Chiles v. Salazar Revisions: 3/31/26
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado's law banning conversion therapy, as applied to a counselor who uses only talk therapy, violates the First Amendment by picking sides in a debate about sexual orientation and gender identity — the most serious kind of speech restriction the Constitution forbids.
The decision means states enforcing similar bans against talk therapists must clear a much higher legal bar than courts had previously required, and opens the door to broad challenges to state regulation of speech-based professional care.
How it got here: A federal district court and the Tenth Circuit both denied the counselor's request to block Colorado's law, applying rational-basis review; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve a circuit split on how the First Amendment applies to such laws.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Kaley Chiles is a licensed mental health counselor in Colorado who uses only talk therapy — no medications or physical techniques. Some of her clients, including minors, come to her hoping to reduce unwanted same-sex attraction or to better align their sense of identity with their biological sex. Colorado's 2019 law banned "conversion therapy" with minors, forbidding any effort to change a client's sexual orientation or gender identity, while explicitly permitting counselors to express acceptance and support for clients exploring their identity or undergoing gender transition.
The question before the Court
Can Colorado bar a licensed counselor from using talk therapy to help clients who want to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, while the same law explicitly allows counselors to affirm those identities — without satisfying the First Amendment's toughest standard?
The Court's answer
No — Colorado's law, as applied to a counselor who uses only talk therapy, violates core First Amendment principles by discriminating based on viewpoint, and the lower courts applied a far too lenient standard in rejecting her challenge.
The law permits counselors to express acceptance and support for a client's identity exploration or gender transition, but forbids them from saying anything aimed at changing a client's sexual orientation or gender identity. That is the government picking sides in an ideological debate — viewpoint discrimination, which the First Amendment nearly always forbids. Because this counselor uses nothing but talk, the law as applied to her regulates only speech, and calling that speech a "treatment" or "conduct" cannot change what the First Amendment demands. The case goes back to lower courts to decide whether Colorado's law can survive the proper, much harder test — which requires a compelling government interest and a narrowly tailored restriction. That ultimate question was not decided today.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Licensed mental health counselors in Colorado and the more than two dozen other states with similar conversion therapy bans may now be able to challenge those laws on First Amendment grounds. States that want to keep the bans in place must defend them under a demanding standard that few speech restrictions survive. The ruling also raises unsettled questions about how far states can go in regulating other forms of talk therapy and speech-based medical treatment.
What changes now
The case returns to lower courts, which must now evaluate Colorado's conversion therapy ban under strict scrutiny — requiring the State to show it serves a compelling interest and restricts speech no more than necessary. That is a demanding standard. Other states with similar conversion therapy bans face new legal exposure, and the decision's reasoning may invite First Amendment challenges to other state laws that regulate speech-based professional care.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Colorado's law can survive strict scrutiny — that question goes back to lower courts. The ruling does not affect applications of the law to physical conversion therapy techniques such as electric shocks or aversive treatments, which the counselor herself acknowledged are properly banned. It also does not resolve how the First Amendment applies to content-based but viewpoint-neutral regulations of professional speech.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (8). Justice Gorsuch (author), joined by Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett.
Dissent (1). Justice Jackson (author).
Concurrence — Justice Kagan
Justice Kagan agreed that Colorado's law violates the First Amendment because it discriminates based on viewpoint — favoring speech that affirms a client's identity while penalizing speech aimed at changing it. She wrote separately to flag what she saw as an open and harder question: whether a content-based but viewpoint-neutral law regulating speech in healthcare settings would face the same demanding scrutiny. She suggested such laws might not pose the same risk of government censorship and could be treated differently, but left that question for a future case.
Dissent — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson argued the majority misread NIFLA and Casey. In her view, when a state regulates a harmful medical treatment and that treatment happens to be delivered through speech, the First Amendment is not violated — the speech restriction is merely 'incidental' to the legitimate regulation of professional conduct. Because Colorado bans conversion therapy as a medical treatment, not to silence ideas, she would have applied lesser scrutiny and upheld the law. She warned the ruling could make speech-based therapies effectively unregulable, threatening the entire framework by which states set standards of care. Read the full dissent →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The First Amendment forbids the government from restricting speech based on its content, and content-based restrictions trigger strict scrutiny — the most demanding legal test, requiring a very strong government reason and a law carefully tailored to serve it. Viewpoint discrimination, where the government picks one side of a debate over the other, is an even more serious violation, nearly always impermissible.
- As applied to this counselor, Colorado's law is viewpoint-based: it explicitly allows counselors to express acceptance and support for a client's identity exploration or gender transition, but forbids any speech aimed at changing a client's sexual orientation or gender identity. Colorado itself did not dispute at argument that this constitutes viewpoint discrimination.
- The Court rejected Colorado's argument that its law only regulates 'conduct' or 'therapeutic modalities,' not speech. Because this counselor uses nothing but talk therapy, the law as applied to her regulates only what she may say. Calling speech a 'treatment' does not strip it of First Amendment protection — a move the Court has rejected before in cases involving jacket slogans (Cohen v. California) and lawyers advising overseas groups (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project).
- The Court also rejected the argument that the law only 'incidentally' burdens speech while mainly targeting harmful conduct. The speech-incident-to-conduct doctrine applies either when speech is tightly bound up with separately unlawful conduct, or when a law restricts expressive conduct for reasons wholly unrelated to its message. Neither fits here: the counselor's speech is not connected to any separately unlawful act, and the law directly targets the content and viewpoint of her speech.
- Colorado tried to anchor its law in historical traditions of content-based regulation — medical licensing, informed-consent requirements, and malpractice liability — arguing these show states may restrict 'substandard' professional speech without triggering strict scrutiny. The Court refused to aggregate those distinct, narrow traditions into a sweeping new exception to First Amendment rules, a move it had similarly refused in prior cases like Alvarez and NIFLA.
- Because Colorado's law discriminates based on viewpoint, the lower courts were wrong to apply only rational-basis review. The case is sent back for courts to assess whether the law survives strict scrutiny — a standard it will be very difficult for the State to meet.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra (585 U. S. 755)
The Court reaffirms NIFLA's rejection of 'professional speech' as a category with diminished First Amendment protection, applying its framework against Colorado.
Reaffirms Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (561 U. S. 1)
Reaffirmed as controlling authority that a law triggering strict scrutiny when applied to speech cannot escape review by being labeled a conduct regulation.