The U.S. Supreme Court handed down an 8-1 ruling in a Colorado case on Tuesday that could reverse the radical cultural agenda of California Democrats
In Chiles. v. Salazar, the Court invalidated a Colorado ban on gay “conversion therapy” for minors.
California has a similar law, and the Court’s reasoning could blow a hole in California’s own ban.
The U.S. Supreme Court building with tulips in the foreground. Getty Images Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch smiling in his judicial robe. AP Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said Colorado’s law “censors speech based on viewpoint.”
That is a brutal sentence for defenders of California’s law.
“Conversion therapy,” as these laws define it, refers to counseling by a licensed therapist aimed at steering a minor away from same-sex attraction or a chosen transgender identity.
Under laws like Colorado’s and California’s, a therapist is free to affirm one direction — but not to question it. One viewpoint is allowed. The other is banned.
That’s not neutral regulation. That’s the government picking sides.
The Court did not treat this as some minor dispute over licensing rules. It treated it as what it is: government deciding which viewpoints a counselor may express and which ones are forbidden.
For years, the Left has tried to hide behind the word “conduct,” as if words spoken in a therapist’s office somehow stop being speech. The Court wasn’t buying it. Not even close.
California should be paying attention. It was the first state in the nation to ban licensed counselors from engaging in this kind of therapy with minors — and its law rests on the same basic theory the Court just dismantled.
That means Sacramento’s supposed victory may have an expiration date.
If Colorado cannot ban disfavored viewpoints in counseling sessions, California is going to have a very hard time explaining why it still can. That is especially true now that the Court has made clear the First Amendment does not vanish just because the speaker holds a professional license.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter. She argued that states need room to regulate licensed professionals and warned the ruling could weaken state oversight more broadly.
But every other justice on the Court, including two other liberals, saw the bigger danger.
Once the government can dictate what a therapist may say on one contested moral issue, it will try to do it on others.
Today it is this subject. Tomorrow it will be another.
The principle is the same, and that is why this ruling matters well beyond one cultural flashpoint.
This is also a political problem for California Democrats, who never met a speech restriction they did not want to dress up as compassion. They sold these laws as protection.
For Gavin Newsom and legislative Democrats, the decision creates a real problem. They have built an entire policy framework around the idea that the state can dictate acceptable viewpoints in sensitive areas.
The Supreme Court just put that framework on notice.
The Court just signaled that what Democrats really built in Colorado was viewpoint discrimination with a state license attached.
Here in California, where the progressive Left controls every lever of state policymaking, there is still one hard limit they cannot override: the U.S. Constitution. That remains the backstop for Californians when Sacramento goes too far.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.
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