Can the state dictate what a professional therapist is allowed to say to his or her clients? That is the fundamental ground upon which the U.S. Supreme Court will be deciding as it has finally taken up a case challenging a Colorado law banning so-called “conversion therapy.”

That term is the derisive name given to efforts by mental health professionals to recalibrate how someone thinks of their sexual parts, function, and identity. According to the Rainbow Mafia, however, you must not turn a person away from the gender cult, only toward it. Back in 2012, California became the first state to pass legislation that effectively banned the practice of conversion therapy for minors, and in the years since, 20 other states and Washington, DC, have passed similar legislation.

In December 2023, the Court was presented with a similar challenge to an anti-conversion therapy law out of Washington State. The majority of justices elected to punt on the issue, much to the chagrin of Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote in his dissent, “It is beyond dispute that these laws restrict speech, and all restrictions on speech merit careful scrutiny.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined in dissent, argued that Washington’s law meant “licensed counselors cannot voice anything other than the state-approved opinion on minors with gender dysphoria without facing punishment.”

In other words, both Alito and Thomas see this as a free speech issue, and now, a sufficient number of justices agree that the problem can no longer be avoided.

This specific case, Chiles v. Salazar, was a suit raised by Christian counselor Kaley Chiles against Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy for minors. Democrat Governor Jared Polis, the nation’s first openly homosexual governor, signed the ban in 2019, claiming at the time that it “will help so many people in Colorado to make sure that no one can be forced to attend a torturous conversion therapy pseudoscience practice.”

Yet Polis’s framing of the issue was disingenuous. Chiles argues that her clients, who are most often Christians, are seeking help to deal with unwanted same-sex attraction. They see these same-sex attractions as opposed to the clear teaching of Scripture and believe them to be morally wrong. Therefore, they hope to overcome them, not embrace them.

As Alliance Defending Freedom president and general counsel Kristen Waggoner notes, “There is a growing consensus around the world that adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria need love and an opportunity to talk through their struggles and feelings. Colorado’s law prohibits what’s best for these children and sends a clear message: the only option for children struggling with these issues is to give them dangerous and experimental drugs and surgery that will make them lifelong patients.”

Effectively, Colorado and other states that have passed bans against conversion therapy have forced a deviant sexual worldview onto society with the threat of governmental coercion for any who would dare to voice their opposition.

These state governments are policing their residents’ worldviews. This should be anathema to Americans, as it strikes at the very heart of our first and most important liberty: freedom of speech.

That worldview is regarding the fundamental nature of human sexuality. For those promoting the view of the LGBTQ ideology, it’s the dogmatic pronouncement of “born that way” — well, unless someone was born the “wrong” way and needs conversion therapy “gender-affirming care.” Fundamentally, they see sexual attraction as a state of being that defines a person’s identity. They reject the notion that human sexuality has a designed normative expression based upon a person’s biological sex.

The LGBTQ lobby has fought long and hard to convince the broader American public to accept and embrace this dogmatic view and, for the most part, has had much success in doing so.

Yet there remain those with a primarily Christian worldview who stubbornly refuse to bow their knee to the new morality. They reject the “born that way” premise and instead insist upon the view that sexual behavior is an expression of desire that can be corrupted — sometimes extremely so — and yet that sexual desire is not an identity marker of the nature of a person’s state of being. From a person’s desire springs behavior, not identity.

The Court’s role is not to come down on one side or the other of this debate over human sexual identity. Instead, the only question the justices should address is whether or not the state has violated First Amendment protections.