2-1 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, issued Friday. Other courts have upheld such bans to date, and the judges who ruled against the Florida bans were both appointees of Donald Trump.“We understand and appreciate that the therapy is highly controversial,” the ruling reads. “But the First Amendment has no carveout for controversial speech.
We hold that the challenged ordinances violate the First Amendment because they are content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny.”Conversion therapy is designed to turn LGBTQ+ people straight or cisgender, and it has been condemned as ineffective and harmful by every major medical and mental health organization in the U.S.