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The city of New York agreed to pay $100,000 in legal fees and nominal damages to a Jewish psychotherapist this week after the city council repealed a law which cracked down on professionals assisting individuals to accept their biological sex or overcome unwanted same-sex attraction.
The city council passed the law in 2018 making it unlawful for any person to provide services for a fee that “seek to change a person’s sexual orientation or seek to change a person’s gender identity to conform to the sex of such individual that was recorded at birth.”
Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist Dr Dovid Schwartz in the case, said that the law unconstitutionally censored private conversations between counselling professionals and their patients.
According to the ADF, “the law only prohibited counsel in one direction—assisting a patient who desires to reduce same-sex attraction or achieve comfort with their biological sex.”
Penalties of up to $10,000 applied.
Inconsistently, counselling that steers a patient towards a gender identity different than his or her physical body was permitted, according to ADF.
Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers requested a federal district court in June 2019 to halt enforcement of the city’s new ordinance that they say violated Schwartz’s freedom of speech and infringed on his religious faith and that of his patients.
Due to the lawsuit by ADF, the city voted to repeal the counselling ban in September last year and the ADF is no longer pursuing its lawsuit on behalf of Dr Schwarz.
“All New Yorkers and all Americans deserve the right to private conversations, free from government control,” said ADF Senior Counsel Roger Brooks.
“New York City directly violated our client’s freedom of speech by trying to regulate and censor private sessions between an adult and his therapist. While the city eventually saw the writing on the wall and reversed course, it needlessly cost the taxpayers of New York tens of thousands of dollars for enacting its unconstitutional policy in the first place, because Dr. Schwartz was forced to go to court to protect his rights.
“Other cities should not repeat the same error. We’re grateful that New York City is no longer threatening to censor Dr. Schwartz’s conversations and impose government-approved orthodoxy on him or his patients.”
According to the ADF, Schwartz has practices for over 50 years and has regularly encountered and served patients who want his help overcoming same-sex attraction.
“Because of their religious beliefs and personal life goals, clients who seek his counsel often desire to experience opposite-sex attraction so they can marry, form a natural family, and live consistently with their Orthodox Jewish faith.
“A number of patients have pursued and achieved those goals with the aid of his psychotherapeutic services. Schwartz uses no techniques in working with his patients other than listening and talking—yet the 2018 law claimed to forbid even that.”