WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which the Supreme Court was considering whether Colorado can prohibit mental health professionals from practicing “conversion therapy” on children, Constitutional Accountability Center Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program David Gans issued the following reaction:

In a long line of cases, the Roberts Court has perverted the First Amendment, converting it into a deregulatory tool to free business and other entities from regulation they dislike. Today’s disappointing decision in Chiles v. Salazar is of a piece with these past rulings, insisting that laws designed to protect patients under eighteen from harmful forms of therapy must be subjected to the strictest judicial scrutiny.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for the Court offers an extended lecture on the importance of a free marketplace of ideas, but ignores that medical professionals, like Kaley Chiles, are regularly subject to state sanctions for providing patients with false or harmful advice.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson observed in a powerful dissent that echoed the brief CAC filed in Chiles, “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of scalpel.”

The Court today errs badly in holding that Colorado cannot prohibit licensed health care professionals from providing conversion therapy, a form of treatment long recognized to be harmful and abusive.

CAC Vice President Praveen Fernandes added this reaction:

The Supreme Court’s majority opinion ignores the reality that in the mental health field, talk therapy is an integral part of licensed medical treatment, not some trivial accessory. As Justice Jackson states clearly in her dissent, “[t]alk therapy is a medical treatment.”

Ms. Chiles was always free to express her personal viewpoints in a variety of contexts, such as through op-eds, but not in the context of providing licensed treatment to children she sees as clients. And the reason for that was simple: state authorities determined that such treatment threatened to harm these children.

That the Court’s majority seems willing to accept this harm to children who might be grappling with their sexual orientation or gender identity is dangerous; that the Court issued this opinion on International Transgender Day of Visibility adds insult to injury.