inclinations. Rather, we are responsible moral agents whom God created with the capacity to discern and pursue what is good in the midst of our many and varied inward experiences. Michigan’s ban is premised on a decidedly different anthropology. At the deepest level, this is the basis on which it undermines the free exercise of religion (and freedom of speech) of the Catholic therapists in this case.

The meaning of “conversion therapy” that Michigan law now bans does not simply place some technical limit on those who work in the mental health profession. It instead validates and mandates a harmful conception of human nature and identity that is antithetical to the convictions of countless religious professionals who faithfully serve in this space. The constitutionally protected religious freedom of therapists and the well-being of their clients are greatly imperiled as a result.

Image by Ekaterina and licensed via Adobe Stock.