Supreme Court Victory for Free Speech and Religious Liberty

In a major victory for the First Amendment and free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on March 31 that Colorado’s ban on speech-based “conversion therapy” is unconstitutional. In the Chiles v. Salazar decision, the Court held that “Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy, as applied to Ms. Chiles’s talk therapy, regulates speech based on viewpoint, and the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.” 

The opinion made four key points:

(a) The First Amendment protects the inalienable right to decide for himself ‘how best to speak.’

(b) As applied to Ms. Chiles, Colorado’s law regulates the content of her speech and goes further to prescribe what views she may or may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint.

(c) Colorado cannot establish that applying its law to Ms. Chiles falls within a long tradition of permissible content regulation.

(d) The First Amendment stands as a bulwark against any effort to prescribe an orthodoxy of views, reflecting a belief that each American enjoys an inalienable right to speak his mind and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas is the best means for finding truth. Laws like Colorado’s, which suppress speech based on viewpoint, represent an egregious assault on both commitments.

Takeaways:

1. Thank God for the protections of the First Amendment. If those protections extend to licensed counselors, they certainly apply to pastors!

2. Praise God for the Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of free speech.

3. The best way to stop unconstitutional legislation is by defeating it in a committee hearing when it is first proposed. However, in those cases where it becomes law, it must be challenged in the courts.