Photo by Joshua Woods on UnsplashIt’s October, which means the U.S. Supreme Court has begun its new term. And once again for those of us who care about secular government and equal rights, it is a time for pessimism.
In recent years, the court has chipped away at the wall between church and state, sometimes brick by brick, sometimes with a wrecking ball. And if the opening weeks are any indication, the 2025–2026 term will once again place queer lives and liberties directly in the court’s crosshairs.
The conversion therapy case: Free speech or licensed harm?
The most closely watched case is Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge to Colorado’s 2019 ban on “conversion therapy” for minors. The term “conversion therapy” is misleadingly clinical. What it really describes is a cluster of pseudoscientific and religiously motivated practices that claims to “cure” LGBTQIA+ people. Every major medical and mental health association — including the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics — has condemned this as not only ineffective but also dangerous.
Colorado’s law, like those in more than 20 other states, simply prohibits licensed mental health providers from subjecting minors to this form of abuse. Yet Kaley Chiles, a therapist backed by the well-funded Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, argues that the ban violates her First Amendment rights. Her reasoning? That “therapy” in this context is really just “speech,” and that she should be able to tell children what she believes about their sexuality and gender, even if that message is rooted in theology rather than medicine.
Framing conversion therapy as “speech” is a clever tactic. It sidesteps the reality that therapists are licensed precisely because their words carry authority, and because their professional interventions — verbal or otherwise — can cause harm if not regulated. Imagine a doctor insisting that prescribing bleach as a cure for illness is protected free speech. It’s absurd, yet when religion is in the mix, suddenly the court is expected to take the claim seriously.
Religious liberty weaponized
This case is not just about one therapist or one state law. It is part of a much broader campaign to redefine religious liberty as the right to ignore any law that conflicts with conservative theology. We’ve already seen how this works:
- In Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018), the court allowed a baker to refuse service to a same-sex couple.
- In Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), it let a Catholic foster agency contracting with the city to exclude same-sex parents despite a nondiscrimination policy.
- In 303 Creative (2023), it created an entirely new free speech exemption so a web designer could refuse LGBTQ clients.
Each ruling has chipped away at the basic principle that laws apply equally to everyone, regardless of religious belief. And each ruling has sent a chilling message to queer Americans: Your access to services, your ability to participate in public life, your very dignity are all negotiable when someone else’s religion is in play.
Now, with Chiles v. Salazar, the court is being asked to extend that logic even further — to allow religion to dictate not just who gets served, but what kind of medical “treatment” vulnerable youth must endure.
It’s not just conversion therapy on the line, however, but also the right of trans youth to access sports. A key case is West Virginia v. B.P.J., in which a 13-year-old trans girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson, challenged the state’s 2021 law barring her from competing on the girls’ track team. The lower courts blocked the ban, noting that it likely violated Title IX and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. But West Virginia appealed, and the case now looms large as a potential vehicle for the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether states can exclude trans youth from school sports altogether.
Another important case is Hecox v. Little, a challenge to Idaho’s 2020 “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” the first law of its kind in the nation. The act bars transgender women and girls from playing on female sports teams at any public school or college. Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State student, brought the suit, joined by a cisgender student athlete concerned about the law’s invasive sex verification provisions. A federal district court blocked the law, and the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld that injunction. Idaho has continued to defend the ban, positioning the case as a test of whether states have broad authority to enforce binary sex categories in athletics.
What unites these cases is the way religious rhetoric saturates the political fight. Supporters of the bans often invoke biblical language about “male and female” to frame their arguments, even when testifying in legislative hearings. The supposed concern for “fairness” masks a deeper agenda: enforcing theological definitions of sex and gender through civil law.
If the Supreme Court takes up either case, the implications will extend far beyond sports. A ruling upholding the bans would embolden lawmakers to pass broader restrictions on trans participation in public life — whether in bathrooms, classrooms or workplaces — under the guise of protecting “fairness” or “religious values.” And for the trans students caught in the middle, the result would be not fairness but exclusion, isolation and stigma.
It’s tempting to treat these cases as isolated disputes about therapists or sports. But the throughline is clear. Religious conservatives, unable to roll back LGBTQIA+ equality through the ballot box, have turned to the courts to carve out ever-expanding exemptions for themselves. They are reframing equality as persecution, and discrimination as liberty.
This is not what religious freedom was ever meant to be. The First Amendment guarantees each of us the right to believe — or not believe — as we choose. It does not give anyone the right to impose their theology on others. When a counselor tells a queer teenager that their identity is broken and must be fixed, that is not freedom of conscience. It is coercion, backed by the authority of a state license.
The danger is not abstract. Studies show that queer youth subjected to conversion therapy face higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. When schools carve out religious opt-outs for LGBTQ content, they send a message to queer students that their existence is shameful or controversial. When faith-based employers are allowed to discriminate, LGBTQ people lose not just jobs but security and dignity. These harms are real, and they fall most heavily on the most vulnerable among us.
For those of us who believe in church/state separation, this court term is a sobering reminder that vigilance is essential. The Supreme Court may have the final word in legal disputes, but it does not have the final word in culture or in conscience.
Every time the court entertains a claim like Chiles’, it reflects the success of a well-funded, well-organized Christian nationalist movement. Groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom know exactly what they are doing: using the language of liberty to hollow out the meaning of equality. Countering them requires more than legal defense. It requires sustained public pressure, storytelling from those harmed, and a refusal to let “religious freedom” be hijacked as a tool of oppression.
Secular Americans have a vital role to play. We can remind our communities that true religious liberty means freedom from coercion, not freedom to coerce. We can insist that the government’s duty is to protect all citizens equally, not to privilege one group’s theology. And we can push back against the narrative that equality for queer people somehow threatens faith.
This term will not resolve every church/state battle. But the stakes could not be higher. If the court sides with Chiles, it will signal to every state that protecting LGBTQ youth is optional, and that religion can override public health. If it grants broader religious opt-outs in schools, it could entrench a patchwork of exclusion that leaves queer kids isolated. And if it expands hiring exemptions, it could gut nondiscrimination protections in workplaces that serve millions.
We cannot control how the justices will rule. But we can control how loudly we speak, how persistently we advocate, and how fiercely we defend the principle that equality under the law is not negotiable.
As the court takes its seat, so must we. Because queer rights and church/state separation are not separate battles, they are the same fight. And if we lose sight of that, we risk losing both.
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
