After facing criticism for repealing a ban on conversion therapy last month, Kansas City officials now plan to propose new legislation that targets the discredited practice.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and 6th District Council member Johnathan Duncan announced the proposal in a press release last week. They are set to introduce the ordinance on June 11, and it could be discussed in a committee meeting as early as June 23. Members of the public will be able to comment on the legislation before council members during that meeting.
"With our revised ban, Kansas City will have the strongest new municipal protections in the country, outlawing discredited therapeutic practices that have harmed generations of youth and adults," Lucas stated in the press release.
The new proposal follows a contentious 7-5 vote in May that repealed the city's original ban, which Council passed in 2019. While several Council members voted against the ordinance in protest, the majority recognized at the time that they had little choice. Passage, they said, was needed to avoid future legal challenges and potentially address an ongoing lawsuit.
The repeal came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against a Colorado law that bans conversion therapy, which seeks to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity to a heterosexual lifestyle. The Colorado law prohibited mental health professionals from engaging in conversion therapy with a minor, but Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor, argued in court it discriminated against the views she expresses in talk therapy. She also argued she did not attempt to "convert her clients."
Organizations like the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association strongly condemn the practice.
Kansas City is also facing litigation that challenges its 2019 conversion therapy ban. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is suing the city on behalf of a group of Christian counselors, who argue it violates their free speech. That lawsuit also targets Jackson County's 2023 conversion therapy ban, which is still on the books.
"We expected to lose millions of dollars in that lawsuit to pay an extremist anti-LGBTQ organization those millions of dollars that could be going to city services," said Duncan, who was one of seven to repeal the ban, on KCUR's Up to Date on Friday.
Duncan said he now regrets that vote because leaders in the city's LGBTQ+ community were not consulted first.
"We didn't craft a replacement ban before we repealed the current ban, and that wasn't right," Duncan said, noting that he heard people were caught off guard by the vote.
"The timing couldn't have been worse: directly before Pride, people felt betrayed," Duncan said. "A lot of people said, you know, 'We expect this from the state, we expect this from the federal government, we don't expect this from a city that's supposed to have our backs.'"
James Moran with Our Spot KC, a nonprofit organization that supports LGBTQ+ people, said he was initially surprised by Council's decision to repeal the ban.
"When we're talking about vulnerable young people who are already facing stigma, harassment, discrimination, bullying — to add on top of that the notion that professionals, family think that you are someone that needs fixing — it really does have deleterious mental health effects," Moran said, adding that some conversion therapy practices include physical cruelty and other treatment akin to torture.
Moran said, for some, local bans provide assurances against being exposed to the practice.
"To suddenly have a new possibility that such heinous practices could be employed, it's scary, and it does put people on edge," Moran said.
What Kansas City's proposed law says
The Supreme Court's decision in Chiles v. Salazar does not automatically strike down the Colorado ban, but instead sends the lawsuit back to the lower courts. And while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's lone dissenting opinion noted the decision "could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers, "Justice Neil Gorsuch, in writing for the majority, said Colorado's law "censors speech based on viewpoint."
Allen Rostron, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said the Supreme Court's ruling will make it challenging for existing bans on conversion therapy to continue.
"They felt like it clearly was violating freedom of speech, because it was discriminating based on the content of what you're saying, and even the viewpoint of the person," Rostron said. "So the question would be: Can you come up with a law that aims to achieve some kind of a similar purpose but does not violate freedom of speech?"
Those are the kinds of questions officials like Duncan sought to answer with the new regulation.
"We understand that this type of, quote-unquote, 'therapeutic practice' is not therapeutic at all," Duncan said. "It leads to suicide, it leads to self-harm, it leads to shame and it leads to a lifetime of psychological damage. And as someone with PTSD, post-traumatic stress, myself, it is absolutely incumbent upon the city to take every step and every measure at our disposal to protect people from this harmful practice."
The legislation seeks to prohibit "dangerous and life-threatening therapeutic practices" done in exchange for compensation. It defines these practices as any service that is provided "for the purpose of treating, curing, changing, or eliminating a person's behavior or condition that is not recognized as a mental disorder" by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The legislation specifically outlines dangerous practices as those that increase the risk of self-harm or depression. Providers who violate the ordinance would be subject to a $1,000 fine and revocation of their business license.
Duncan said the city's original ban was limited and only applied to minors. He said no person was charged under the city's 2019 ban for providing conversion therapy. Duncan said the new proposal expands coverage to any person who receives it.
"We focused mostly on the harm and not the practice itself," he said.
The ordinance also restricts someone from paying for these practices, Duncan said, as a way to hold parents and guardians accountable if they expose children to conversion therapy.
"I imagine that, if we're successful here, that this is going to be used as a template for other cities looking at: How do we get around the Supreme Court's decision to protect our most vulnerable folks?" Duncan said.
Unlike the 2019 ban, the soon-to-be proposed legislation does not explicitly name conversion therapy as a prohibited practice, nor does it have any language specifying practices targeting the LGBTQ+ community or minors.
Rostron said it's an interesting approach.
"The argument would be: 'Well, we're not specifying this particular practice, we're just saying any kind of therapeutic practice that is harmful or life-threatening would be prohibited,'" Rostron said. "In some ways, it seems to improve their position on the First Amendment issue, because it's no longer prohibiting one specific practice that the government doesn't like, so it doesn't seem as much based on the viewpoint or the expression of a particular disfavored idea."
But, Rostron added, the lack of specificity in the ordinance opens up other concerns that the ordinance could be too vague or subjective.
"It talks about any dangerous or life-threatening therapeutic practice. What are those?" he said. "What about all kinds of other therapeutic practices? Who's now going to decide which ones are sufficiently dangerous and life-threatening?"
Carl Charles is legal counsel with Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization focusing on the LGBTQ+ community. He said a limitation of the proposal's current text is its outlining of conditions not recognized as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
Specifically, he said gender dysphoria, which many trans people experience, is still included in the manual of mental disorders.
"It is not a mental disorder — that's important to note," Charles said. "Even though I think there are arguments that this works for the purposes of prohibiting conversion therapy, trying to change someone's gender identity, it could face unnecessary pushback."
Kansas City officials aren't the only ones facing the difficult task of how to protect LGBTQ+ youth from harmful practices like conversion therapy.
"It's certainly an uphill battle, and the Chiles decision doesn't make that battle easier, but it's one they could be facing even absent the Chiles decision," Charles said. "They're just going to face a little bit more scrutiny in the drafting of that new legislation."
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