Professional counseling to overcome homosexuality or transgenderism has been the focus of attack by the LGBT movement at home and abroad for some time. A major decision, crucially important for religious freedom, free speech, and liberty of conscience, which should be definitive, but may well have to be fought in litigation in other cases, was issued by the Supreme Court this spring in the Chiles v. Salazar case.

Kaley Chiles is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and a Licensed Addiction Counselor (LAC) in Colorado. She is associated with Deeper Stories Counseling, which attempts to “bridge the divide between the mental health community and the faith community.” She filed a pre-enforcement lawsuit against Colorado’s ban on professional counseling against homosexuality or transgenderism for minors (the Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL)) as an unconstitutional ban on freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with her free speech claims in a March 31 decision that the MCTL was both an “egregious assault” on free speech and guilty of “viewpoint discrimination” (the state mandating speech in favor of a particular viewpoint in an ongoing controversy, one of the worst violations of the free speech doctrine).

The Danger in Counseling Bans

The great danger in such laws – beyond the fact that people ought to be able the access such counseling if they want – is that the prohibition of speech against homosexuality or transgenderism will spread from professional counseling to any such speech by anyone. This is shown in many Western nations and jurisdictions that have done exactly that, so that even the counseling of a parent to their child against LGBT behavior or inclination is illegal. Some such laws, as in Germany, apply only to speech to minors, others, as in France, apply to speech by anyone to anyone. In the United States, such legislation is blocked by the strong free speech doctrine the Supreme Court has long upheld. But many states have attempted to erode the free speech doctrine by passing laws prohibiting professional advice aimed at overcoming LGBT inclination and behavior, or at least such counseling for minors.

Another great danger in the controversy is the way the LGBT movement has termed such counseling. Called “reparative therapy” or “sexual orientation change therapy” (SOCE) by its advocates, it is called “conversion therapy” by its opponents. The use of the word “conversion” seems strategic, as it could very easily be extended beyond sex to religion, and stigmatize, and ultimately criminalize any advocacy of change in religious beliefs or practices. Again, the free speech doctrine in this country makes this unlikely in the near future, but it is a possibility, perhaps longer-term, in other Western jurisdictions.

Counseling Bans in Other Western Nations

This writer has reviewed the alarming progress in the early 2020s of bans against counseling to overcome LGBT behavior and inclination in other countries. In late 2020, it was noted that the meaning of “conversion therapy” was being extended to include any practice, whether a paid service or not, intended to suppress or extinguish homosexual inclination or transgender identity. Also apparent in laws in other countries similar to Colorado’s law is the viewpoint discrimination, which makes illegal telling others about the very real dangers of LGBT life (which pro-LGBT advocates reflexively attribute to “stigma,” or “discrimination”), while explicitly allowing affirmation of any LGBT identity. This was done by Bill C-8 in Canada, which ultimately did pass as the even more severe Bill C-4, without hearings or debate in the Canadian Parliament in December 2021.

At the same time, a similar legislative push was noted in Great Britain and Victoria state, Australia. It was observed in connection with the British legislation that Christianity seeks personal conversion from sin, not therapy, and labelling conversion as “therapy” and criminalizing it is a direct attack on the gospel. It was also noted that this would include speech in church or at home. The provincial law in Australia was passed with extremely high penalties (ten years in prison and the equivalent of a £100,000 fine).

Subsequent articles pointed to the advance of “conversion therapy” bans that effectively criminalized expression condemnatory of LGBT behavior and inclination in the West (here, here, here, here, and here). These laws really attack Christian faith and morals at a very basic level, the level of sexual morality. They represent the gravest domestic threat to Christianity (and to the classical liberal doctrines of freedom of religion and free speech that developed in later Christian civilization) since the conversion of the West to Christianity in ancient times.

Hurt Feelings as Harm

The positions taken on this issue in Supreme Court briefs followed familiar lines, with conservative churches and right-leaning organizations supporting Chiles, and liberal or secularist organizations supporting Colorado. It is important to notice that the issue before the court was not policy (whether sexual orientation change therapy (SOCE) is right or wrong), but constitutional requirements.

As noted in the Family Research Council brief (to be reviewed subsequently), LGBT advocates earlier maintained in United States v. Skrmetti (2025) that the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment meant that Tennessee could not prohibit the “gender transitioning” (really sexual mutilation) of minors, whereas in Chiles v. Salazar, they maintained that the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment may be set aside by Colorado to prohibit speech discouraging such “transitioning” of minors. Notably, the American Civil Liberties Union, which still holds a strong free speech doctrine, and the American Bar Association, both of which filed briefs in the 303 Creative v. Elenis case opposing freedom of expression for creative professionals, did not submit a brief in Chiles v. Salazar. A review of the more notable briefs follows.

The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and twelve other mental health and medical associations (including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics) in their brief basically held that the harm of SOCE (or SOCGICE, sexual orientation change and gender identity change efforts, referring to therapy to overcome transgenderism) has been well established by professional medical associations. The speech of Licensed Professional Counselors or others with health credentials in treating patients was held to be a form of conduct, and thus not to have the protection of the First Amendment. APA strongly maintained that regulation of therapists’ speech to achieve beneficial outcomes for mentally distressed LGBT people is “evidence based.” But it is difficult to see how this could be true, if (on page 32 of the brief) it was (shockingly) held the “SOCGICE should neither be studied nor provided precisely because SOGICE may cause harm to patients.”

Perhaps key to this is the claim (pages 13-14) that homosexual desire and expression have in the course of the development of psychology been found to be a normal variation of the human personality rather than a pathology. In fact, however, both of the APAs (psychological and psychiatric) were intimidated by homosexual activists into denying the pathology of homosexuality in the early 1970s, and this denial now carries over into transgenderism. The claim of...

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