The Supreme Court on March 31 ruled against a Colorado ban on so-called conversion therapy for LGBT youth.

In an 8–1 decision, the justices said a lower court failed to properly analyze whether the Colorado law violated the First Amendment. The court’s majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Two of the court’s three liberal justices joined the majority opinion.

The Colorado law “censors speech based on viewpoint,” Gorsuch said, and “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety.”

“Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same,“ he said. ”But 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.”

The sole dissenter was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who said the “fallout” from the new ruling could be “catastrophic.” She said her colleagues failed to consider “the potential long-term and disastrous implications of this ruling.”

Jackson said Colorado’s law was “based on the medical profession’s broad consensus that this medical treatment (which seeks to change a gay or transgender person’s sexual orientation or gender identity) is ineffective and harmful.”

“Ultimately, because the majority plays with fire in this case, I fear that the people of this country will get burned,” she said.

The case, Chiles v. Salazar, was brought by therapist Kaley Chiles, who said Colorado’s law unconstitutionally infringed on her ability to help minors struggling with gender dysphoria and unwanted same-sex attraction.

Conversion therapy, according to WebMD, is “any emotional or physical therapy used to ‘cure’ or ‘repair’ a person’s attraction to the same sex, or their gender identity and expression.”

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia ban conversion therapy for minors, according to a report by the Movement Advancement Project.

Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law allows officials to take away the licenses of health care professionals who are determined to have offered conversion therapy to minors.

Upon conviction, offenders can also be fined as much as $5,000.

The law prohibits licensed therapists from attempting to “change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Chiles argued that the law banning conversion therapy encourages young people to change their sexual orientation or gender identity away from the heterosexual norm and prohibits the provision of counseling for same-sex desires or identification with the opposite gender.

A federal court previously declined to block the law, stating that Colorado was regulating professional conduct rather than constitutionally protected speech.

Judge Charlotte Sweeney of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado said children are “entitled to a state’s protection from therapeutic modalities that have been shown to cause longstanding psychological and physical damage.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the Colorado law “as a regulation of Chiles’s conduct, not speech.”

Justice Elena Kagan filed a concurring opinion, which Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined.

Kagan said she agreed that the Colorado law, “as applied to talk therapy, conflicts with core First Amendment principles because it regulates speech based on viewpoint.”

“A law drawing a line based on the ‘ideology’ of the speaker—disadvantaging one view and advantaging another—skews the marketplace of ideas our society depends on to discover truth,” Kagan said.

“If the First Amendment prohibits anything, it is the ‘official suppression of ideas.’”

The Supreme Court reversed the 10th Circuit decision and remanded the case “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

Chiles’s attorney, Jim Campbell of Alliance Defending Freedom, said the Supreme Court’s ruling in his client’s case, which was based on her engaging in “voluntary conversations,” will lead to similar laws in other states being struck down.

“[The court said] laws like these that discriminate based on viewpoint, single out a particular perspective for silencing, that those laws have to be subject to the highest, highest First Amendment scrutiny,” he said during a teleconference after the ruling.

“And so that’s going to apply to every single one of these laws around the country.

“And the one thing we know is that whenever a court has applied that kind of heightened scrutiny to one of these laws, it has struck it down.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said the high court’s decision was “a setback for Colorado’s efforts to protect children and families from harmful and discredited mental health practices.”

“For generations, states have set and enforced standards to ensure that licensed professionals provide safe and appropriate care,“ Weiser said in a statement. ”We strongly disagree with the court’s reasoning.

“[Conversion therapy is] a practice that every major medical and mental health association in the country has rejected as unsafe and ineffective.”