First Amendment / professional speech
Tenth Circuit dissent warns Colorado turned therapy speech into conduct
The dissent in Chiles v. Salazar says the majority’s label swap could narrow First Amendment protection for licensed counselors and other professionals. It argues the case is about speech first, not just a regulated service.
A Tenth Circuit dissent says Colorado’s conversion-therapy ruling does more than regulate counseling. It treats a licensed professional’s words as conduct, and that move could give states wider room to police speech in other licensed fields.
- The dissent says counselor speech was wrongly treated as conduct.
- The case grows out of Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors.
- The warning reaches beyond therapists to other licensed professionals.
- The First Amendment fight starts with a basic question: is it speech at all?
- Colorado's conversion-therapy fight has become a test of a deeper First Amendment line
Colorado's conversion-therapy fight has become a test of a deeper First Amendment line. In the Tenth Circuit, the dissent in Chiles v. Salazar says the majority treated speech by licensed professionals in the course of their practice as conduct, not speech, before ordinary constitutional scrutiny even began.
That distinction matters because the label changes the protection. If a counselor’s words are treated as part of a regulated service rather than protected expression, the state gets more room to police what happens in the therapy room.
What the label changes
The dissent says that move reaches beyond one ban on conversion therapy for minors. If Colorado can regulate a licensed counselor’s conversations by calling them professional conduct, the dissent suggests, other states could follow the same path in other licensed fields.
That is why the case reads less like a one-off dispute over therapy and more like a boundary fight over speech itself. Once a court accepts that some professional words can be folded into conduct, the dissent warns, First Amendment challenges become harder to bring and easier to lose.