Supreme Court: Colorado’s Conversion Ban Law Violates First Amendment
“The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth.”
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado’s forcing a conversion ban on therapists violates the First Amendment in the case of Chiles v. Salazar.
Yes, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, writing a 35-page dissent.
As Jim Nault wrote in March 2025 (emphasis mine):
The case, Chiles v. Salazar, concerns a Colorado licensed professional counselor who wishes to provide services to Colorado youth suffering from gender dysphoria. But Colorado law forbids that counselor, Kaley Chiles, from providing any counseling (i.e. speaking) if it concerns the concept of a young person NOT seeking to affirm their transgender status. For example, if a young person who has transitioned from one sex to another is questioning that decision and approaches Chiles for guidance about potentially detransitioning, she is legally forbidden from providing that guidance.
The part I emphasized is important because the case has nothing to do with the conversion ban. It has everything to do with telling Chiles what she can and cannot say to her clients.
The district court and the Tenth Circuit ruled that Chiles had Article III standing, but denied her a preliminary injunction based on the merits.
The courts claimed “that Colorado’s law is best understood as regulating professional conduct and that it regulates speech only incidentally, thus triggering no more than rational-basis review under the First Amendment.”
Well, SCOTUS ruled that Colorado’s law “regulates speech based on viewpoint.”
It is a narrow decision, which is likely why Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the other four.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion:
The question before us is a narrow one. Ms. Chiles does not question that Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy has some constitutionally sound applications. See Brief for Petitioner 53. She does not take issue with the State’s effort to prohibit what she herself calls “long-abandoned, aversive” physical interventions. Instead, Ms. Chiles stresses that she provides only talk therapy, employing no physical techniques or medications. Yet, she argues, Colorado’s law still applies to her, prescribing what she may say in “voluntary counseling conversations” with her clients. And because that application of the law strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, she contends, it warrants considerably more searching scrutiny than the rational-basis review the Tenth Circuit applied in this case or the intermediate-scrutiny review some other lower courts have employed in cases like hers.
Again, it has nothing to do with conversion therapy. It has to do with the state telling Chiles how to speak to her clients.
The majority pointed out (emphasis mine):
- The First Amendment applies to everyone, including licensed professionals.
- The law “regulates the content of her speech” and tells her “what views she may and may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint.”
- Colorado failed to “establish that applying its law to Ms. Chiles falls within a long tradition of permissible content regulation.”
- “The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth.”
YES. THANK YOU. Our Founders wrote the First Amendment to protect ALL speech. You know they had unpopular speech in mind since they faced treason charges just for saying anything negative about the king.
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An 8-1 decision.
Extra points bonus question, Who was the 1?
[Jeopardy theme countdown-music playing in the background]
Justice Jackson was the dissenting justice.
Her dissent is interesting in that she notes that there are all sorts of regulations as to what a physician can and cannot say to a patient. (For example, a psychiatrist cannot advocate killing oneself. A doctor may recommend one drug, but not another for a specific disease.)
Jackson equates the ban to standards within a profession. Her position is that standards apply everywhere in all professions and are legal.
The problem with her position is that professional standards exist to protect the professional, the client and the patient from harm.
Chiles’ conduct and speech harmed no one. The ban was simply because a group of people hated what she and others were saying while helping people.
In silencing Chiles, the State of Colorado violated what is the singular important standard of the medical community of “first, do no harm.”
Banning Chiles’ speech harmed patients.
Somehow Jackson missed that critical point.
Action Jackson misses a lot of points and not just critical ones.
We may never know if Jackson is a woman, or a “woman”, but we DO know this:
She is a total moron.
In past opinions, each of Barrett and Sotomayor have pointed out glaring errors in Ketanji’s written opinions. Ketanji doesn’t belong on SCOTUS.
“Somehow Jackson missed that critical point.”
Expressing ideas that offend snowflakes cause snowflakes to “feel unsafe,” therefore “harm.”
It’s too bad that self-defense shooters have to prove that a “reasonable man” would have felt as threatened as they claim to have felt… but snowflakes aren’t required to prove anything. That needs to change.
That’s what happens when someone who is too stupid to define what a woman is gets a DEI Supreme Court appointment.
No doubt her 35 pages of rambling dissent are up there with other great literary works, like Michael Obammo’s college thesis.
Tomorrow the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on birthright citizenship. Ketanji Brown Jackson says she doesn’t need to hear any gall darn arguments because she already knows how she will vote.
Even “conversion therapy bans” are suspect. My gay friends all admit to having been molested as children. It is not conversion, it is dealing with childhood sexual trauma.
That’s because every gay man or lesbian has been molested. But you’re supposed to believe the lie that people are born that way.
Every? Proof please.
When Tammy Bruce moved to the right, she said that it was well known among, lesbians, gays, and bi’s that they’d all been molested as children or teenagers. Now, I wouldn’t swear that there are no exceptions to that, but for a member of the community to believe it’s universal, I’d say it has to describe the overwhelming majority accurately.
Not true
Well, that’s a stupid statement.
35 pages? I can’t even…..
I’m sure it’s one for the ages; scholars will be lifting quotes out of it 100 years from now.
Whereas comedians have already started mining it.
Back in my industry days my (multinational giant) employer once solved the problem of a VP of Engineering who was a total “Colonel Kurtz” by “promoting” him to Senior VP of Equal Opportunity Programs, where he could be safely pigeonholed and ignored. Too bad there’s no such avenue available to the Supreme Court.
Recommended along with Hilldog Clinton’s “What Happened?” books, volumes 1-5, along with catching “Hillary Clinton Presents: ‘What Happened’ – The Musical”
Conversion is easy. Just hand the sissy kid some vintage centerfolds and a bottle of Wild Turkey.
RE: Quote from page 1 of the case:
In 2019, Colorado adopted a law prohibiting licensed counselors
from engaging in “conversion therapy” with minors, Colo. Rev. Stat.
§12–245–224(1)(t)(V), defining the term to include “any practice or
treatment . . . that attempts . . . to change an individual’s sexual ori
entation or gender identity,” as well as any “effor[t] to change behav
iors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic
attractions toward individuals of the same sex,” §12–245–202(3.5)(a).
It seems to me that anyone who is persuading a boy is a girl, is violating this law. (any practice or treatment . . . that attempts . . . to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.)
All the MD, PHD, teachers etc who encourage the initial treatment are guilty.
So now we can start deprogramming young socialists of America when they get out of college?
Don’t you mean middle school?
Elementary my dear Paula.
MSN Media refers to it in titles as “Gay Conversion Therapy.”
An easy reason to oppose all bans on therapy is that they always sneak ‘gender identity’ into the definition. So when Johnny says he wants to be Jane, a therapist is forbidden from helping him to live as his real sex. Blue states force the therapist to idulge the disorder.
the real crime is lying that kentaji could write 35 pages of anything worthy of reading
Neither could Michelle Obama. I found that out by reading her senior thesis at Princeton. I doubt any of my high school English teachers would have given it a passing grade.
“I axed you a qwestion”
So then that law would then trickle down to the populace at large
especially to be charged with operating without a med license
let alone giving someone their opinion(s) of conversion
especially since this law/scotus judgement will be skirted around by the left
For those who aren’t aware of how often occupational speech laws are routinely abused every day in the USA, here’s a listing of cases that IJ has won over the past several years on just this issue,
Jackson is a national embarrassment.
To be fair, it is embarrassing that she is (technically) of the same species as the rest of us.
Shakes my faith in humanity that a creature that incredibly stupid exists.
Conversion therapy is the ideological inverse of “gender affirming” surgery. By this distorted reasoning, it’s okay to alter the body to fit the mind, but not okay to alter the mind to fit the body. Say what???
No, it absolutely is NOT.
Gender dysphoria is a mental illness.
Those afflicted should be able to get counselling.
The CO law prohibited licensed counsellors from doing their jobs. It made it illegal to give sound advice. Worse, it actually required them (compelled speech) to give incredibly bad advice to their patients that the counsellors knew as false and harmful.
This SCOTUS ruling is very simple, and very narrow, “compelled speech” violates the 1st Amendment. Period. Always has been, always will be.
KBJ is a complete imbecile and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any court.