As a gay teen growing up in Benton, Illinois, Curtis Lopez-Galloway would be driven hours across state lines into Kentucky to see a religious counselor who worked out of his home.
The man would give him “masculine” activities to complete and derided a “homosexual lifestyle" that he claimed showed a predisposition to traits shared by murderers and pedophiles. According to Lopez-Galloway, the counselor eventually forced him to separate from friends who affirmed his sexuality, and instigated fights between him and his parents.
Lopez-Galloway said he eventually patched things up with his parents, but he still suffers from anxiety and depression.
“It was the darkest time of my life,” Lopez-Galloway said. “There’s always going to be a permanent scar on my relationship with my parents … it’s always there in the background.”
Now, at 31-years-old and having since founded the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, Lopez-Galloway is still processing last week's Supreme Court ruling against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids in Colorado. It's one of 23 states — including Illinois — that ban the discredited practice, in addition to four that restrict it.
“I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier,” Lopez-Galloway said, while reiterating that Illinois' ban remains untouched "for now."
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argued the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide if it meets a legal standard that few laws pass, though it left other bans intact.
It's the latest in a line of recent cases in which the justices have backed claims of religious discrimination while taking a skeptical view of LGBTQ+ rights.
In her solo dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that states should be free to regulate health care, even if that means incidental restrictions on speech. The decision “opens a dangerous can of worms” that “threa
