The United States Supreme Court On Tuesday it ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ children in Colorado, one of about two dozen states that ban the reprehensible practice.
An 8-1 majority on the Supreme Court sided with a Christian counselor who argues that a law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets legal standards that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, said the law “regulates speech based on opinion”. The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce ideology or speech in this country”.
In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that states should be free to regulate health care, even if that means sudden restrictions on speech. The decision, Jackson wrote, “opens a dangerous can of worms” that “threatens to destroy the ability of states to regulate the delivery of medical care in any way”.
The decision is the latest in a string of recent cases where judges have upheld claims of religious discrimination while taking a skeptical view of LGBTQ+ rights.
Kaley Chiles, seconded by the President Donald Trump‘s Republicans, said the law wrongly prevents him from providing voluntary, religious therapy to children.
