The legal challenge to a Colorado law banning conversion therapy for minors may be novel, but the group behind the case is familiar to the justices.
Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado Springs, is represented by lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom. The Arizona-based group, founded more than three decades ago as a legal-defense fund focused on conservative Christian issues, has become a mainstay before the Supreme Court in recent years, particularly in high-profile culture war cases.
The group, known as A.D.F., has been involved in challenges to gay and transgender rights, abortion access and a dispute about whether public money can be used to fund religious charter schools.
In the organization’s 2024 annual report, Kristen Waggoner, the chief executive, pointed to President Trump’s election as a “rebuke to progressive ideology” and said that A.D.F. was “made for this moment” and would help “reclaim the truths and freedoms that made the West truly great.”
A.D.F. has several cases slated to be heard by the Supreme Court in the coming months. The group is working with Idaho and West Virginia to defend the constitutionality of state laws barring transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams. A.D.F. lawyers also are slated to argue that a New Jersey subpoena seeking the identity of donors to a faith-based pregnancy center violated the center’s First Amendment rights. In that case, the state attorney general’s office had issued the subpoena as part of a broader investigation into whether certain nonprofit entities in New Jersey had misled donors and potential clients about the health services they provided.
The Colorado conversion therapy case is the third recent legal challenge on gay and transgender rights to reach the Supreme Court from A.D.F. clients in that state.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker and A.D.F. client who had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. In a narrow ruling, the court held that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which had evaluated the baker’s reasons for declining to make the cake, had violated the clause of the First Amendment guaranteeing the free exercise of religion.
In 2023, the justices sided with the A.D.F. in another challenge from Colorado, this time involving a web designer who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples despite a state law that forbade discrimination against gay people.
The legal organization also has mounted a number of challenges to abortion and contraception access. In 2014, A.D.F. represented Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned craft store, successfully arguing that employer-sponsored health insurance could exclude contraception coverage. The group worked with Mississippi in its successful 2022 case that overturned Roe v. Wade, upending the constitutional right to abortion. In 2024, the justices rejected A.D.F.’s challenge of the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the widely available abortion drug mifepristone.
They have also pushed for public funding of religious education. Last term, A.D.F. represented the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board in its bid to use government money to run the country’s first religious charter school. The court deadlocked 4-4 in the case, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself. The decision meant that, for now, Oklahoma could not use public funds for the school.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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