A Jewish Therapist is Suing the City Over a Ban on Counsel Against Gay Sex – & We Were Better Off Naked

Are you in Brooklyn and wish to be ex-gay? If so, you can visit Dr. Dovid Schwartz, a licensed psychotherapist and member of the Chabad Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish Community.

Oh, wait — no you can’t: A city council law has made it illegal for anyone to sell services which “seek to change a person’s sexual orientation or seek to change a person’s gender identity to conform to the sex of such individual that was recorded at birth.”

Oy.

Dovid wants to challenge that law; therefore — with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom — he’s suing the city.

The good doctor claims the ordinance violates his freedom of speech as well as the religious faith of not only him but his potential clients.

From the ADF:

Notably, the law only prohibits counsel in one direction—assisting a patient who desires to reduce same-sex attraction or achieve comfort in a gender identity that matches her or his physical body. The law threatens increasing fines of $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000 for first, second, and subsequent violations. By contrast, counseling that steers a patient towards a gender identity different than his or her physical body is permitted.

So here’s what the suit says:

The patient-psychotherapist relationship requires giving patients the ability to express themselves without fear of reprisal and allowing therapists the freedom to respond to that expression with understanding; it is the last possible place where the government should be dictating what topics or ideas are off limits. Yet New York City’s recently enacted Law Number 2018/22 (“the Counseling Censorship Law”), reaches into this confidential relationship to prohibit the discussion and exploration of ideas—and even the patient’s own, personal goals—to which the New York City Council objects.

Furthermore, as per ADF Senior Counsel Roger Brooks:

“All Americans, secular and religious, deserve the right to private conversations, free from government censorship. It is difficult to imagine a more direct violation of freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment than New York City’s attempt to regulate the private sessions between an adult and his counselor. The city council’s regulation is unprecedented and threatens to stand between Dr. Schwartz’s patients and the lives they choose to pursue. As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in its 2018 NIFLA decision, ‘[T]he people lose when the government is the one dictating which ideas should prevail.’”

Reportedly, some of Dovid’s clients wanna shake off the gay because they desire to live by the guidelines of Orthodox Jewish tradition — aka get hitched to someone sportin’ different genitals.

But for now, as pointed out by the ADF, he can’t do that:

“A number of patients have pursued and achieved those goals with the aid of his psychotherapeutic services. Schwartz uses no techniques in working with his patients other than listening and talking—yet the law claims to forbid even that.”

Whether you believe in conversion therapy or not, it seems to me that this is an issue of severe and inappropriate government intrusion into the choices and affairs of the citizenry.

At one point in history, we are all just runnin’ around, nekkid in the woods. People did what made sense to them, and that was it.

Someone had an idea: “Hey, if we form some kind of group, maybe we’ll get killed and eaten less.”

Fast-forward a few thousand years, and you can’t give someone money to talk to them about changing something — about your dadgum self — that you don’t like.

And there’s this.

That whole “group” thing went terribly, terribly wrong.

-ALEX

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