The Supreme Court handed Colorado an 8-1 defeat last week in Chiles v. Salazar, striking down the state's conversion therapy ban as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. It was the third time in recent years the justices have rebuked Colorado in a major First Amendment dispute, and the pattern says more about the state's political leadership than it does about the Court.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the lopsided majority, did not mince words.
"The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country."
That line should be framed and hung in the Colorado Attorney General's office. The state has now been told, repeatedly, by overwhelming margins, that its progressive enforcement apparatus runs afoul of the Constitution. And each time, as Fox News Digital reported, Colorado's leadership has doubled down rather than recalibrated.
Kaley Chiles is a licensed faith-based counselor in Colorado Springs. She argued before the Supreme Court that she helped youths reach their own stated goals, which could include minors seeking counseling on their sexuality and gender identity. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed the conversion therapy ban into law in 2019, and the state defended it by arguing that Chiles' talk therapy amounted to regulable professional conduct and that the law protected minors from harmful counseling.
The justices weren't buying it. The Court found that Colorado's law discriminated based on viewpoint because it restricted talk therapy only when the therapy aimed to prevent minors from embracing being transgender or gay. A counselor who affirmed a minor's gender transition faced no restriction. A counselor who helped a minor explore alternatives did. That is textbook viewpoint discrimination, and eight of nine justices said so.
Jim Campbell, the Alliance Defending Freedom attorney who represented Chiles, told Fox News Digital that the state "has proven itself to be no respecter of the First Amendment." He added bluntly:
"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."
The ruling drew an unusually broad coalition on the bench, with only one justice dissenting from the 8-1 decision. When a state loses that badly, the question is no longer whether the law was constitutional. The question is why the state's lawyers thought it ever could be.
The Chiles ruling did not arrive in a vacuum. It landed on a record that now stretches back nearly a decade, a record of Colorado pushing ideological enforcement to the Supreme Court's doorstep and losing.
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 Court found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had shown unconstitutional hostility toward Phillips' religious beliefs, hostility it did not show toward other bakers who declined requests on other grounds.
That case should have served as a warning. It did not.
In 2023, the Court ruled 6-3 in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis that the First Amendment barred Colorado from using the state's Anti-Discrimination Act to force a website designer to create wedding websites for same-sex couples. The high court held that the state could not compel a person to create content conveying a message he or she disagreed with.
Even the internal disagreements among the justices in these cases have underscored just how far Colorado has pushed. When liberal justices split publicly over the reasoning in a free-speech case involving Colorado, it signals that the state has managed to stake out a position that even parts of the Court's left flank cannot fully defend.
And then there was Trump v. Anderson. In that case, 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 the state simply lacked the authority to do what it tried to do. Unanimous. Nine to zero.
Four major cases. Four losses. Three of them by lopsided or unanimous margins. The common thread is not complicated: Colorado's political establishment has repeatedly used its regulatory and legal machinery to enforce progressive orthodoxy, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly told the state it cannot do that under the Constitution.
Carrie Severino, president of the legal watchdog JCN, connected the dots in an interview with Fox News Digital:
"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 also pointed back to the Phillips case, noting that the 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. "From what we can see," she said, "that hasn't changed in the intervening years."
Her conclusion was sharp: "Unfortunately, each time the Supreme Court has corrected them, they've only doubled down."
That assessment is hard to argue with. Colorado did not respond to Masterpiece Cakeshop by moderating its enforcement posture. It signed a new conversion therapy ban the very next year. It did not respond to 303 Creative by reconsidering how it applies its Anti-Discrimination Act. It defended the conversion therapy ban all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost 8-1.
The people who bear the cost of Colorado's losing streak are not the politicians who sign these laws or the state attorneys who defend them. The cost falls on people like Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado Springs who spent years in litigation to vindicate her right to do her job without the state dictating which viewpoints she could express to her own clients.
It falls on people like Jack Phillips, who was dragged through years of legal proceedings for declining to create a custom product that violated his religious beliefs. The broader pattern of Colorado's governance, from runaway program costs to aggressive regulatory overreach, suggests a political class more interested in ideological signaling than in the practical consequences for the people who live under its authority.
Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles, framed the dynamic in blunt terms. Democrats in Colorado, 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 added that his organization is working to pass conservative ballot initiatives in the state, arguing that voters themselves need to step in where the courts have had to intervene repeatedly.
"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."
The Supreme Court's current term is far from over. On Tuesday, January 13, 2026, protesters waved transgender pride flags outside the Court as it heard arguments over state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams. The justices are also preparing to hear arguments on birthright citizenship, another high-profile constitutional dispute involving the Trump administration.
Colorado may not be a named party in every one of those cases. But the state's record before the Court tells a story that extends beyond any single lawsuit. It is the story of a state government that treats constitutional rights as obstacles to be tested rather than limits to be respected.
Four trips to the Supreme Court. Four losses. An 8-1 rebuke on viewpoint discrimination. A finding of unconstitutional hostility toward religious belief. A unanimous reversal on ballot removal authority. And still, the state's posture has not changed.
At some point, a reasonable government looks at a record like that and asks whether the problem is the Court, or the mirror. Colorado's leadership has yet to reach that point.
