I wasn’t going to write about this one, but it’s just too fascinating not to share, given an idea that’s been going around the Internet.

Yesterday’s Providence Journal had a brief article highlighting a bill heard in the Rhode Island Senate that would completely ban “conversion therapy” for Rhode Islanders under 18 years of age. The legislation defines such therapy as “practices which attempt or purport to change behavioral expression of an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity or attempt or purport to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Yet, in December, the Providence Journal ran a series of articles about a teenage girl taking body-altering drugs and having irreversible surgery to make her body more like that of a boy. The articles were celebratory, and there’s little chance the sponsors of this legislation would have any qualms about such decisions. Indeed, the bill stresses that the banned therapy does not apply to “the facilitation of… identity exploration and development.”

So, it is permissible (even worthy of public praise) for children to physically alter themselves, but even if a child, his or her family, and his or her doctor think it’s worth a few therapeutic sessions to test whether a budding sexual orientation is not what he or she currently thinks it to be, legislators want the state to insist that it knows better.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’d have to know a child very, very well before I’d offer any advice on these matters, even if asked, and I’m definitely not proposing to expand the proposed ban so it applies even more expansively. But the combined reality of celebrating changes in one direction while banning them in another strikes me as tantamount to establishing a religion within the law.

That’s where the fascinating aspect comes in.

Yesterday, David Goldman’s review of Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America made its way wide and far across the Internet:

Just what is a secular religion, and how does it shape the spiritual lives of its adherents? Bottum deftly peels the layers off the onion of liberal thinking to reveal its Protestant provenance and inherited religious sensibility. The Mainline Protestantism that once bestrode American public life never died, but metamorphosed into a secular doctrine of redemption. … Bottum writes, “The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s Mainline Protestant Christians, in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way.” By redefining sin as social sin, Rauschenberg raised up a new Satan and a new vocabulary of redemption from his snares.

It’s not difficult to infer that the “conversion therapy” legislation is rich in the language of that new redemption.

Minors cannot make the decision to drive or to smoke; they cannot alter their bodies mildly with alcohol. But making the decision to alter their own bodies to serve the supernatural good of “diversity” is a move toward the progressive vision of purity and perfection, while resisting such alterations is stubborn and sinful denial of the goodness of Tolerance.