The Supreme Court handed Colorado an 8-1 defeat last week in Chiles v. Salazar, striking down the state's ban on so-called conversion therapy as a violation of the First Amendment. It was the third time in recent years that the justices rebuked Colorado in a major dispute over speech, religion, and individual rights, a pattern that conservative legal advocates say reflects a state government more interested in enforcing ideological conformity than respecting constitutional limits.
The ruling wasn't close. Only one justice dissented. And the core finding was blunt: Colorado's law discriminated based on viewpoint, restricting talk therapy only when it aimed to prevent minors from embracing a transgender or gay identity. Therapy that affirmed those identities faced no such restriction.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, shares it simply as Fox News Digital reported:
"The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country."
That word, orthodoxy, keeps surfacing in the Court's dealings with Colorado. And the state's officials keep running into it.
Kaley Chiles is a licensed faith-based counselor in Colorado Springs. She argued that she helped young people reach their own stated goals, which could include minors seeking counseling on sexuality and gender identity. Colorado countered that it could regulate her therapy because it amounted to professional conduct and that the state wanted to protect minors from what it deemed harmful counseling.
The Court disagreed, overwhelmingly. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed the conversion therapy ban into law in 2019. Six years later, the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional, not on narrow procedural grounds, but on the broadest possible basis: the government cannot target speech it dislikes while leaving identical speech it favors untouched.
The Chiles case did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed a now-familiar sequence of Colorado officials pressing aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination and speech-related statutes, only to be reversed by the nation's highest court.
In 2023, the Court ruled 6-3 in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis that the First Amendment barred Colorado from using its Anti-Discrimination Act to force a website designer to create wedding websites for same-sex couples. The justices held that the state could not compel a person to create content conveying a message she disagreed with. The state's civil rights division lost that fight after years of litigation.
The 8-1 free speech ruling in the conversion therapy case echoed the logic of that earlier decision, and of an even earlier one.
In 2018, the justices sided with baker Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Phillips, who operates his shop in Lakewood, Colorado, had declined to create a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The Supreme Court found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had shown unconstitutional hostility toward Phillips' religious beliefs, hostility it did not display toward other bakers who declined other requests.
That decision was narrower, focused on the commission's conduct rather than a sweeping free-speech principle. But it established a damaging fact about Colorado's enforcement apparatus: the state agency charged with protecting civil rights was itself acting with unconstitutional bias.
The pattern extends beyond speech and religion. In Trump v. Anderson, the justices unanimously reversed the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to remove President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential primary ballot over allegations that he had incited an insurrection. The Court found that the state simply lacked the authority to take that step.
That ruling, unanimous, across every ideological line on the bench, suggested that Colorado's legal position was not merely wrong but untenable. The state had attempted something no state had ever successfully done, and every justice said it overstepped.
The Supreme Court's willingness to take up politically charged disputes has only grown in recent terms. Colorado has been on the wrong end of that trend more than any other state.
Conservative legal figures see a deliberate pattern in Colorado's behavior, not a string of bad luck, but a state government that treats constitutional limits as obstacles to route around rather than boundaries to respect.
Carrie Severino, president of the legal watchdog JCN, comments to report:
"Colorado seems h***-bent on enforcing its own new orthodoxy of thought, and the Supreme Court has had to come back time and time again to correct them and to remind them that the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even when the state may disagree with a person's opinions."
Severino pointed to the institutional dimension. The problem, she argued, is not just bad laws but bad actors within state agencies.
"The Supreme Court found, at least at the time of Masterpiece Cakeshop, that Colorado's state agency was acting in a way biased against a certain set of beliefs, and from what we can see that hasn't changed in the intervening years. Unfortunately, each time the Supreme Court has corrected them, they've only doubled down."
Jim Campbell, the Alliance Defending Freedom attorney who represented Chiles before the Supreme Court during oral arguments, offered a sharper assessment. Colorado, he told Fox News Digital, "has proven itself to be no respecter of the First Amendment."
Campbell rejected the idea that the losses were coincidental. The ideological divisions on the Court have not prevented overwhelming majorities from ruling against Colorado, 8-1, 6-3, unanimous, which suggests the state's positions are not close calls.
"I don't think at this point that it's coincidental. The State of Colorado has shown an utter disregard for the First Amendment rights of people like Kaley Chiles."
What makes Colorado's record especially notable is not just the outcomes but the margins. These are not 5-4 nailbiters where a swing justice tips the balance. The Chiles ruling drew only a single dissent. The Trump ballot case was 9-0. Even 303 Creative, at 6-3, was a comfortable majority. The Court is not agonizing over these cases. It is correcting them.
The people who bear the cost of that correction are not politicians or bureaucrats. They are the Kaley Chileses and Jack Phillipses, small practitioners and business owners who spent years in litigation defending rights the Constitution already guaranteed them. Phillips' legal ordeal stretched across multiple cases and years of public scrutiny. Chiles challenged a law signed in 2019 and did not receive vindication until the Supreme Court acted years later.
Terry Schilling, president of the conservative group American Principles, framed the issue in blunter terms. Colorado's Democratic leadership, he told Fox News Digital, "will stomp on the rights of anyone who stands in the way of the well-heeled gay and transgender lobby whether it is bakers, doctors, or desperate families."
Schilling said the legal process itself is part of the problem. Citizens should not need to fight to the Supreme Court to secure basic constitutional protections.
"It should not take the lengthy legal battles or the Supreme Court to rein in the liberal war against reality. That is why fed-up Colorado families are appealing straight to voters to protect children from extremist Democrats."
He cited his organization's efforts to pass conservative ballot initiatives in the state, an attempt to bypass a political establishment that has shown no interest in self-correction.
The current Supreme Court term shows no sign of slowing down on high-stakes constitutional questions. Colorado may yet find itself back before the justices. If so, the state's track record offers little reason for confidence.
Four major Supreme Court rebukes in roughly six years. Lopsided margins each time. Rulings spanning free speech, religious liberty, and the limits of state authority over federal elections. The common thread is a state government that repeatedly tests constitutional boundaries, and repeatedly discovers they exist.
Colorado's defenders might argue the state is simply advocating for progressive values in a hostile judicial environment. But the margins tell a different story. When eight of nine justices say your law discriminates by viewpoint, the problem is not the Court. When all nine say you lacked authority to remove a presidential candidate from the ballot, the problem is not partisanship on the bench.
The problem is a state apparatus that treats the First Amendment as an inconvenience and its own citizens' rights as negotiable. The Supreme Court has now said so, repeatedly, clearly, and by overwhelming margins.
At some point, a reasonable government would stop forcing its own people to litigate their way to liberty. Colorado's hasn't reached that point yet.
