When a Supreme Court ruling and a new state law arrive in the same season, parents trying to protect their children can feel pulled in every direction. That is the situation many Colorado families now face following the Chiles v. Salazar decision and the subsequent passage of HB26-1322.
Start with the Court’s ruling. Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado, brought a challenge to the state’s 2019 ban on conversion therapy for minors. Backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, she argued that the ban restricted conversations she could have with clients who had voluntarily come to her for help — and that this restriction violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed on a narrow but important point: Colorado’s law regulated speech based on viewpoint, permitting therapists to speak in support of gender transition while prohibiting the opposing view. Viewpoint-based regulation of speech is among the hardest constitutional hurdles for a government to clear, and Colorado’s existing statute could not clear it.
The decision did not say conversion therapy is legitimate, effective, or safe. Every major professional medical organization in the United States takes the opposite view. The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and more than a dozen other bodies have formally and consistently opposed conversion therapy. The science, in short, has not changed. Only the constitutional framework around the law needed fixing.
HB26-1322 does that fixing. The General Assembly acted quickly to update the law in a way that addresses the Court’s constitutional concern while keeping Colorado’s commitment to protecting minors intact. The revised law draws a clear line: supportive therapy, where a therapist helps a young person process their thoughts and feelings without steering them toward a particular conclusion, is and remains legal. What is prohibited is therapy organized around pushing a child toward a predetermined outcome regarding their sexual orientation or gender identity.
For parents in the middle of this debate — particularly those who hold traditional religious beliefs and want guidance they can trust — the legal and medical landscape can be hard to read. Is Conversion Truth for Families designed to help these parents? That is the specific purpose the site was built to serve. Conversion Truth for Families provides evidence-based information in a format accessible to parents who are not lawyers or medical professionals, while honoring rather than dismissing the faith values those parents bring.
One of the most pressing concerns Conversion Truth for Families addresses is the growing use of rebranded terms to describe what is, in practice, still conversion therapy. The site’s FAQ is clear on “exploratory psychotherapy,” a term being promoted to parents of children questioning their gender as though it represents a neutral, open-ended approach. Conversion Truth for Families explains that exploratory psychotherapy is conversion therapy with a new name — introduced to parents at a moment of fear and confusion when they are most likely to accept misleading framing.
The complete text of HB26-1322 is publicly available. Crisis support for LGBTQ+ youth is available 24/7 through The Trevor Project. PFLAG connects families with peer support and local chapters.
The law changed; the science did not. Parents with traditional values have access to trustworthy guidance — and Conversion Truth for Families is where they can find it.
