Most people who go into the counseling field do so because they sincerely want to help other people and believe they have the skills for empathetic listening.
They don't go into it thinking, "I can help everyone but those who eat shellfish or women who are subservient to their husbands" (or other biblical dictates), and they don't go into it believing, "I can be an empathetic listener to those in traditional marriages but not those whose marriage is sanctified only by a Supreme Court ruling."
A bill to be voted on in the Tennessee House (House Bill 1840) today would allow counselors to deny services and to refer clients based on the counselor's "sincerely held religious beliefs."
We believe such a bill is unnecessary because of parameters already built into counseling licensure.
Most counselors are licensed under associations that have stated codes of ethics, and those codes of ethics require the counselor - as the American Counseling Association (ACA) puts it - to "practice only within the boundaries of their competence, based on their education, training, supervised experience, state and national credentials, and appropriate professional experience."
If they don't feel comfortable counseling the client within those boundaries, despite a 2014 amendment to the ACA code of ethics that prohibits a counselor from referring a client based on a counselor's "personally held values," they are duty bound to tell the client of their boundary issue and, where applicable, refer the client elsewhere.
However, this same code of ethics - again, using the ACA - suggests that "counselors gain knowledge, personal awareness, sensitivity, dispositions, and skills pertinent to being a culturally competent counselor [by] working with a diverse client population."
In other words, to offer the widest range of experience to the largest number of people, counselors expand their education and training. To offer one's self as a counselor in a community setting, not a specialized practice, and serve everyone but clients whose lifestyle violates the counselor's "sincerely held religious beliefs" is damaging to both a counselor's reputation and to the counseling field as a whole.
After all, one of the core professional values of the counseling profession, according to the ACA, is "honoring diversity and embracing a multicultural approach in support of the worth, dignity, potential and uniqueness of people within their social and cultural contexts."
If clients can't count on that from the average counselor, they may rightly wonder what they can count on from such a counselor.