The 1st Amendment Is About a Lot More Than Just Viewpoint
Free Speech is About Individual Liberty, Not Viewpoint Discrimination
Free Speech is About Individual Liberty, Not Viewpoint Discrimination
(Wanjiru Njoya, Mises Wire) - Supreme Court rulings are significant not only for their decision on who wins, but also for their reasoning. A victory for common sense may sometimes be pyrrhic if it benefits the party who wins the dispute but relies on reasoning that erodes individual liberty in the longer term.
In that context, while the outcome in the recent case of Chiles v. Salazar, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (decided March 31, 2026) was welcomed, the emphasis it placed on “viewpoint discrimination” is unfortunate. It is one more step down the road to conceptualizing free speech as an application of the non-discrimination principle, rather than as an emanation of individual liberty.
The majority of the court in Chiles ruled that therapists should be permitted to conduct “sexual orientation change efforts.” Because the case was brought under the First Amendment, the reasoning was that restricting this form of talk therapy amounts to “discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.” This framing reflects the trend of subsuming all jurisprudence within egalitarian principles of non-discrimination—in this case, the principle being that all licensed therapists have an equal right to practice their chosen form of talk therapy. Forbidding one form of talk therapy discriminates against the therapists who wish to choose that form.
Conceptualizing free speech as an equal right to express one’s views is a stark departure from the libertarian view of free speech as an emanation of self-ownership and property rights.
In this case, a Colorado therapist, Kaley Chiles, successfully argued that…
A word on censorship:
Give up your free speech at your peril. Once they are able to silence you, the game is over. The loss of all of your other freedoms will fall like dominos after. Anyone that advocates to censor you, or to unmask your anonymity is your adversary. Treat them like one - no matter what else they say.
But why is it so vital and necessary for the combined monolithic apparatus of government, corporations, and NGOs, to brute force censor everyone while decimating the careers and reputations of the dissenters? Here is why:
The reason the First Amendment is prime directive order 1, is because it is the most important freedom we have for the same reason it is the first target an adversary subverts, disrupts, and destroys during a crime, a war, or a takeover—preventing a target from assembling, communicating, and organizing a response to an assault grants an enormous advantage to the aggressors.
The Second Amendment is second because it is the remedy for anyone trying to subvert the First.
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"The 1-A is first for a reason. The 2-A is it's twin. Together they make a bond of freedom." —S.P.H.
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent will be led, like sheep to the slaughter." —George Washington