Regarding the official LDS church statement: Opposing Proposed Utah Psychologist Licensing Act Rule.
I think the shared goal here is, or should be, harm reduction. We are all trying to do the morally right thing that results in more kids getting Good Treatment, and fewer kids getting Bad Treatment.
So we need to balance:
- therapists', parents', and patients' freedom to engage in treatment that they believe is best, with
- scientific evidence that certain treatments are, on the whole, objectively harmful.
We want to prevent Bad Treatment from being administered, without the unintended consequence of preventing Possibly Good Treatment that science either can't or has not yet proven to be Good Treatment. But the whole value judgement of what is Good/Bad Treatment contains deeply subjective elements, especially when you mix in religion.
So I get it. It's a nuanced topic, and the church is saying let's err towards the status quo, let's err towards freedom to seek and administer treatment as we individually see fit.
I say this: The LDS church is an organization that has a history of engaging in what they thought was Potentially Good Treatment, which turned out to be objectively Bad Treatment. (I am specifically talking about how the church used to tell gay people that conversion therapy works.) It seems obvious to me that they would prefer the status quo where they get to keep doing what they have been doing.
The hippocratic oath says to do no harm. I think it is totally appropriate to err towards doing no harm. So you'll have to pardon me for not mourning the loss of religious freedom, when the price of keeping that religious freedom is measured in the blood of the suicides that have resulted from harmful faith-based treatments. I'll say it again: if we must err, let's err on the side of doing no harm.
