Lindsay Whitehurst, for the Associated Press and carried by PBS NewsHour on 31 March 2026, reports that the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors, siding 8-1 with Kaley Chiles, a Christian counselor who said the ban silenced her faith. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that "the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country." Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter. Colorado’s law, which already exempted religious ministries, is one of about two dozen now left exposed.
The whole ruling hangs on one word, orthodoxy, and the Court holds it upside down. Gorsuch uses it to shield the person doing the converting. But conversion therapy is the orthodoxy. It is the oldest one there is. It says a child who loves the wrong way is a thing to be corrected. The ruling only renames the correction. The cure becomes counseling. The pressure becomes voluntary. The orthodoxy becomes speech. This is the courteous mirror. The soft room, the word therapy said like a kindness, is how the cruelty is handed over. A child is held up to their own face and told the face is a sickness, gently, in a licensed office, with the law now standing at the door.
The Court’s reason is that her counseling is speech, and a state cannot force her to hold her tongue. That worry is not nothing. No one should be made to say words they do not believe. But this was never only words. Conversion therapy is a treatment the state licenses, a thing done to a child over months. Calling it speech is how a procedure slips into the one room the law will not enter. She does not lose her voice. She loses the license to perform the cure. That is conduct, dressed as speech so it can pass the First Amendment unsearched.
And see what the law never touched. Colorado exempted religious ministries. The church was always free to do this. The fight was only over the paid, licensed version. Orthodoxy was never restricted where it actually lives, in the pulpit and the back room of the chapel. It reads one column of a child, who they love, and calls the rest of them a disease that column caused.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is that back room, written from inside it. Jeanette is adopted, taken in by an evangelical mother to be raised into a missionary, a child acquired to carry the faith. The mother splits the world into friends and enemies. Then Jeanette falls in love with a girl. When the church finds out, the pastor does not call it love. He calls it a demon. They shut her in without food and pray over her until she says what they need to hear. No license, no courtroom, no First Amendment. Just orthodoxy doing to one girl what the Court now says a counselor may keep doing. Winterson even gives the demon a shape, an orange one, that tells Jeanette everyone has a demon and she may keep hers. That is the one thing the chapel cannot allow, a child keeping the column it wants to burn.
I know that room from the inside. I grew up where orthodoxy keeps one column of you and calls the rest of you its to fix. It never comes as cruelty. It comes as concern, as family. It is the people who love you most, holding the mirror up to your face. That is what makes it hold. It is hard to fight the hand that strokes your hair while it tells you what you are.
So I do not read this as a free speech case. I read it as a receipt. The court looked at a machine built to overwrite a child, called the overwriting thought, and protected it. Gorsuch is right that no orthodoxy should be enforced. He only missed that he was protecting one. In the book the mother keeps serving oranges, as if there were a single fruit, a single shape a life may take. There is not. There never was. The whole cruelty was pretending there was.