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.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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