SCOTUS Defends Christian Counselor’s Right to Confidentiality| National Catholic Register

COMMENTARY: Therapist Kaley Chiles’ victory is a welcome reminder that the First Amendment still means what it says.

The Supreme Court has spoken. 

In Chiles v. Salazar, the Court ruled 8-1 in favor of Kaley Chiles, a Christian therapist in Colorado Springs who refused to let the state dictate what she could say inside the confidential space of a counseling session. 

It is a victory not just for Chiles, but for every family in America who believes that a conversation between a struggling child and a trusted counselor belongs to them, not to the government.

The Court’s majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, made clear that Colorado’s law banning “conversion therapy” with minors — a pejorative phrase used to malign efforts like talk therapy to help children struggling with gender confusion embrace biological reality — is subject to the most “rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.” 

Kaley Chiles is not a fringe figure or an ideologue operating out of the mainstream. She is a licensed professional counselor in Colorado Springs whose clients, often young people navigating painful confusion about their identity, along with their parents, seek her out precisely because she shares their faith. They want to explore their feelings honestly. They want to reconcile what they are experiencing with what they believe. They want a therapist, not a state-mandated conclusion delivered before the first session ends.

Under Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), that exploration was prohibited. Any licensed therapist who helped a minor even consider an alternative to gender transition risked a $5,000 fine and loss of licensure.

As Chiles herself has put it: “The law basically restricts the speech between me and my client. If your daughter were to say, ‘I think I am a boy,’ we can only affirm and validate that and assist with gender transition.”

Colorado’s defense rested on a legal sleight of hand: the claim that its law was regulating not speech but professional conduct and that states have long had the authority to regulate what licensed professionals do. Under that theory, the law required only rational-basis review, the most permissive standard of judicial scrutiny, which the state could easily satisfy.

The Supreme Court rejected that framing.

The constitutional problem was never subtle. Colorado was not banning a surgical procedure. It was not restricting the use of a drug or a device. It was reaching into the confidential conversation between a counselor and a young patient and declaring that only one viewpoint was legally permissible. A therapist who said, “Let’s explore this together” faced punishment. A therapist who said, “Let’s transition” faced none.

That is textbook viewpoint discrimination, the First Amendment violation the Court has most consistently refused to tolerate. 

“Colorado’s law does not just regulate the content of Ms. Chiles’s speech,” explained Gorsuch for the Court. “It goes a step further, prescribing what views she may and may not express.”

Gorsuch continued with a perennial observation that is worth quoting in full: 

Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But 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 the truth.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, arguing that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy regulates professional conduct, not protected speech, and thus falls within the state’s authority to oversee medical practice. She criticized the majority for treating the law as viewpoint discrimination and warned it would undermine states’ ability to set professional standards. 

Notably, no other justice joined her dissent, and even the Court’s other liberal members — Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — pushed back in a concurrence, writing that Jackson’s position “rests on reimagining — and in that way collapsing — the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions.”

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have bans similar to Colorado’s. After Tuesday morning’s decision, these jurisdictions are now on notice.

The medical landscape on gender medicine for minors has shifted dramatically toward far greater caution. Take, for example, Great Britain’s 2024 Cass Review, the most comprehensive examination of pediatric gender medicine ever conducted. It found the evidence supporting medical interventions in minors to be weak and inconclusive.

Recently, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has recommended against gender surgeries on minors. And the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services found no reliable evidence that gender transition reduces suicide risk or improves long-term mental health in minors, while documenting serious risks including infertility and regret.

As Chiles’ lawyer noted during oral argument last October, research suggests that up to 90% of children who experience gender dysphoria before puberty naturally reconcile with their biological sex if allowed to mature without intervention.

This decision matters enormously for Catholic and other Christian families. They are the ones who are most likely to seek out a Christian counselor like Kaley Chiles. 

For Catholic families in particular, this case has always been about something deeper than legal doctrine. The Church has long taught that every person is made in the image and likeness of God. Identity is not a subject to be resolved by state fiat, but by truth, grace and accompaniment. 

Kaley Chiles fought for that freedom on behalf of every child and family in America that has felt the weight of an ideologically captured system pressing down on their most private decisions. The Supreme Court has now vindicated her, ruling that the government does not get to enter that room and tell her what she is allowed to say with little judicial oversight.

That is not a political victory. It is a constitutional one. And for families looking for a trusted counselor to help their children through a difficult struggle, it is a welcome reminder that the First Amendment still means what it says.