I have a friend with same-sex attraction who is having counselling to live a chaste life. I understand that some of the conversion therapy legislation in Australia would make counselling in his case illegal. Is this a violation of a basic human right to seek help?
It is most certainly a violation of a basic human right. Everyone has the right, for example, to go to a doctor to seek treatment for an illness, and to a psychologist to seek help for a mental disorder.
Equally, they have the right to seek counselling for unwanted same-sex attraction. It should be said, of course, that a person with same-sex attraction who wants to live a gay lifestyle has a civic right to seek help to do so, and the legislation in most countries protects that right.
I say “civic right”, meaning a right with respect to human legislation. Naturally, no one has a moral right, a right before God, to engage in homosexual acts, which are disordered and seriously sinful (cf. CCC 2357-2359). But any legislation that denies a person with same-sex attraction the right to seek help to live a chaste life is fundamentally unjust.
The US Supreme Court agrees. In an 8-1 judgment on 31 March 2026, the court found that a Colorado conversion therapy law violated the First Amendment because it told therapists that they could not help young people struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria.
The state’s law defined conversion therapy as “any practice or treatment” that attempts to change a person’s “sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Its ban included efforts to change a person’s “behaviours or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
The majority decision of the Supreme Court stated: “The Constitution does not protect the right of some to speak freely; it protects the right of all… It safeguards not only popular ideas; it secures, even and especially, the right to voice dissenting views… The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth… Laws like Colorado’s, which suppress speech based on viewpoint, represent an egregious assault on both commitments.”
The Supreme Court decision came as a result of a lawsuit brought in 2022 by Kaley Chiles, a Christian counsellor, who challenged the Colorado ban, arguing that her clients came to her for faith-based counselling.
The lawsuit alleged that the Colorado law constituted discrimination based on viewpoint because it expressly permitted therapy supportive of gender transition but it prohibited therapy rooted in “a religious viewpoint that aligns with [Chiles’] religious beliefs and those of her clients.”
Chiles argued that she “provides only talk therapy” to her clients. She said the law “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech.”
Australia, unfortunately, has conversion therapy legislation in numerous jurisdictions which is very similar to that of Colorado and other US states.
Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory have laws against conversion therapy or conversion practices, and recently, the Greens have proposed a similar bill for Tasmania. Victoria’s “Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021” is especially harsh.
It criminalises and penalises any practices, including religious or pseudo-medical approaches, directed at changing or suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
The law explicitly bans certain prayer-based practices, deliverance practices, or spiritual guidance intended to convert or suppress identity.
This law, like those in other jurisdictions, facilitates a person’s desire to adopt a gay lifestyle or change their gender, while prohibiting efforts to help them live according to Christian values. It thus prioritises one’s sexual or gender identity over their religious identity.
It is to be hoped that Australian laws like this will be challenged in the courts and overturned on the grounds that they deny the fundamental human right to seek treatment for an unwanted condition.
