In a lopsided 8-1 vote, the justices ruled in favor of free speech rights for a licensed Colorado counselor, Kaley Chiles, who provides faith-based counseling.
Chiles had sued in federal court to challenge her state’s LGBTQ-friendly law, passed in 2019, that bans so-called “conversion therapy” in professional counseling sessions.
The case that came before the court is Chiles v Salazar.
After California passed the first law in 2012, approximately half the U.S. states have passed similar laws that were demanded by rainbow activists over claims of cruel and inhumane counseling sessions conducted by religious counselors and therapists.
After the Chiles ruling, a Colorado-based group called Interfaith Alliance denounced the decision. In a statement vowing to work around the 8-1 ruling with a new state law, the group said conversion therapy perpetuates "immorality and harm" against "LBGTQIA+" people.
The legislation the group supports is called HB26-1322, Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors, which would allow clients to sue counselors such as Chiles.
John Mauck, an Illinois attorney who has worked on religious liberty cases, told AFN a similar law in Illinois threatens counselors with losing their license.
“Generally, the pattern is: Let's make it impossible for counselors to help people go straight,” he said, referring to a client with unwanted same-sex attraction.
The demand from LGBTQ activists to end conversion-based counseling was a winning argument for half the country’s state legislatures, but Mauck said those bans forced a counselor to verbally affirm same-same attraction or risk being punished by their state for refusing to do so.
Not only did those laws require a Christian counselor such as to Chiles to reject her own religious beliefs, but the newer transgender rights movement forced counselors to deny biological sex and affirm their client is the opposite sex with a new name and new pronouns.
In its related statement, the Interfaith Alliance called it "dubious" that the Chiles ruling came out on Transgender Day of Visibility.
In 2013, a year after the California law, the American Psychiatric Association bowed to intense lobbying pressure to remove “gender identity disorder” as a recognized mental illness from its manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Despite that fact, this week's statement from the Colorado group says any reference to a mental disorder is "not based on medical or scientific fact."
“You’ve got to help them, but you can't help them the other way,” Mauck, summarizing the state laws, pointed out. “That was the gist of the Supreme Court opinion.”
That narrow allowance over what a counselor can legally say is why the high court ruled 8-1 against the Colorado ban.
In his 23-page majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the Colorado law “censors speech based on viewpoint,” according to a related story by the SCOTUS Blog website.
That law runs counters to the First Amendment, he further wrote, because “every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely.”
The high court’s ruling kicked the matter back down to a lower federal court, which had ruled against Chiles, with an order to apply “strict scrutiny” to the looming issue of the First Amendment right to speak.
Despite that clear defense of Childs, the Interfaith Alliance says conversion therapy "is still illegal, immoral, and unethical."
The leader of the LGBTQ-friendly Interfaith Alliance is Jacquelyn Stanton, a licensed counselor in Thornton, Colorado. Her biography at Psychology Today says she has "specific expertise in Radical Healing Skills and techniques."
