A federal court has reopened a Christian therapist’s challenge to a Washington law restricting counseling for minors who seek help with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington last Thursday revived Tingley v. Brown, a lawsuit brought by licensed therapist Brian Tingley against the state’s 2018 “conversion therapy” ban.
Tingley argues that the law prevents him from engaging in voluntary counseling conversations with young clients who share his Christian beliefs and request his assistance.
Then-Gov. Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5722 in 2018, prohibiting licensed therapists from providing sexual orientation change efforts therapy to minors.
Although religious organizations were exempted, Tingley sued the state in 2021, contending that the law violated protections for religious liberty and free speech.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected his challenge in September 2022, with Clinton-appointed Circuit Judge Ronald M. Gould writing the opinion.
The 9th Circuit declined to rehear the case en banc in January 2023. Reagan-appointed Circuit Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain respected the order but said the earlier panel relied on “erroneous” reasoning.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Tingley’s appeal in December 2023, leaving the lower court ruling intact.
That legal landscape shifted in March when the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado could not prohibit therapists from counseling minors seeking to change their sexual orientation or address gender dysphoria.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority that “we conclude that the courts below failed to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny in this case.”
“While the First Amendment protects many and varied forms of expression, the spoken word is perhaps the quintessential form of protected speech. And that is exactly the kind of expression in which Ms. Chiles seeks to engage,” wrote Gorsuch.
“Colorado’s law does not just regulate the content of Ms. Chiles’s speech. It goes a step further, prescribing what views she may and may not express.”
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys say the Chiles decision undermines the reasoning previously used against Tingley.
Jonathan Scruggs, ADF’s vice president of litigation strategy, said Chiles “effectively reversed” the ruling against Tingley because the Supreme Court’s 8-justice majority required Colorado’s similar law to face strict scrutiny, a standard the 9th Circuit had not applied to Washington’s law.
