Supreme Court dismisses appeal that challenges California's ban on gay reparative therapy

The United States Supreme Court has struck down an appeal that challenges California's ban on "gay conversion" therapy for minors.

The High Court declined on Monday to hear the Welch v. Brown case, which attempted to overturn a 2012 state law that prohibited state-licensed mental health counselors, social workers, and psychologists from offering homosexual reparative therapy to minors.

The challenge to the ban was filed by Donald Welch, an ordained minister and licensed family therapist who oversees counseling at Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego.

Welch is joined in the suit by a Catholic psychiatrist and a man who underwent conversion therapy and now wants to perform it on others, according to Reuters.

The Supreme Court had also rejected a previous challenge to the law in 2014, which argued that the ban was a violation of free speech.

After the rejection of their free speech challenge, the plaintiffs pressed their claim that the law violates their religious freedom. The San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their arguments last October.

The ban on sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) therapy for minors was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in 2012. Similar laws have been passed in New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia, according to Church Militant.

The therapy often involves counseling, hypnosis, dating skill training, and in some cases, aversive techniques that induce pain or electric shocks in response to same-sex erotic images. Such treatment is said to originate from the belief that homosexuality is a mental illness, which the state says has been discredited for decades.

While proponents of the ban argue that reparative therapy is harmful, some licensed counselors disagree.

Christopher Doyle, an ex-gay who uses SOCE therapy to help his clients, opposes certain methods promoted under the guise of "Christian counseling," but he maintains that SOCE does not include the abusive methods highlighted in media reports.

"Licensed, ethical therapists do not force or coerce teenagers to change, nor do they manipulate desperate parents to send their kids away to be reformed," he wrote in an op-ed for The Christian Post in March.

Doyle argued that attempts to ban reparative therapy are "particularly unconscionable" because "minors often struggle with same-sex attractions as a result of rape or molestation by pedophiles."

"To propagate their lies, gay activists have made outrageous claims that this therapy involves electroshock and other forms of aversive methods, but they have yet to offer any proof of this. Contrary to their claims, this counseling is simply talk therapy," Doyle said.

"Homosexual activists would rather keep these young people locked in a lifetime of hopelessness — and silence — than allow them to find healing from rape or molestation," he added.