On April 27, 2016, the governor of Tennessee signed into law House Bill 1840, which "declares that no person providing counseling or therapy services will be required to counsel or serve a client as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with the sincerely held principles of the counselor or therapist;"
In short, counselors can refer a client anytime something the client is, says, or does conflicts in some way with what the therapist sincerely and principally believes. It is no secret that the bill is,
part of a wave of religious-freedom bills that have been introduced and passed in the past year or so, almost all inspired by objections to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Some of these measures are just for show -- pastors could never be legally compelled to perform a gay-marriage ceremony in the way some bills have suggested, for example. But some represent a relatively novel approach to religious-freedom legislation: They offer legal cover to people of faith who don't want to provide certain goods or services to LGBT people, especially when doing so might seem like a tacit endorsement of their relationships and sex lives. (Source)
The problem here (well, one of many) is that this directly contradicts the American Counseling Association's 2014 Code of Ethics, section A.11.b., Values Within Termination and Referral, which states, "Counselors refrain from referring prospective and current clients based solely on the counselor's personally held values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor's values are inconsistent with the client's goals or are discriminatory in nature."
According to that same code of ethics, section A.4.b., Personal Values, the call instead would be for counselors to "be aware of -- and avoid imposing -- their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... respect the diversity of clients... and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor's values are inconsistent with the client's goals or are discriminatory in nature."
What is the ethical code really saying?
"It is better if you don't touch referring clients away solely because of your personal beliefs with a 10-foot pole. A better alternative is to get educated on why your personal beliefs and your clients can't exist in the same room, then work on that. Because guess what? If you talk to another human being long enough, you're going to find out you don't have 100% the same beliefs with anyone, so you'd have to refer everyone away. And you wouldn't do that. You'd just pick the humans that really bug you. And that's called discrimination."
And here's the thing from a boots-on-the-ground, full-caseload therapist -- I routinely provide counseling to individuals who are doing and saying things that I find personally offensive, or that are by their simple being an affront to the points of view I hold very deeply.
For example:
- I help number of individuals who believe there is no God and actively campaign to proselytize others to that point of view.
In these cases and countless others, I do not refer, but instead try to be aware of the ways in which my values inform how I approach my clients in these areas, to mitigate the impact of those values if they run the risk of me railroading them and presuming to know what is best for their lives or what they ought to do. When this is a significant struggle, I seek help and further education from literature and therapist mentors and colleagues. And *GASP*, when appropriate, I bring these things up with my clients and talk about how this might impact us and what it means for us to continue working.
Even if you could concede that this is probably a more appropriate approach, you might still wonder, "Yes, but is it really appropriate for someone who is anti-gay to work with someone who is gay?"
But this question obscures a much larger, encompassing question: "Is it really appropriate for a person who is licensed by the state to provide counseling services to be anti-gay to the extent that they cannot help a gay person without bias interfering?"
I mean, let's hash out what we're typically talking about here:
Do counselors need to have some sort of specialized code of agreement about the phenomenological nature of sexual orientation or sexual identity or gender identity to support someone through grief and mistreatment?
Is it really providing a "tacit endorsement of their relationships and sex lives" to weep with those who weep, to mourn with those who mourn?
Do therapists have to don leather chaps or march in the next pride parade to pick another human up off the ground or to help them think through the best way to respond to a tough situation?
From a counseling perspective, the answer is an overwhelming, resounding, "NO, MY GOD, NO. YOU JUST BE WITH PEOPLE AND HELP THEM FIGURE OUT THEIR STUFF."
We don't have to "agree" with anything, because it isn't our role to do so -- nobody's asked us our danged opinions and counseling isn't advice-giving. This is something we're supposed to have learned in our first semester of counselor training. There are hundreds and thousands of other decisions my clients make which I probably wouldn't "agree" with, but which nonetheless don't prevent me from helping them.
And to think that this is motivated by so-called "Christian" folks. As a card-carrying Christian and a therapist, I have always been very nervous when we use our Christianity as a way to not help people.
Long story short:
HB1840 misses that the very core of counseling as a vocation and the mandate of our professional licensure is that we are to be ethical counselors, and that it is not enough to just make some cursory and perfunctory effort to act that way, to simply throw up our hands when our belief-o-meter ticks red and beeps frantically. We can't just say, "But dontcha see, MY BELIEFS are sincerely held. I don't feel like working on this one. Hey, Tom -- you take em!"
As counselors, when it comes into our field of conscious awareness that there is within us such a rigidly held value that it would prevent us from helping others, we must investigate, self-reflect, think deeply, ask for help -- not just move on and hope it doesn't happen again. This is the distinction that the ACA ethical code makes, and it is improper to embrace a statute that fails to make this same distinction, as it is making lawful what is unethical. And that's just what Tennessee's HB1840 has done. It says, "Well, the ACA may say it's unethical, but in Tennessee, it's legal." For shame. For shame.