The Supreme Court’s next MAGA fan fiction
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The Republicans on the Roberts Court have made it clear how receptive they are to completely made-up stories that validate their ideological priors, and reactionary interest groups are responding accordingly:
On Tuesday, a Christian legal group will urge the US supreme court to overturn a ban on anti-LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” in a case that could erode protections for transgender and queer youth across the country.
Lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in high-profile litigation, are representing a woman challenging a 2019 Colorado law that prohibited conversion practices for youth under age 18. The ban applies to licensed clinicians who seek to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity, tactics medical groups have discredited as harmful and ineffective.
ADF’s petition in the case, Chiles v Salazar, cited several scholars to support its argument that conversion practices should once again be permitted. Two of those experts, however, told the Guardian that ADF had “profoundly” misrepresented their research, which discussed the “psychological damage” of conversion therapy.
The family of a deceased researcher, also quoted by ADF, said they were “deeply disturbed” by the “distortion” of his work.
“This is the most upsetting use of my scholarship that has ever happened in my career,” said Clifford Rosky, a University of Utah professor of constitutional law and civil rights. He has worked to ban conversion practices, but ADF nonetheless cited his research on sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ rights, co-authored with the renowned sexuality researcher Dr Lisa Diamond, to bolster its petition. “It’s upsetting because this is lethally dangerous to LGBTQ+ kids,” he said.
Roberts’s rule is that all social science is gobbledegook except for social science that actually is gobbledegook.