Why the Supreme Court nuked Colorado’s 'Must Stay Gay' law (and what to expect next)

Colorado's ban of so-called "conversion therapy" has finally been exposed for what it really is: an attack on free speech.

In the recent decision Chiles v. Salazar, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado had violated the First Amendment by censoring the free speech of psychological professionals in the name of banning “conversion therapy.”

Constitutional rebukes by courts are routinely treated like speed bumps by social engineers.

That’s a grab-bag term invented by activists to demonize traditional counseling aimed at helping patients pursue happiness as they see fit.

Cruel denial

In fact, Colorado’s “Must Stay Gay” law didn’t restrict — as its advocates claimed — cruel or coercive treatments. Instead the law prohibited therapists from serving clients who sought help in diminishing unwanted sexual compulsions.

For instance, imagine a married dad struggling with temptations to commit adultery with young, even underage, males. Or consider a sexual abuse victim suffering from gender dysphoria who wishes to accept her physical sex instead of submitting to disfiguring, sterilizing surgery and a lifetime of dangerous hormones.

The LGBTQ lobby pushed hard for this law, akin to an equally draconian ban in California, falsely claiming that any therapy aimed at altering sexual feelings was “unscientific” and “harmful.”

'Changed' for the better

My own organization, the Ruth Institute, filed a detailed amicus curiae debunking such claims, citing published studies by eminent professionals showing that talk therapy with willing clients is often beneficial and virtually never harmful. People do successfully change their patterns of sexual attraction and behavior, with or without therapy.

The Changed Movement collects their stories. We at the Ruth Institute have interviewed many such people. In fact, objective studies show that there are more "ex-gays" than "gays." “Must Stay Gay” laws like Colorado’s depend on legislators’ ignorance of such facts.

'Egregious assault'

But the court didn’t rule on the psychological merits, instead pointing to the more fundamental question of free speech in America. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority:

The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech," and any viewpoint-suppression law "represents an 'egregious' assault" on the "inalienable right to think and speak freely" and the "free marketplace of ideas.”

Such a robust attachment to free speech and thought is increasingly rare in America and other Western countries. A pastor in Finland just faced trial for an alleged hate crime for writing a pamphlet summarizing historic Christian teaching on sexual morality. A law soon to pass in Canada would punish “offensive” religious speech, even citations of the Bible. We’ve heard prominent figures such as Hillary Clinton call for civil or even criminal cases aimed at citizens who share “misinformation.”

In Britain, dozens of citizens face arrest every day for posting their opinions about immigration and crime. The European Union has fined the platform X (formerly Twitter) $140 million for refusing to suppress political speech that Eurocrats deem unacceptable.

RELATED: How we help 'gay' men and women 'Leave Pride Behind'

ruthinstitute.org

Politically enforced orthodoxy

Why have so many, especially among our elites, endorsed censorship and even government-enforced speech? Because so many of their preferred policy positions cannot prevail on the merits in the “free marketplace of ideas,” which Justice Gorsuch rightly defended. These fashionable stances rely on media myths, pseudo-science, and politically enforced orthodoxies.

As I show in my book "The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and How the Church Was Right All Along," the only way for an untenable worldview to prevail is by massive amounts of force and propaganda. The campaign against change-allowing therapy meets both objectives. It discredits the very idea of therapy to help reduce unwanted same-sex attraction. And it shuts the door to anyone in the helping professions who doesn’t accept every jot and tittle of the sexual revolution’s shifting party line.

Those who hold traditional Christian ethical values must be driven out of the therapy business. There must be nowhere for sexually confused or traumatized people to go, except to those convinced that there are 47 human genders, that gay people are “born that way,” that sexual orientation is fixed and immutable while gender is a shifting social construct.

None of that is supported by the evidence, but it’s sold to the public and low-information legislators as the “verdict of science.”

A brick in the wall

The victory for therapeutic freedom and the First Amendment in Colorado is welcome pushback against the rule of groupthink. It should invalidate laws in other states that constitute “viewpoint discrimination.” One brick has been pulled from the sexual revolutionary Berlin Wall.

But the revolutionaries are already at work looking for workarounds. Constitutional rebukes by courts are routinely treated like speed bumps by social engineers. (Despite SCOTUS’ defense of the Second Amendment, blue-state gun grabbers keep scheming up new ways to undermine this fundamental right.) The very day of the SCOTUS decision, Colorado and California introduced bills to incentivize lawsuits against therapists for alleged “harm” inflicted by “conversion therapy.”

The freedom of your neighbors to the therapy of their choice is still not safe. Despite this important victory at the U.S. Supreme Court, the battle isn’t over.