The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for minors, ruling in a 8–1 decision that the law violates the First Amendment free speech rights of licensed counselors.
The Court’s majority found that the law favors one viewpoint by allowing counselors to affirm a client’s gender identity or sexual orientation but preventing counselors from helping clients who don’t wish to take that step.
“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote on behalf of the majority. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter.
“In the worst-case scenario, our medical system unravels as various licensed healthcare professionals — talk therapists, psychiatrists, and presumably anyone else who claims to utilize speech when administering treatments to patients — start broadly wielding their new-found constitutional right to provide substandard medical care,” Jackson said.
“It is baffling that we could now be standing on the edge of a precipitous drop in the quality of healthcare services in America. But the Court sees fit to bring us one step closer to that fate today,” she wrote.
More than 20 states have similar laws banning “conversion therapy.”
The Colorado law at issue prohibits “any practice or treatment” that aims to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
While the measure has not been enforced since it was first passed in 2019, the law includes fines of up to $5,000 for each violation and could result in the suspension of revocation of a counselor’s license. Providers “engaged in the practice of religious ministry” are exempt from the law.
Counselor Kaley Chiles first challenged the law in 2022 with help from attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom, arguing it prevented her from working with young patients who want to live a life “consistent with their faith.”
Chiles, an evangelical Christian, said she was not looking to “cure” clients of their same-sex attractions or to “change” their sexual orientation, but to instead help patients meet their own goals, which can include “seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions.”
Her attorneys argued that because Colorado leaders disagree with her views on gender and sexuality, the state “puts itself in Chiles’s counseling room, forbidding her from discussing the values she and her clients share.”
Chiles received support from the Trump administration, while Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) defended the law, arguing states have always regulated medical practices to protect patients from substandard care.
“Central to Petitioner’s position is her claim that mental health professionals’ counseling of their patients is no different from a chat with one’s college roommate, such that both interactions receive the same First Amendment protection,” the state’s opposing brief read. “Not so.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law. The lower court ruled the law was a legal “regulation of professional conduct incidentally involving speech.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday disagreed.
“The Constitution does not protect the right of some to speak freely; it protects the right of all. It safeguards not only popular ideas; it secures, even and especially, the right to voice dissenting views,” the Court ruled.
“Consistent with these principles, our precedents have expressly rejected the State and dissent’s notion that ‘professional speech’ represents some ‘separate category of speech’ subject to ‘diminished constitutional protection,'” it added.