A federal court has reopened a Christian therapist's lawsuit against Washington state's ban on counseling minors who seek help with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion, a case that looked dead until the Supreme Court changed the legal landscape.

Brian Tingley, a licensed marriage and family therapist with more than 20 years of experience, first sued Washington state in May 2021 over Senate Bill 5722, the law that bars licensed therapists from performing what the state calls "sexual orientation change efforts" on patients under 18. Gov. Jay Inslee signed the bill in 2018. Tingley argued the law violated both his freedom of speech and his freedom of religion by preventing him from having voluntary conversations with young clients who share his Christian worldview and come to him seeking guidance.

He lost at every level. A three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously against him in September 2022. The full court declined to rehear the case in January 2023. And in December 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment to take up his appeal, leaving the lower court ruling in place. The case, Tingley v. Brown, appeared finished.

Then the Supreme Court handed down Chiles v. Salazar.

An 8-1 Supreme Court ruling rewrote the rules on counseling bans

In March, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado could not ban therapists from counseling minors who sought to change their sexual orientation or address gender dysphoria. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that Colorado's law failed to meet the strict scrutiny standard the First Amendment demands when the government restricts speech based on its content and viewpoint. The Christian Post reported that the ruling directly undercut the reasoning courts had used to reject Tingley's challenge to Washington's nearly identical law.

Gorsuch left little room for ambiguity about what the First Amendment protects:

"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."

He went further, noting that Colorado's law did more than regulate the content of a therapist's speech, it prescribed what views she could and could not express. That distinction matters. Washington's Senate Bill 5722 operates on the same principle: it tells licensed counselors which conversations they may have with willing minor clients and which ones the state forbids.

The Chiles ruling required courts to apply strict scrutiny, the highest level of judicial review, to laws restricting this kind of counseling speech. The 9th Circuit never applied that standard when it ruled against Tingley. It treated the counseling ban as a regulation of professional conduct, not a restriction on protected speech. That reasoning no longer holds.

Reagan appointee flagged the problem two years before the Supreme Court acted

When the full 9th Circuit declined to rehear Tingley's case in January 2023, Circuit Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, a Reagan appointee, wrote a pointed statement explaining why he believed the panel's reasoning was wrong. He noted that the earlier opinion cited no evidence for what he called "the implausible proposition that conversion therapy conducted entirely by means of speech risks direct physical harm."

O'Scannlain's statement laid out the constitutional problem plainly:

"In sum, under binding Supreme Court precedents, conversion therapy consisting entirely of speech cannot be prohibited without some degree of First Amendment scrutiny."

That argument, dismissed by the majority of the 9th Circuit at the time, became the foundation of the Supreme Court's 8-1 ruling in Chiles. The broader pattern is familiar to anyone watching how the federal judiciary handles religious liberty: lower courts apply a permissive standard, religious litigants lose, and the Supreme Court eventually steps in to say the Constitution required more. The Texas Supreme Court's recent decision backing a Christian judge who declined to officiate same-sex weddings followed a similar trajectory, courts eventually recognizing that the government cannot compel people to act against their faith without clearing a high constitutional bar.

The Clinton-appointed judge who wrote the original 9th Circuit opinion against Tingley, Circuit Judge Ronald M. Gould, had framed the issue differently. He argued that states retain the power to regulate medical treatments "performed under the authority of a state license merely because those treatments are implemented through speech rather than through scalpel." He also emphasized that Washington's law "makes no reference to religion, except to clarify that the law does not apply to practice by religious counselors."

That exemption for unlicensed religious counselors was supposed to answer the religious liberty objection. But Tingley is a licensed therapist, a Christian who holds a state credential. The law effectively told him he could counsel minors on any subject, hold any therapeutic conversation, unless that conversation aimed to help a young person move away from same-sex attraction or gender confusion. The state carved out religious counselors who lack a license while punishing the ones who earned one.

Alliance Defending Freedom says the dominos are falling

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization representing Tingley, celebrated the district court's decision to reopen the case. ADF Senior Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse framed the development as a vindication:

"We're pleased the court reined in Washington state's ideological crusade because it violated the First Amendment and deprived children of the help that they seek."

Jonathan Scruggs, ADF's Vice President of Litigation Strategy, said the Chiles ruling "effectively reversed" the earlier decision against Tingley. His reasoning is straightforward: the Supreme Court's 8-1 majority held that a nearly identical Colorado law had to survive strict scrutiny. The 9th Circuit never applied that standard. The district court's decision to reopen the case acknowledges, at minimum, that the legal ground has shifted.

Washington is not the only state feeling the pressure. Since the Chiles ruling, Michigan agreed to stop enforcing a similar counseling law. Two Christian counselors in Missouri will have their case reheard. And in Oregon, a counselor named Frank Canepa had a $90,000 fine against him withdrawn. The Justice Department's recent move to strengthen religious liberty guidance, including new parental rights protections, adds federal policy weight to the same trajectory.

Each of those outcomes followed the same pattern: a state passed a law restricting what licensed counselors could say to willing clients, courts upheld the restriction, and the Supreme Court's ruling in Chiles forced a reconsideration. The legal architecture that supported these bans, the idea that talk therapy is conduct, not speech, and therefore exempt from First Amendment scrutiny, has been dismantled by an 8-1 majority.

Washington's law punished licensed believers while exempting unlicensed ones

Senate Bill 5722 prohibited licensed therapists from engaging in sexual orientation change efforts therapy on minors. It included an exemption for religious groups, meaning a pastor or church counselor without a state license could have the very conversations the law forbade Brian Tingley from having. The state's position, in effect, was that a licensed professional with more than two decades of clinical experience posed a greater risk to minors than an unlicensed religious adviser doing the same work.

That distinction reveals the law's real target. It was not about protecting children from a dangerous medical procedure. It was about controlling what licensed professionals, many of them people of faith, could say inside a private, voluntary counseling session. The federal court's recent invocation of the First Amendment to shield a church from a RICO lawsuit over tithing disputes illustrates the same principle: the government cannot use licensing and regulatory frameworks to override constitutional protections for religious speech and practice.

Tingley's case also raises a question the state has never adequately answered: what happens to the minor who walks into a therapist's office and asks for help? Under Washington's law, a licensed therapist who shares the client's faith and the client's goals is forbidden from providing the counseling the client requests. The state substituted its own judgment for the client's, and for the therapist's, on a matter of private speech between two willing parties.

Washington state has already faced scrutiny for using its regulatory power against people of faith. A federal court recently forced the state to stop punishing Christian foster parents over disagreements about gender ideology, another case where the government attempted to condition participation in a state program on abandoning religious convictions.

Open questions as the case moves forward

The district court's decision to reopen Tingley v. Brown does not guarantee Tingley will win. But it does mean Washington must now defend its counseling ban under the strict scrutiny framework the Supreme Court established in Chiles. That is a far higher bar than the 9th Circuit originally applied, and one that similar laws in Michigan, Missouri, and Oregon have already failed to clear.

Several questions remain unanswered. The specific grounds the district court cited in its decision to reopen the case have not been made public in the available reporting. Whether the court explicitly relied on Chiles or acted on other procedural grounds is unclear. And the current procedural posture, whether the case will be fully reheard at the district level or follow a different path, has not been specified.

What is clear is the direction of the legal current. The Supreme Court's handling of free speech cases involving religious expression has drawn increasing attention, and the 8-1 margin in Chiles sent an unmistakable signal. States that built counseling bans on the theory that talk therapy is regulable conduct, not constitutionally protected speech, now face a judiciary that has rejected that theory by a near-unanimous vote.

When eight out of nine justices agree that the government cannot dictate what a therapist says to a willing client in a private room, the states still defending these bans are not standing on principle. They are standing on ground the Supreme Court has already pulled out from under them.