8 OCTOBER 2-8, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Ban on the Run SOLICITOR GENERAL SHANNON STEVENSON WILL ARGUE THE CASE IN WASHINGTON, D.C. BY BRENDAN JOEL KELLEY Colorado has another date with the U.S. Supreme Court, this time over the state’s prohibitin of conversation therapat. On Tuesday, October 7, the U. S. Su- preme Court will hear a First Amendment challenge to Colorado’s statute banning the use of conversion therapy on minors. Conversion therapy, or reparative therapy as it’s sometimes known, is intended to change a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation, and medical groups includ- ing the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have deemed it harmful to minors. Colorado enacted its ban on conversion therapy for minors in 2019, and today 27 states and more than 100 municipalities have banned the practice. But anti-LGBTQ groups have steadily challenged those bans in the courts. In the case going to the Supreme Court on October 7, Kaley Chiles, a Colorado Springs-based Christian therapist, backed by anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), asserts that the ban infringes on her First Amendment right to free speech. Chiles initially fi led a preliminary injunc- tion against enforcement of the law, known as the Minor Conversion Therapy Law, but the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado denied her motion. She then ap- pealed her case to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Tenth Circuit Court, headquartered in Denver, upheld the ban, determining that it constitutes a regulation of Chiles’s conduct, not her speech. The Ninth Circuit has also treated counseling conversations as conduct, not speech, but the Third and Eleventh Circuits have ruled that conversion therapy is speech, creating a circuit split, a confl ict among the nation’s second-highest courts. The question before the Supreme Court is “whether a law that censors certain conver- sations between counselors and their clients based on the viewpoints expressed regulates conduct or violates the Free Speech Clause” of the First Amendment. Chiles and her ADF attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. Attor- ney General Phil Weiser, who’s running in the Democratic primary for governor next year, and whose offi ce will be defending the ban in front of the Supreme Court, tells Westword, “The very clear consensus is that the so-called conversion therapy is harmful. It has lasting harm on people, and the type of therapy that is used can often be cruel. We don’t want to let people be harmed by substandard care, so in Colorado, we’ve banned it on a bipartisan basis.” In the 2019 legislative vote on the statute, three Repub- lican state senators and two Republican state representatives voted to approve the ban. Colorado legislators originally intro- duced the bill in 2015, but the Republican- controlled Senate killed it in committee after it had been passed in the House. Shannon Stevenson, Colorado’s Solici- tor General, will argue the case before the Supreme Court, and “make clear what a radical case this is,” Weiser says, “and also underscore that this is what you might think about as somewhat NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS The Supreme Court of the United States of America. DAVIS STAEDTLER continued on page 10
