By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court is set to wade back into the nation’s culture wars during its new nine-month term that begins on Monday with a series of contentious cases on issues including transgender athletes, gay conversion therapy, guns and race.
The first of these goes before the court on the second day of its term. Arguments are slated for Tuesday over the legality of a Democratic-backed Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Republican President Donald Trump’s administration is supporting the Christian professional counselor who challenged the law.
“Like last year, this term the Supreme Court again will face issues that arise from the culture wars and the Trump presidency that deeply divide our country,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, during its last term that ended in June upheld Tennessee’s Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors and let parents keep their children out of classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read. Acting on an emergency basis, it also allowed Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military.
The Colorado case plaintiff challenged the state’s law as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech, saying it unlawfully censors her communications with clients. While lower courts upheld the measure, the First Amendment argument is expected to find a receptive audience in the Supreme Court’s conservative justices.
“I predict a 6-3 vote in favor of the counselor,” Georgetown University law professor Stephanie Barclay said at an event sponsored by the Federalist Society legal group.
Barclay said the case centers on client-led talk therapy, not coercive methods.
“There is no evidence that the state has marshaled that this type of talk therapy, with client-directed goals, would be harmful,” Barclay said. “Colorado might be continuing its losing streak when it comes to these First Amendment cases.”
The Supreme Court in recent years has ruled in favor of Christian plaintiffs who challenged state anti-discrimination measures in Colorado – a website designer who did not want to provide custom web designs for same-sex weddings and a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. It backed the website designer on First Amendment free speech grounds and the baker on First Amendment religious freedom grounds.
Colorado’s law subjects mental health professionals to discipline if they perform on children any treatment that “attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” even when the client seeks out treatment and desires that change.
Democratic Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a court filing that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression and suicide attempts, and “the First Amendment allows states to reasonably regulate professional conduct to protect patients from substandard treatment, even when that regulation incidentally burdens speech.”
Twenty-two other states also have banned conversion therapy.
TRANSGENDER ATHLETES
In another case, Idaho and West Virginia are seeking to enforce Republican-backed state laws banning transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools. Federal appeals courts ruled against the two states. The Trump administration is supporting the states in the litigation.
“Nothing is more central to the culture wars than transgender athletes participating in sports,” Chemerinsky said.
The litigation implicates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of equal protection, a provision that often has been invoked in combating discrimination based on race, gender and other traits.
U.S. District Judge David Nye ruled that Idaho’s treatment of transgender athletes likely violated the equal protection provision.
The “incredibly small percentage of transgender women athletes in general,” coupled with weak evidence that they actually have physiological advantages, “suggest the act’s categorical exclusion of transgender women athletes has no relationship to ensuring equality and opportunities for female athletes in Idaho,” Nye wrote.
A federal appeals court upheld Nye’s decision.
The Supreme Court seems likely to give states broad leeway to regulate the participation of transgender athletes in school sports, much as it did in its landmark 2022 ruling in the case called Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that returned the authority to regulate or ban abortion to the states, Bradley University law professor Taraleigh Davis said.
“They’re continuing this post-Dobbs federalism framework of returning any type of contested moral social issues back to the democratic process at the state level,” Davis said.
HAWAII GUNS LAW
A case from Hawaii gives the conservative justices a chance to further expand gun rights. The court will hear a challenge to a Hawaii law restricting the carrying of handguns on private property that is open to the public such as most businesses. A lower court found that Hawaii’s measure likely complies with the Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
The issue of race also returns to the court, which in 2023 rejected race-conscious collegiate admissions policies. The justices on October 15 will hear arguments in a dispute over a Louisiana electoral map that raised the number of Black-majority congressional districts in the state from one to two – out of a total of six districts in the state – after a judicial ruling that an earlier map violated the Voting Rights Act.
The case gives the conservative justices an opportunity to gut a key provision of this landmark 1965 law that bars racial discrimination in voting. The plaintiffs in the case are 12 Louisiana voters who identify themselves in court papers as “non-African American.” They claimed the map violated their equal protection rights.
Black people comprise nearly a third of Louisiana’s population.
The case “could very well affect the drawing of districts” when electoral maps around the United States are reconfigured, according to Widener University Commonwealth Law School professor Michael Dimino Sr.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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