Governments across the West now claim the power to decide which conversations about sex, identity and reality are permitted. In Australia that power has already produced conversion therapy bans that treat voluntary counselling aimed at biological reality as harmful, while protecting the opposite direction.

A pending US Supreme Court challenge to similar state laws raises the same stakes for Australia: can the state compel therapists to follow one ideology, or do clients retain the freedom to seek help that aligns with truth and their own conscience? John Steenhoff, principal lawyer at the Human Rights Law Alliance, contends the answer will shape more than therapy rooms.

John Steenhoff frames the coming US Supreme Court decision in Charles v. Salazar as a test of whether states may outlaw any counselling that seeks to resolve gender confusion or unwanted same-sex attraction in line with classical psychological principles or Christian teaching. The laws under challenge go beyond prohibiting aversive techniques; they ban ordinary talk therapy that does not affirm the prevailing ideology.

Steenhoff argues the better standard is not state-directed therapy but client-directed therapy—and better still, truth-directed therapy. People made in the image of God possess inherent dignity and freedom of conscience. Within proper boundaries they should be able to pursue help consistent with reality rather than being compelled to indulge a self-conception detached from it. The alternative—treating the individual’s self-identification as the highest authority—has produced measurable harm: rising anxiety, depression and confusion among the young, and a medical and psychological establishment that increasingly refuses to treat the underlying condition.

The philosophical conflict is stark. One side holds that objective moral and biological standards exist and that therapy should help a willing client conform desire and identity to them. The other elevates self-actualisation above external reality, treating every feeling as authoritative. Steenhoff traces the second view to the autonomous individual unmoored from the Judeo-Christian and classical Western inheritance that once supplied the moral framework for law and medicine.

He is blunt about the practical double standard. Conversion therapy bans protect the movement toward an LGBT identity while criminalising assistance for those who freely choose the reverse. That is not equality; it is the imposition of one contested ideology. Anti-discrimination statutes, he notes, cannot be applied neutrally. They smuggle in moral judgements. Once the assumed Christian moral framework is removed, a new dogmatic religion fills the vacuum—one that cancels dissenters, offers no grace and tolerates no restoration.

“More dangerous than violence between citizens is a government that controls ideas and is the arbiter of what speech is acceptable and what speech is not.”

Steenhoff points to the human-rights bureaucracy’s long preoccupation with grievance and identity politics at the expense of classic freedoms. Post-war human-rights instruments recognised that the greatest threat to liberty is the state that polices ideas. Today the reflex is the opposite: after violence or offence, governments rush to regulate speech rather than target actual criminal behaviour. He regards a government that decides acceptable speech as more dangerous than violence between citizens.

Courage is required. Steenhoff lists Australians who have already paid a price—Israel Folau, the Manly Seven, Archbishop Julian Porteous, university students and lecturers, corporate employees—for stating biological or Christian convictions. The academy, he says, currently suppresses genuine debate under the language of safety and bigotry. Renewal will not come through institutional demolition but through new institutions and a steady supply of people willing to speak truth without being paralysed by the usual labels.

For ordinary Christians the path is local and long-term: reject any sacred-secular divide, tend the square inch God has given, speak or refuse to speak falsehood, marry, raise children who know they have a God and a country worth serving, and build a culture of life rather than decline. Australia still retains substantial freedom; the question is whether its people will recover the moral foundations that made that freedom possible.

The conversation does not pretend that every contested claim has already been settled by data. Steenhoff repeatedly grounds his case in the observed outcomes of the current experiment and in the logical consequences of abandoning objective truth. Readers will still need to weigh the medical evidence and the precise wording of Australian statutes for themselves.