When the U.S. Supreme Court commences proceedings Tuesday to hear oral arguments over whether a Colorado therapist can offer “conversion therapy” to queer youth, the stakes are far greater than one state’s law. 

Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge to Colorado’s ban on ‘conversion therapy for minors, is about whether the highest court in the land will once again choose bigotry over humanity and call it constitutional.

And it will likely do it based on a lie. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which is defending conversion therapy in the case, is accused of misquoting and misrepresenting a 2016 study by scholars Lisa Diamond and Clifford Rosky.

In light of all this, I’m not sure why the court is wasting its time listening to oral arguments when the result will be a foregone conclusion. This is all a dog and pony show, a sham, by the six conservative justices to somehow show that they can remain “unbiased,” which is a joke with tragic consequences.

Conversion therapy is not in any way therapy. It is psychological torture masquerading as religion, marketed as “healing,” and has historically been inflicted on queer people under the guise of saving their souls. It sure as hell doesn’t save them — it destroys them.

It was born in the 19th century from the same pseudoscientific junk that justified lobotomies and “hysteria” diagnoses. Doctors prescribed hypnosis, electroshock, even chemical castration to “cure” homosexuality. They failed, of course, not because they lacked technique, but because there was never anything to cure.

By the late 20th century, the medical community condemned conversion therapy as quackery and abuse. Virtually every medical group in the country is opposed to conversion therapy.

But members of the sanctimonious religious right keep shoving it down victims’ throats. In their warped logic, with the cross as their shield, they call it “free speech.” And Tuesday, before a Supreme Court dominated by Christian fundamentalists, that twisted argument will get its day. 

I can see Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Thomas behind the curtain snickering and salivating at their chance to trash opponents of conversion therapy, who will likely point out the life-threatening danger of this so-called free speech.

This case really asks whether a therapist should be allowed to inflict emotional and psychological trauma on LGBTQ+ youth in the name of religion. Under this court, the answer will almost certainly be yes. Unambiguously yes. Glory hallelujah yes.

This pseudo court functions less as a judicial branc, and more like Donald Trump’s black-robed bullies and rubber stampers. Case after case, the 6–3 majority has given Trump everything he’s wanted: immunity shields, deregulation, trampling voting rights, and weaponizing government agencies. 

This court doesn’t interpret the Constitution. That’s another one of its repeated lies. It sees its mission as enforcing a cultural and religious crusade while making Trump emperor and king.

And LGBTQ+ Americans have been in its crosshairs from day one. And we will continue to be through this upcoming term. While the court paves the way for Trump to become a dictator, it will piously try to tear down rights and precedent.

This court has consistently ruled against LGBTQ+ plaintiffs, framing discrimination as “religious freedom.” It said states can ban gender-affirming care for youth and sided with business owners who claim their “faith” allows them to deny service to queer customers. 

Justices Thomas and Alito have openly telegraphed their desire to revisit, read overturn, Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. They’ve described it as a “mistake,” a “threat to religious liberty,” and a decision that “should be corrected.” Corrected, in their eyes, means erased, done away with, put in the dustbin of history.

And that’s the ideological platform on which Tuesday’s case will be decided. It’s not about the law. It’s not about science. And it’s most certainly not about human decency. It’s about the court’s divine entitlement and the belief that Christian conservatives are owed special protection to impose their beliefs on others.

Enter Kaly Chiles, the therapist at the center of the conversion therapy case, who wants to impose her beliefs and her destructive logic on impressionable queer youth.

It’s grotesque. Immoral. And it’s dangerous.

Ask Andrew Hartzler, president of the Missouri Young Democrats and a survivor of conversion therapy. At 14, after he came out to his parents, they sent him to a so-called counselor in Kansas City three times a week. 

He says the sessions “put me in a suffocating box” where he was taught that every thought or feeling he had about another boy was a sign of sin. “If I was walking down the street and noticed a guy who caught my eye,” he recalled, “I was told it meant I wasn’t praying enough or reading the Bible enough.”