ANALYSISApril 13, 2026
Supreme Court rules 8-1 against Colorado conversion therapy ban Chiles v Salazar
On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar, finding that Colorado's Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL) violated the First Amendment free speech rights of Christian counselor Kaley Chiles. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch held that the 10th Circuit failed to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny, specifically finding the law engaged in viewpoint-based censorship requiring strict scrutiny review. The ruling does not strike down Colorado's law outright but remands the case to lower courts to evaluate the law under the stricter standard.
If a licensed counselor sincerely believes talk therapy can change a child's sexual orientation, does the First Amendment shield that practice from a state that calls it psychological abuse? The Court just said maybe yes — and the lone dissent warns that answer will cost real kids their wellbeing.
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Licensed therapy as regulable conduct
C
Colorado's law targeted what conclusions a therapist was permitted to reach in conversation with a willing adult client — that is not regulating conduct, it is regulating the ideological destination of speech. Every professional relationship involves speech, but the First Amendment draws a hard line at viewpoint: the state can tell a surgeon not to cut, but it cannot tell a therapist not to conclude.
L
The surgeon analogy actually cuts against you. We don't say the state is 'regulating the ideological destination' when it tells a physician not to prescribe opioids for headaches — we say the state is enforcing professional standards in a context where the patient cannot evaluate the risk. A client seeking conversion therapy cannot assess whether that therapeutic framework will harm them, which is precisely why licensing exists.
C
The opioid analogy works only if the harm is pharmacological and measurable — but Colorado's law didn't restrict a technique, it restricted a viewpoint, and proved it by exempting therapists 'engaged in religious ministry' from the identical restriction. If this were about patient safety, the ministerial exemption is inexplicable.
L
The ministerial exemption is a genuine flaw in Colorado's drafting, but a poorly tailored law is a narrow tailoring problem — it doesn't transform what is fundamentally a conduct regulation into viewpoint censorship, and the Court's decision to treat it as the latter has consequences for every licensed profession.
Religious ministry exemption's constitutional significance
C
Colorado's own carve-out for therapists 'engaged in religious ministry' is the single most damning feature of this law. It permitted a pastor-therapist to tell a gay teenager that his identity was disordered while prosecuting a licensed therapist for saying the same thing. That is not child protection — that is the government picking which ideological team gets to speak.
L
The exemption is bad drafting, not proof of discriminatory intent. The legislature was navigating Establishment Clause concerns about regulating religious ministry — the carve-out reflects a different constitutional constraint, not an admission that the underlying restriction was viewpoint-based. Sloppy line-drawing in a statute is not the same as a law designed to suppress a viewpoint.
C
If the state's answer to 'why can a religious practitioner say this but not a licensed one' is 'Establishment Clause,' that just proves the point — the exemption exists because the speech is constitutionally protected in one context, which means the state's authority to ban it in the other context cannot be grounded in the speech's content.
L
That logic would mean any religious exemption automatically undermines the parallel secular restriction — a rule that would make legislating around religious practice nearly impossible and has no support in the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence.
Harm evidence under strict scrutiny
C
The Trevor Project data is not rhetoric — LGBTQ youth who experienced conversion therapy attempting suicide at twice the rate of those who did not is a compelling interest in the precise constitutional sense the test requires. We should not pretend the harm is contested or abstract. But strict scrutiny requires both a compelling interest and narrow tailoring, and Colorado failed the second prong by writing a viewpoint exemption into the very law it claimed was saving lives.
L
You're conceding the compelling interest, which matters more than you're letting on. Narrow tailoring is a demanding standard, but it is not a gotcha — courts conducting strict scrutiny review can identify what a narrowly tailored version of this law would look like, and states can redraft. The kids who needed this protection while that redrafting happens are not an abstraction.
C
The point about children harmed during years of remand is real, but it runs in both directions — Kaley Chiles's clients sought her out precisely because they did not want the state's preferred therapeutic conclusion, and the harm calculus has to include coerced ideological conformity as a cost.
L
Invoking the autonomy of clients who seek conversion therapy is a serious argument for adults — but Colorado's law applied to minors, who cannot consent to experimental psychological interventions in the way adults can, which is why the harm asymmetry here isn't symmetrical at all.
Doctrinal reach beyond this case
C
The ruling is deliberately modest — it doesn't void Colorado's law outright, doesn't declare conversion therapy effective, and explicitly preserves licensing boards' authority to pursue fraudulent claims. Strict scrutiny is not a death sentence; it is a demanding standard that well-designed laws can survive. Twenty states will face challenges, but the ones that wrote their bans as narrow conduct regulations rather than viewpoint restrictions have a path through.
L
The modesty framing obscures the doctrinal expansion. Before Chiles, most circuits treated professional speech regulation as falling outside strict scrutiny — now every licensed therapist in the country has a First Amendment argument against any restriction they characterize as viewpoint-based. You can't extend NIFLA from compelled speech at crisis pregnancy centers into the licensed therapy room and then claim nothing fundamental has changed.
C
NIFLA's warning was explicit: professional licensing cannot be a trojan horse for suppressing disfavored speech. If that principle destabilizes regulations that were always constitutionally questionable, that is the First Amendment working correctly, not the Court going rogue.
L
The question is who gets to decide which regulations were 'always constitutionally questionable' — and the answer, after Chiles, is increasingly federal courts applying strict scrutiny to the accumulated judgments of state licensing boards that have governed these professions for decades.
What the 8-1 vote actually establishes
C
The 8-1 margin forecloses the partisan overreach narrative entirely. When Sotomayor and Kagan sign onto a ruling that Colorado's law was viewpoint-based censorship, the credible objection is not 'the Court is wrong' — it is 'the law was badly designed.' That is a lesson about legislative drafting, not a crisis for child protection.
L
Sotomayor and Kagan joining the majority tells us the viewpoint-discrimination analysis has a clear answer once the threshold question is resolved a particular way — it doesn't tell us the threshold question was correctly resolved. Jackson's dissent argues the therapist-client relationship should be treated as regulable conduct before the First Amendment analysis even begins. That prior question isn't settled by the vote count.
C
Jackson's position had decades of circuit precedent behind it and still drew only one vote. At some point 'the foundational question was wrongly decided' has to contend with the fact that it persuaded exactly one of nine justices who had every incentive to reach the other result.
L
Dissents in landmark cases routinely start at one vote — that's the history of the First Amendment itself. The question isn't whether Jackson persuaded her colleagues today, it's whether the doctrinal framework the majority just built will hold as its consequences unfold across the licensed professions.
Conservative's hardest question
The most difficult challenge for this argument is the documented association between conversion therapy and elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation in LGBTQ youth, as characterized by the APA and other major medical bodies. If that harm evidence is robust, a court conducting strict scrutiny might find Colorado's compelling interest satisfied — meaning my argument about the law's likely defeat may overstate the case, and the human cost of invalidating these bans is not abstract.
Liberal's hardest question
The most difficult challenge to this argument is the 8-1 vote itself — it is genuinely hard to dismiss the fact that Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, the Court's two most reliable liberal votes, joined the majority. Their concurrence suggests that even within a rigorous civil liberties framework, there is a serious First Amendment concern with government restricting what a therapist may say based on viewpoint, and that concern cannot be explained away as conservative judicial overreach.
Both sides agree: Both sides accept that the 8-1 vote is not easily dismissed as partisan, and that Justices Sotomayor and Kagan's concurrence represents a genuine First Amendment concern rather than ideological capture of the Court.
The real conflict: The sides disagree on a foundational factual-legal classification: conservatives treat talk therapy as speech occurring in a marketplace of ideas subject to First Amendment protection, while liberals treat it as professional conduct occurring within a licensed regulatory framework where the state's authority to set standards has never been understood as censorship.
What nobody has answered: If the same talk-based therapeutic conversation about sexual orientation is constitutionally protected speech when a licensed therapist delivers it but regulable professional conduct when a licensed physician prescribes a drug, what principle actually distinguishes these cases — and does any coherent principle exist that doesn't require courts to rank professions by how much their work resembles speech?
Sources
- Supreme Court opinion, Chiles v. Salazar (March 31, 2026) — Justice Gorsuch majority opinion and Justice Jackson dissent
- 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Chiles v. Salazar (2023)
- Colorado Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), enacted 2019
- Alliance Defending Freedom case filings and statements from Jim Campbell, Chief Legal Counsel
- Statement from Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (March 31, 2026)
- Statement from Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson (March 31, 2026)
- Statement from American Counseling Association CEO (March 31, 2026)
- NIFLA v. Becerra, 585 U.S. 755 (2018)
- 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570 (2023)