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The Supreme Court issued one of its most clarifying rulings in years on Tuesday, directly challenging the cancellation efforts of modern progressivism, and the reaction from the progressive Left revealed everything you need to know about who actually believes in freedom and who doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
In Chiles v. Salazar<\/em><\/span><\/a>, the Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado\u2019s ban on so-called \u201cconversion therapy\u201d \u2014 specifically, talk therapy that helps minors explore whether their gender dysphoria might resolve in alignment with their biological sex \u2014 violates the First Amendment rights of licensed counselor Kaley Chiles. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, put it poetically<\/span><\/a>: laws that \u201csuppress speech based on viewpoint represent an egregious assault\u201d on First Amendment commitments. The ruling wasn\u2019t close. It was a near-unanimous recognition that the government cannot dictate which therapeutic conversations are permissible and which are forbidden based on the ideological conclusion it prefers. Tuesday\u2019s ruling should send a chill down the spine of other states that have taken similar action.<\/p>\n Enter Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY).<\/p>\n Beshear<\/a><\/span> decried the ruling, saying that \u201cconversion therapy is torture,\u201d and invoked his progressive Christian faith to say that \u201cmy faith teaches me that all children are children of God and practices that endanger or harm them are wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Beshear is welcome to espouse his convictions of faith in public life, including as a sitting governor (even if they depart from biblical teaching). He is not welcome to abuse it in the service of a philosophical position that he and other progressives fail to reason through with consistency.<\/p>\n Here is the question he, along with all other leftists, cannot or refuse to answer: If you affirm a minor\u2019s right to pursue medical intervention \u2014 puberty blockers, hormones, surgeries \u2014 to align their body with their perceived gender identity, on what principled basis do you deny another minor the right to pursue talk therapy exploring whether their dysphoria might resolve without drastic intervention? Both involve a young person, a clinical professional, and a question about identity. The only difference is the direction of the therapeutic goal. And those goals are set against what progressivism thinks sufficiently aligned with its own aims. Beshear supports state-sponsored medical intervention when the conclusion is sufficiently progressive and lines up with what he bills as compassionate; he abandons the language of compassion when it runs contrary to leftist goals for using the government to advance transgender ideology.<\/p>\n The compassionate appeal to \u201cchildren of God\u201d is theologically sound as far as it goes \u2014 every Christian affirms it. But it proves too much and too little simultaneously. It proves too much because it could be deployed to ban any therapy a state deems harmful. It proves too little because it says nothing about which therapeutic goals are legitimate, which is the actual question before us. That\u2019s an anthropological question, one that liberals do not like to answer because modern progressive anthropology lies on flimsy, irrational grounds, unable to determine what a man or woman even is. What Beshear wants is for his theological sentiments to do the intellectual work that his empty platitudes cannot. But a magistrate charged with upholding the common good owes citizens more than sentiment (Rom. 13:1-7). He owes them a coherent account of what a man and woman are, and which identity claims warrant medical affirmation and which warrant further reflection \u2014 and why. He has not given one. He cannot give one, because the moment he tries, the internal contradictions of progressive gender ideology become impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n Consider the logical structure on display in the leftist outcries to Tuesday\u2019s decision:<\/p>\n