Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. With the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.
Well, Colorado has extended its losing streak at the Supreme Court. Yesterday, the court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar, a case that challenged a law that prohibited licensed counselors from helping clients, especially children, reconcile their identity with their sex through talk therapy. The eight-to-one decision included all of the court's conservative justices and two of its liberal justices. Because the Colorado law would restrict speech based on viewpoint, the court held, it violated the First Amendment.
The plaintiff in the case is Kaylee Chiles, a Colorado-based counselor who provides talk therapy to her patients. As the court explained, talk therapy is speech. It does not involve physical treatments or medical prescriptions. It consists only of the spoken word. And in counseling her patients, including children, Chiles often discusses issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Under the Colorado law, Chiles could express acceptance and support of a child's so-called identity exploration. She could even assist a child to, quote-unquote, transition his or her gender.
However, she was forbidden from saying anything to change sexual orientation or from helping a child feel comfortable with his or her God-given sex. And that, the court recognized, is flat-out viewpoint discrimination. Justice Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion for the court, called Colorado's law an egregious and blatant violation of the First Amendment. Even Justice Kagan agreed with that. In a short concurring opinion, joined by Justice Sotomayor, the liberal justice called this a textbook case of viewpoint discrimination.
The law, she said, and I quote, distinguishes between two opposed sets of ideas, the one resisting, the other reflecting the state's own view of how to speak with minors about sexual orientation and gender identity. On such an ideologically charged issue, the First Amendment does not allow Colorado to enable speech on one side, but restrict it on the other. In their futile attempt to defend their law, Colorado argued that it was a regulation of professional speech, which, it said, should receive less First Amendment protection. But the court rejected the argument. The First Amendment protects everyone.
Licensed professionals are not second-class citizens, nor should they be treated as such by the law. And that's an incredibly important aspect of this particular ruling. After all, a free society requires that professionals are able to speak freely. Think, for example, of the recent studies such as the UK's CAS review or the review from the US Department of Health and Human Services, both of which expose the overall lack of evidence for the effectiveness of gender dysphoria so-called treatments like cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgical removal of healthy body parts. If the government could punish professionals for publishing and speaking about these topics or expressing viewpoints that the government disfavors, then science becomes politicized.
the truth is suppressed, and people then, especially children, will suffer real harm. As the court put it, and I quote again, the people lose whenever the government transforms prevailing opinion into enforced conformity. ⁇ But that's precisely what Justice Jackson, who was the sole dissenter on the court, hoped would happen. In her view, the state should enforce its opinion under the guise of licensing standards and medical treatments. None of the other justices, even the liberal ones on the court, were willing to sacrifice the First Amendment in that way.
This case, Chiles v. Salazar, is just the latest in a whole string of losses suffered by the state of Colorado at the high court. In Masterpiece Cake Shop, the court found that Colorado officials violated the First Amendment when they expressed overt hostility toward the Christian beliefs of cake artist Jack Phillips. Then in 303 Creative, the court rebuffed Colorado's efforts to compel Christian web designer Lori Phillips to engage in speech that celebrated same-sex marriage. And so now, after the Chiles decision, Colorado is 0-3 in First Amendment cases.
You'd think by now that the state would have learned to respect both the constitutional rights and the religious convictions of its citizens. But for now, we can at least be grateful for the Supreme Court's affirmation that Christian counselors like Kaylee Chiles and other professionals still have a right to speak, even in professional context, in accordance with their consciences and sincerely held religious beliefs. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. with breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Ian Speer.
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