On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in Chiles v. Salazar, holding that Colorado likely violated the First Amendment by forbidding licensed counselors from saying some things to minors about sex and identity while allowing them to say the opposite. The plaintiff, Kaley Chiles, is a Colorado counselor who argued that the law let her affirm a child’s movement away from his or her sex, but not help a child reconcile with it through ordinary talk therapy. Justice Gorsuch wrote for the majority, and even Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Sotomayor, agreed that Colorado’s law was a “textbook” case of viewpoint discrimination.
What makes Chiles v. Salazar so striking is not merely that Colorado lost. It is that eight of the nine justices agreed the law could not stand. Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority. Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined him. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. In a Court often split by ideology, an 8 to 1 ruling is not routine. It is a warning light.
Colorado tried to regulate not electric shocks, starvation, or physical abuse, but voluntary talk therapy. The Court stressed that Kaley Chiles challenged the law only as applied to counseling conducted through “the spoken word,” with no drugs or physical interventions. And Colorado’s law did something constitutionally fatal: it allowed counseling that affirmed gender transition and identity exploration, while forbidding counseling aimed at reducing same sex attraction or helping a client live in accord with his or her biological sex. In other words, the state allowed one message and banned the other. That is why the Court treated the law as viewpoint based.
Jackson’s dissent turns on a clever but dangerous move. She says this is not mainly a free speech case, but a professional regulation case. Once the state labels a counseling practice harmful, she argues, it may regulate that practice even when the “treatment” consists of words. That sounds tidy until you see the danger. If speech becomes regulable whenever the government calls it therapy, then viewpoint discrimination can simply put on a white coat and call itself healthcare. The majority refused to let Colorado get away with that.
The deeper problem is historical. The very institutions that now speak with moral certainty once spoke very differently. In 1973, it was the American Psychiatric Association that formally moved away from treating homosexuality as pathology, adopting its “Position Statement on Homosexuality and Civil Rights” that year, later printed in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1974. Then in 1975, the American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives adopted policy minutes reflecting opposition to discrimination against homosexuals. Those moves mattered because they pushed back against state and institutional moral policing of sexuality.
That is why Jackson’s logic is so revealing. The old lesson was that the state should not use professional power to enforce one official sexual orthodoxy. The new lesson, apparently, is that the state may enforce the new orthodoxy so long as the right experts approve. Yesterday the guild fought coercive moralism. Today her dissent would let the state impose it again, only under updated branding. That is not neutrality. It is the same machinery with a new slogan.
And yes, this is the same Justice Jackson who famously said during her confirmation hearing that she could not define what a woman is!
That matters here because the pattern is the same: blur the category, then empower the bureaucracy. When a culture loses confidence in basic realities, it compensates by becoming more aggressive in policing speech about them. The result is not wisdom, but confusion armed with credentials.
That is why the Court’s ruling matters. Colorado may ban coercion, fraud, and barbaric abuse. Of course it may. But it may not forbid a counselor from engaging in voluntary conversation simply because that conversation points toward an unfashionable moral horizon. Eight justices saw that clearly. They understood that once the state claims power to decide which vision of the human person may be spoken in the counseling room, it is no longer merely regulating a profession. It is trying to govern the soul.
A historically Christian society should know better. It should know that truth does not fear inquiry, that conscience cannot be reduced to bureaucracy, and that speech is most endangered not when it is false, but when it is inconvenient to power.