Supreme Court upholds Christian counselor’s right to provide faith-based care

On March 31, 2026, in Chiles v. Salazar (a case I previously wrote about here), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a licensed Christian therapist because a Colorado law infringed on her free speech rights by banning her from practicing “conversion therapy” for minors experiencing gender dysphoria.

In light of the potentially far-reaching impact of Chiles for free speech, including that which is religion-related, this column reviews its facts and judicial history before reflecting on its significance.

The facts

Kaley Chiles, a practicing Christian and licensed counselor, believes people are best off when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex.

Many of Chiles’ clients seek her help because they view their faiths and relationships with God as the basis for understanding their identities. While Chiles “never promises that she can solve these issues, she believes clients can accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace.”

Chiles challenged Colorado’s 2019 Minor Conversion Therapy Law, one of twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia nationally banning mental health professionals from what it describes as attempting to change minors’ self-proclaimed sexual orientations or gender identities regardless of their birth sexes. The law forbade Chiles from even discussing the underlying causes of the gender-related distress her clients experienced.

Yet, the law tacitly encouraged conversations providing “[a]cceptance, support, and understanding for…identity exploration and development, including…to a person undergoing gender transition.” Counselors who violate the law face up to $5,000 fines and the loss of their licenses.

Lower courts

A federal trial court rejected Chiles’ December 2022 claim that the law infringed on her First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and speech.

In September 2024, a sharply divided Tenth Circuit affirmed in Colorado’s favor. Focusing on speech, the majority agreed because the conversion therapy ban regulated conduct, not speech.

Maintaining that the law only incidentally involved speech, the court applied rational basis scrutiny, the lowest level of constitutional review under which state actions usually survive constitutional analysis if they are rationally related to legitimate governmental interests, here purportedly protecting confused youngsters.

Chiles then appealed to the Supreme Court, which, as noted, reversed in her favor.

The Supreme Court

As author of the Supreme Court’s eight-to-one judgment, Justice Neil Gorsuch began the analysis in his twenty-three-page opinion by observing that “[t]he question before us is a narrow one” because it involved Colorado’s unwillingness to permit a viewpoint inconsistent with its preferred perspective.

Justice Gorsuch then observed that “this Court has long held that laws regulating speech based on its subject matter or “communicative content” are “presumptively unconstitutional.” He explained that such “content based” restrictions trigger “the government to prove its restriction on speech is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests” and, when applied, it is “‘rare that a regulation…will ever be permissible.’”

Gorsuch reasoned that rather than appropriately regulating the content of Ms. Chiles’s speech, the Colorado law was impermissible viewpoint discrimination because “[i]t goes a step further, prescribing what views she may and may not express.” Conceding that “‘how best to help minors’ struggling with issues of gender identity or sexual orientation is presently a subject of ‘fierce public debate,’” he found Colorado’s law unacceptable because it “censors speech based on viewpoint.”

In language worth quoting in full, reversing in favor of Ms. Chiles, Gorsuch emphasized that:

…the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country. It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth. However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.

Concurrence

In a separate four-page concurrence, Justice Elaine Kagan, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, agreed that the law conflicts with core First Amendment principles by improperly regulating speech based on viewpoint.

Still, she commented that “if Colorado had instead enacted a content-based but viewpoint-neutral law, it would raise a different and more difficult question.”

Lone dissent

Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who was unable to define what a woman is during her confirmation hearing because “I’m not a biologist,” issued a thirty-five-page dissent.

Although unable to distinguish the sexes, she argued that the Court erred in preventing Colorado from imposing what she described as reasonable restrictions on Chiles’ treatments for minors with gender dysphoria, claiming its order “opens a dangerous can of worms [because i]t threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect.”

Analysis 

As encouraging as Chiles is in upholding the counselor’s right to speak as a Christian, it is a limited victory because it did not strike the Colorado law down outright. Instead, the Justices returned the dispute to the lower courts to apply the proper standard of review insofar as it was viewpoint discrimination by favoring its perspective over Chiles.

Because the law involved the fundamental First Amendment right of speech, Justice Gorsuch’s opinion explained that it was subject to strict scrutiny, the most stringent constitutional standard, rather than rational basis review. As noted, when courts apply strict scrutiny—unless state actions limiting fundamental rights such as freedom of speech are justified by compelling governmental interests implemented in the least restrictive manner—they typically fail.

Key to the Supreme Court’s analysis is that although it did not address Chiles’ religious convictions, it upheld her right to free speech rooted in her faith-based beliefs. Moreover, rather than prevent any state regulation of speech, what the Justices specified is that Colorado, and by extension, other states, cannot require counselors to favor one perspective or viewpoint over another in terms of how they deal with clients if speaking from their faith-based perspectives.

Even in conceding that state legislatures have the authority to regulate counselors’ professional activities, including when working with minors experiencing gender dysphoria, it is unclear how lawmakers could have treated speech as conduct. Further, even amid concerns over the safety of the youngsters Chiles sought to care for, one must ask what is more harmful: allowing confused minors to seek voluntary assistance that may help them, or to limit the judgment of professional counselors by dictating that they can only support, rather than question, children who may opt for irreversible medical treatments and surgeries.

Rather than rushing to counsel students to attempt to “transition” sexes, caution is in order in light of a ground-breaking fifteen-year study from the Netherlands demonstrating that most young people with gender dysphoria eventually outgrow it. This study reported that while 78% of participants were never discontent with their sexes, of the 11% who initially reported the desire to have been born as the opposite gender, this was reduced to about 4% by the time they reached twenty-six.

Moreover, a 2025 report study from the United States Department of Health and Human Services revealed the long-term harmful effects of hormone therapy accompanying so-called “gender affirming” care, such as blood clots, hair loss, weight gain, acne, gallstones, elevated liver enzymes, as well as infertility, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Based on these data, it seems that caution is in order in light of testimony from the growing numbers of individuals who regret having “transitioned” resulting in litigation. In fact, a twenty-two year-old detransitioner in New York who identified as male as a teenager recently won a $2,000,000 malpractice award against doctors accused of encouraging her to undergo a double mastectomy when she was sixteen.

The Supreme Court’s order in Chiles, subjecting the Colorado statute to further review under the proper constitutional standard, is the appropriate remedy for a law that deprived counselors of their right to speak in accord with their professional judgments and faiths in caring for youngsters experiencing gender dysphoria. Slowing down attempts to try to accomplish the biologically and scientifically impossible by attempting to “transition” from one sex to another is ultimately in the best interest of the confused youngsters counselors such as Kaley Chiles seek to help because regardless of whether they were born as males with XX chromones or XY of the female variety, they simply cannot change their make-ups because “male and female [God] created them.”

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