Something predictable happened Tuesday at the Supreme Court, and it had less to do with the ruling itself than with who was left standing alone when it was over. In an 8-1 decision, the court ruled that Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” likely violated the First Amendment. I was expecting a 6-3 ruling, but the moment I saw it was 8-1, the identity of the lone dissenter was obvious.
The case involves Kaley Chiles, a licensed mental health counselor in Colorado who practices only talk therapy. She doesn't prescribe medication, use aversive techniques, or employ any physical methods — she talks with her clients and helps them pursue their own stated goals.
Colorado's 2019 law banned her and others from helping kids reduce unwanted same-sex attraction or change their gender identity. Under the law, she could only affirm LGBTQ identity or assist clients "undergoing gender transition.”
The viewpoint discrimination was so brazen that it should have been a unanimous ruling, but alas, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson proved, yet again, that she is the epitome of a DEI hire, picked for checking the correct diversity boxes rather than for having anything resembling a brilliant legal mind.
Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch dismantled Colorado's argument with surgical precision. The majority made clear that the First Amendment doesn't care what label a government slaps on regulated speech — calling something a "treatment" or a "therapeutic modality" doesn't strip it of constitutional protection. "The First Amendment is no word game," Gorsuch wrote, and the rights it protects "cannot be renamed away or their protections nullified by 'mere labels.'" The majority explicitly rejected what it called the idea that "professional speech" deserves "diminished constitutional protection,” which is the precise theory Jackson built her entire dissent around.
ICYMI: Read This Before Celebrating SCOTUS’s 'Conversion Therapy' Ruling
Then there's the majority's masterful use of history to expose just how dangerous Jackson's logic actually is. "Not long ago, many medical experts and organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, considered homosexuality a mental disorder," Gorsuch wrote. "On the view Colorado and the dissent advance, a law adopted during that era prohibiting counselors from engaging in the 'substandard care' of affirming their clients' homosexuality would have been subject to only rational-basis or intermediate-scrutiny review — and likely upheld."
Even the court's liberals couldn’t hold back.
Justice Kagan filed a concurring opinion, making clear that she agreed with the majority on the core principle while taking pointed aim at Jackson's reasoning. Kagan accused Jackson of quietly abandoning the court's settled hostility to viewpoint discrimination. In her opinion, Kagan wrote that Jackson's "view to the contrary rests on reimagining — and in that way collapsing — the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions."
Wow.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 31, 2026
Justice Kagan's concurring opinion attacks the dissent of her fellow liberal Justice Jackson. pic.twitter.com/FhSy6Pk2lz
When the liberals on the court won't stand with you, you're not just in the minority — you're in the wrong.
Jackson, in her dissent, insisted that the ruling "risks grave harm to Americans' health" and that the Constitution doesn't serve "as an obstacle to sensible regulation of harmful medical procedures merely because inadequate care is delivered through speech rather than a scalpel." It's the same emotionally charged language we’ve come to expect from Jackson, but it’s not a solid constitutional interpretation. I’ve said before that a justice can hold left-wing views and still earn respect through rigorous legal analysis. Jackson brings the passion of an activist but lacks the constitutional rigor to earn respect from her fellow justices.
Joe Biden announced his criteria in 2022—he would nominate a black woman to the court — and he did. Jackson is the epitome of an unqualified DEI hire, and she’s seemingly been on a desperate mission to prove it ever since. Her record on the high court has featured sloppy reasoning, strained analogies, and positions so far outside the mainstream that her fellow liberals have distanced themselves from her.
