The Wisconsin GOP has finally stopped being conservative — at least in one area. And that’s a good thing.
That is, “conservative” in the sense of conserving leftists’ mistakes. At issue is that State Assembly Republicans have blocked a freedom-squelching bureaucratic ban on reparative therapy (RT) for so-called LBGTQ individuals.
RT, generally referred to pejoratively as “conversion therapy” by mainstream media, seeks to rid people of unwanted homosexual or “transgender” feelings or those relating to other types of disordered sexuality. It has been outlawed in 20 states and D.C. — by the same type of activists who busy themselves trying to convert children into sexual devolutionaries in passions and practice.
The ban’s suspension was effected by the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules, which passed the measure Thursday on a 6-4 party-line vote, with the GOP in the majority. “Wisconsin Republicans … rejected the policy after four hours of debate in which they argued that the Department of Safety and Public Standards [DSPS], which oversees licensed therapists, counselors, and social workers and issued the ban in the first place, overstepped its legal authority,” relates the Daily Mail.
Providing some background, Fox News informs that after the DCPS instituted the anti-RT rule in 2020, Republican lawmakers “introduced a bill in January 2021 to strike it down. Lawmakers then placed that bill in committee for the remainder of the 2021-22 session, avoiding a veto from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and temporarily suspending the ban.”
“The ban was reinstated after lawmakers failed to permanently block it by the end of the last legislative session,” Fox also writes. It had “been back in effect since Dec. 1, after Evers won reelection.”
“Mike Mikalsen, chief of staff for rules committee co-chair Sen. Steve Nass, reiterated the committee’s reasoning for suspending the ban in 2021, telling The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that the licensing board had no authority under state law for the reinstatement,” Fox continues.
Of course, Democrats cried foul, and the mainstream media kicked its propaganda machine into high gear. For example, the Daily Mail’s “senior health reporter,” Cassidy Morrison, proved that she knows as little about American civics as she does about health in writing that RT was “outlawed” in Wisconsin in 2020.
False: It was never outlawed in the Badger State.
Bureaucracies such as the DSPS have no power to create law; they can only issue “rules.” Lawmaking is solely the Legislature’s role.
Such confusion is lamentably common, however. It was also exhibited with the many Covid restrictions, which were often called “laws” but were almost universally mere executive orders by usurpative governors. Such misunderstandings are dangerous because people won’t try to stop government officials from overstepping their bounds if they don’t even know what those bounds are.
These misunderstandings are often encouraged by government officials who should (and perhaps do?) know better, too. For example, Senator Chris Larson, a Milwaukee Democrat, “said the vote was an attempt to skirt the authority of an examining board that has been empowered by the state’s legislature,” relates Morrison.
Obviously, a bureaucracy “empowered” by the Legislature can also be disempowered by it. Is Larson implying that upon creation an agency suddenly becomes a competing, unelected de facto legislature that can issue diktats without opposition or oversight? Ours is not a government of, by, and for the people if unelected bureaucrats can trump the voters’ will as expressed via their elected representatives.
Ironically, though, the sexual devolutionaries are quite taken with majority will in other situations. Morrison writes, for example, that reparative therapy “flies in the face of the accepted scientific consensus.” Yet “consensus” is a term not of science, but of politics. One would never say, “Consensus holds that the Sun is 93 million miles from Earth,” as facts stand on their own; they don’t derive credibility from majority vote. “Consensus” is something cited when facts can’t be.
Morrison further states that RT “has been rejected by all mainstream medical organizations.” Would these be the type of “mainstream medical organizations” that (mis)managed the Covid situation, making claims such as there’s no evidence the disease can be spread person-to-person, we just need “two weeks to flatten the curve” (before flattening our economy by demanding lockdowns), and the “vaccines” are “safe and effective”? Those “mainstream medical organizations”?
Morrison also quotes Senator Larson as saying, “My Republican colleagues have developed an unusual and disturbing obsession with the bodies and identities of children and adolescents … and re-instituting conversion torture is just the latest example.”
“What they’re trying to do is nothing less than state-sponsored child abuse,” he continued.
For her part, Morrison called reparative-therapy treatments “draconian.” These are the same people, do note, who advocate giving a preteen damaging puberty-blocking drugs and mutilating a youth’s genitalia merely because he “feels” he’s the opposite sex — even though 80 to 90 percent of sexual-identity-confused kids will naturally outgrow their problem if left alone.
Continuing the staggering projection, Morrison parroted other mainstream media in calling RT “pseudoscience.” Yet consider: RT holds that MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender identity”) is a psychological problem and thus requires a psychological remedy. That’s congruence.
The MUSS activists claim that at issue is a biological condition requiring a biological remedy (body alteration), but prescribe this based on a psychological diagnosis (strong and persistent feelings of “cross-gender identification”). That’s irrational.
(Likewise, there’s no evidence homosexuality is inborn.)
Put simply, RT proponents diagnose the problem via the mind and treat the mind; MUSS advocates diagnose the problem via the mind, too.
Then they “treat” the body.
Who’s peddling pseudoscience again?
Lastly, Morrison lists “shaming the person” as a “draconian” RT treatment, as if the pro-virtue side shanghais people off the street and forces them into therapy. But at issue here — and what Democrats are adamantly opposing — is virtually always a voluntary arrangement (in the case of minors, it occasionally might not be). A person wants help and a therapist agrees to provide it.
Many people desperately want their minds changed, not their bodies. As with a MUSS individual who wrote in an online comment years ago, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy,” these people seek freedom from their disordered sex-oriented feelings. That a certain party would deny them this freedom, and would instead mutilate their bodies, says it all.
