JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Siding with a Christian counselor in Colorado, the U.S. Supreme Court today tossed out the state's law banning conversion therapy. The decision could well invalidate laws in some two dozen other states, laws that bar mental health therapists from practicing a version of talk therapy that tries to change a teenager's sexual orientation or their gender identity. The lawyer for the therapist in this case argued that Colorado's law prevented voluntary conversations with minors seeking help, NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Conversion therapy is generally defined as a treatment used to change a person's attraction to individuals of the same sex or to, quote, "cure" gender dysphoria. The therapy has been forcefully repudiated by every major medical organization in the country on grounds that the therapy doesn't work and often leads to deep depression and suicidal thoughts and actions in minors.
But today, the court delivered a major victory to therapist Kaley Chiles. She challenged the Colorado law, contending that it violated her First Amendment right of free speech by subjecting her to possible punishment for using talk therapy to help teenage minors struggling with their sexual orientation or gender dysphoria. By an 8-1 vote, the Supreme Court agreed with her. Writing for the court majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the Colorado law, as applied to Chiles, impermissibly regulates her speech by forbidding her to do anything in her counseling that attempts to change a client's sexual orientation or gender identity. Here's Chiles today.
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KALEY CHILES: I'm grateful that my speech is protected. But I'm even more excited that families and children seeking access to counseling that respects biological reality will be able to get the help that they need.
TOTENBERG: Colorado had defended its state law, contending that the statute is narrow, applies only to minors and allows anyone of any age to seek counseling from religious organizations without being subject to state licensing laws. As Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser put it last fall...
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PHILIP WEISER: If you take away the ability of states to protect patients from substandard care, then you're opening the door to all sorts of discredited treatments.
SHANNON MINTER: This decision is so hypocritical.
TOTENBERG: Shannon Minter is legal director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights.
MINTER: I do not understand how the same Supreme Court can, with one breath, say it's fine for Tennessee to ban a type of medical care for transgender young people, and on the other hand say it is not OK for Colorado to protect gay and transgender young people against a type of treatment that really no one could possibly defend.
TOTENBERG: That said, the court was nearly unanimous in its decision today. Justice Gorsuch, in his opinion for the court, noted 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.
MINTER: There is a few glimmers of light in this otherwise terrible decision.
TOTENBERG: One of those glimmers, says Shannon Minter, comes from Justice Kagan's concurring opinion, joined by Justice Sotomayor.
MINTER: I believe she is trying to signal and express that it may be possible for states to go back and redraft these laws in a way that is much more explicitly neutral.
TOTENBERG: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter today and took the unusual step of explaining her dissent from the bench. The power of government to regulate the professions is not lost whenever the practice of a profession entails speech, she said. So in my view, it cannot also be the case that Colorado's decision to restrict dangerous therapy that incidentally involves speech is presumptively unconstitutional. In concluding otherwise, she said, the court's opinion misreads our precedents, is unprincipled and unworkable and will eventually prove untenable for those who rely upon the responsibility of the states to regulate the medical profession for the protection of public health. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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