WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that state laws forbidding “conversion therapy” for minors violate the free-speech rights of licensed counselors.

The court said Colorado’s law violates the 1st Amendment. The free-speech ruling is likely to invalidate similar laws in California and 23 other states.

In an 8-1 decision, the justices said Colorado’s ban on “talk therapy” may prevent Christian counselors from helping teens work through their feelings about sexual attractions or their gender identity.

State lawmakers passed the new measures in response to healthcare professionals who said that efforts to change a teenager’s sexual orientation were both ineffective and harmful.

But in cases like this, the law “censors speech based on viewpoint,” said Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the 1st Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country. ... However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an “egregious” assault on both of those commitments,” he wrote.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone in a 35-page opinion.

“The 1st Amendment cares about government efforts to suppress ‘speech as speech’ (based on its expressive content), not laws that, like {Colorado’s} that restrict speech incidentally, due to the government’s traditional, garden-variety regulation of such speakers’ professional conduct,” Jackson wrote.

“States have traditionally regulated the provision of medical care through licensing schemes and malpractice regimes without constitutional incident,” she continued. “And no core principle of our 1st Amendment jurisprudence leads inexorably to the conclusion that it violates the Constitution for a State to prevent its licensed talk therapists from using speech to harm the minors in their care.”

The ruling is the third significant defeat for LGBTQ-rights advocates in the past year.

The conservative majority upheld state laws that prohibit puberty blockers and other “gender affirming” care for minors. And last month, the justices said parents in California have a right to know about their child’s gender identity at school.

They said California’s student privacy policy violated parents’ rights, including the free exercise of religion.

Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado Springs, sued and argued the state’s law violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

She said she does not seek to “cure” clients of same-sex attractions or to “change” their sexual orientation.

The Alliance Defending Freedom appealed her case to the Supreme Court and described her as “a practicing Christian [who] believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design.”

Her clients “seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires,” they said. “But Colorado bans these consensual conversations based on the viewpoints they express.”

The state law defines “conversion therapy” as “any practice or treatment by a licensee that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to ... eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Violators may be fined up to $5,000, but no one had been fined, the state says.

A federal judge and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver rejected the free speech claim. By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court said the state law was not a ban on free expression. Rather, it regulated the conduct of licensed medical professionals. States have the authority to regulate the practice of medicine.

In their appeal to the high court, lawyers for Chiles said the state was “censoring” voluntary conversations and forbidding speech on only one side of a controversy.

The Trump administration supported the 1st Amendment challenge because the state seeks “to suppress a disfavored viewpoint.”

In response, the state said its law “safeguards public health” by prohibiting “a discredited practice” that was shown to be harmful. It stressed the law regulates licensed professionals only and does not extend to religious ministers or others who provide private counseling to young people.

In 2012, California was the first state to ban licensed counselors from using “conversion therapy” for minors.

Then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. said these “change” therapies “have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

In June 2025, the court in a 6-3 decision upheld laws in Tennessee and 24 other red states that prohibit “gender affirming” puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors.

The majority said then it was deferring to the state and their lawmakers who decided to prohibit such medical treatments for minors.

But in the Colorado case, the court majority did not defer to the state’s judgment that “conversion therapy” was harmful and potentially dangerous.

The decision is also the third victory for the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom in its free-speech challenges to Colorado laws. A maker of custom wedding cakes and the designer of websites won suits seeking an exemption from the state law that required them to provide equal service for same-sex weddings.

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