This one is a big deal, and I want to make sure you understand exactly why — not just for talk therapists in Colorado, but for every licensed professional in America, including every attorney, doctor, and content creator who dares to speak up for the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court handed down an 8-1 decision in Chiles v. Salazar, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), reversing Colorado’s one-way talk-therapy law. The majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch. The sole dissenter was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. That vote count alone should tell you something important about what was really at stake.
What Colorado’s Law Actually Did
Kaley Chiles is a licensed professional counselor in Colorado who provides talk therapy — she talks to clients, she doesn’t prescribe medicine, she doesn’t perform surgery, she doesn’t touch anyone. Among her clients were minors dealing with gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction. Colorado’s law, passed in 2019, told her she could encourage a client to transition from one gender to another, but she was legally forbidden from helping a client explore the opposite path — for example, helping a young person who wanted to reconcile with their biological sex.
That is pure viewpoint discrimination. The state said: you may say X, but you may not say not-X. The only thing being regulated was speech. And the Supreme Court agreed, 8-1, that Colorado could not use its professional-licensing authority to impose that kind of ideological straitjacket on a licensed counselor.
Why Justice Jackson’s Dissent Should Alarm You
Here is where I need you to pay close attention, because Justice Jackson’s dissent contains a theory that, if it had prevailed, would have been catastrophic for every licensed professional in the country.
Her position, in essence, is this: once you accept a professional license from the state, the state acquires broad authority to regulate what you say as part of regulating your profession. She would have let Colorado’s one-way therapy rule stand on exactly that theory.
Think about what that means in practice. Suppose your state bar association decides that publicly supporting the right to keep and bear arms is “harmful to the profession.” Under Justice Jackson’s framework, the bar could threaten your law license unless you stop. A medical licensing board could tell a physician: endorse our preferred policy on firearms in the home or risk your license. A psychological licensing board could blacklist a therapist who publicly defends gun ownership. Even, hypothetically, a building-permit authority could condition a home-improvement permit on the applicant’s political silence.
If that theory had picked up just one more vote, it becomes the law of the land. That is how close we came.
What Gorsuch Got Right
Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion shut that door firmly. He wrote:
“The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country. It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth. However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an egregious assault on both of those commitments.”
And later:
“When the government seeks not just to restrict speech based on its subject matter, but it also seeks to dictate what particular opinion or perspective individuals may express on that subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. While the First Amendment protects many and varied forms of expression, the spoken word is perhaps the quintessential form of protected speech.”
That is exactly right. There is no more obvious form of speech than speaking. Talk therapy is, by definition, talking. And the Court held that the First Amendment protects that speech from viewpoint-based suppression regardless of whether the speaker holds a state-issued license.
The Second Amendment Connection
My read is that this ruling matters directly to everyone in the Second Amendment advocacy space — and I mean that literally, not just as an analogy. The Court has now said, 8-1, that your professional license does not waive your constitutional rights. That principle does not stop at the First Amendment. It extends logically to your Second Amendment rights as well.
If the government cannot condition a professional license on surrendering your right to speak, it cannot condition a permit or license on surrendering your right to keep and bear arms either. That is a building block. And the fact that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor joined Gorsuch’s majority opinion — two of the most liberal members of the Court — tells you this principle has real staying power.
The ability to defend the Second Amendment in public, on social media, on YouTube and Rumble and X, without risking a professional license or government permit is not a separate issue from the Second Amendment itself. If we cannot speak, we cannot protect the right to keep and bear arms. Chiles v. Salazar just reinforced both.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.