The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 Tuesday that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors violates the First Amendment rights of a Christian counselor, a decision that could jeopardize similar laws in more than 20 states.
The case was brought by Kaley Chiles, a Christian talk therapist in Colorado who argued that the state’s ban violated her free speech rights. The ruling reverses a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which had found the law did not violate Chiles’ free-speech rights and instead concluded it regulated professional conduct that only incidentally burdened speech.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the Colorado law improperly favored one viewpoint over another by permitting therapists to affirm a minor’s gender identity or sexual orientation but not to help them change it if they wished.
“The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter, taking the unusual step of reading a summary of her opinion from the bench. Jackson warned that the ruling threatened states’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care broadly.
“It threatens to impair states’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”
The ruling came on the global Transgender Day of Visibility. The decision is a narrow one and does not overturn Colorado’s law outright, the case will now return to the lower courts.
Conversion therapy is a pseudoscientific practice in which providers attempt to change a youth’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy torture and recommended it be banned. A study from suicide and crisis prevention group The Trevor Project found that young people who reported going through conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to have reported attempting suicide compared to those who had not.
Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law prohibits all mental health professionals in the state from attempting to change a client’s sexual orientation or gender identity during therapy sessions and imposes penalties for violations, including a $5,000 fine and the potential loss of a license.
Jim Campbell, chief legal counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, who argued on Chiles’ behalf before the Supreme Court, welcomed the decision.
“Kids deserve real help affirming that their bodies are not a mistake and that they are wonderfully made,” Campbell said in a statement. “States cannot silence voluntary conversations that help young people seeking to grow comfortable with their bodies.”
The case is the first of three LGBTQ-related cases before the court this term.
