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The Supreme Court’s courtroom took up a crucial fight this week over whether Colorado can tell licensed counselors what they may and may not say to minors about sexual orientation and gender identity. Conservatives watching the argument saw the conservative justices press hard on whether the state’s “affirm-only” posture is really just viewpoint discrimination cloaked as health regulation.
The challenger, Christian counselor Kaley Chiles, argues the Colorado law tramples the First Amendment by banning certain therapeutic aims and speech, a claim backed by religious-liberty groups and the Trump administration. Colorado, predictably, answers that the law is a narrow public-health regulation aimed at protecting children from practices the medical establishment says are harmful.
From the bench, conservative justices were rightly skeptical that a democratically enacted statute should be able to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. Questions from Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, and others cut to whether this law functions as a prior restraint on speech and whether regulators are quietly imposing an ideological litmus test on therapy.
Colorado insists the statute regulates professional conduct, not speech, and points to research it says links conversion therapy to real harms—while also carving out religious ministries from enforcement and threatening fines and license penalties for violations. Those penalties and the state’s broad regulatory power over health-care professionals show how easily routine state oversight can become ideological coercion.
Conservatives should be blunt: when government starts telling counselors they must adopt a particular viewpoint, it’s not neutral health policy — it’s censorship dressed up as care. Groups like Liberty Counsel warned the Court that the First Amendment does not allow states to dictate therapeutic objectives, and that precedent protecting expressive freedom must not be sacrificed to political fashion.
This case isn’t just about one counselor or one state law; it’s about whether parents and their children will have access to a range of therapeutic options and whether dissenting medical or faith-based views will be driven from public practice. If the Court allows states to silence therapists who disagree with prevailing ideology, the consequences will extend far beyond Colorado — into classrooms, clinics, and family life across the country.
Patriotic Americans who value free speech, religious liberty, and parental rights should pay attention. The justices now have a chance to reaffirm that the First Amendment protects unpopular speech and that the state may not weaponize licensing regimes to enforce orthodoxy. Whatever your view of the underlying science, no free society should accept the government policing private conversations between a counselor, a child, and a family.
