Can states ban conversion therapy for kids? Supreme Court takes up major LGBTQ+ case [View all]

Source: USA Today

Oct. 5, 2025, 3:00 a.m. ET


WASHINGTON −Growing up in a conservative and religious family in Arizona, Matt R. Salmon was desperate not to be gay. He prayed, fasted, read scripture and pleaded with God to change him.

“Even at other kids’ birthday parties, when they were blowing out their birthday candles, I would try to make my wish before they could, to try and steal it,” Salmon, now 37, recounted. When that didn’t work, he agreed at age 18 to see a counselor he was told could help.

Not only did his attraction to men not go away, but Salmon said he absorbed the therapist’s message that something was deeply wrong with him. Although he’s worked hard to undo those two years of what he called “psychological abuse,” Salmon said he still feels “so hurt and, to this day, broken by the experience.”

So he was stunned when the Supreme Court said it would decide whether Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ minors violates a counselor’s free speech rights. “Licensed professionals don’t have free speech,” said Salmon, now a psychiatrist and counselor himself in Washington, DC. “You don’t just get to say whatever you want.”

Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/05/supreme-court-ban-conversion-therapy-colorado/86344212007/