Maureen Groppe

They thought that would violate their religious beliefs to do so.

And in both of those cases, the court ruled against Colorado.

There shouldn't be any overlap between the two.

The legal issues in the cases are very different.

This case involved, as we said, free speech rights.

And the case about states' bans on transgender athletes involves the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.

That's the clause that says people in equal situations should be treated equally.

And it also involves a federal law that bans sex discrimination in education.

So we're still waiting for that decision.

And based on the oral arguments, it did sound like the court

is likely to uphold these state bans.

But if the court does uphold the state bans on transgender athletes, they'll do it for different reasons than the reason that they cited when siding with the counselor in yesterday's decision.

I think it's noteworthy that it was an 8-1 decision that you had two of the three liberal justices who were agreeing with the six conservative justices.

Justice Elena Kagan, she wrote a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Sotomayor, explaining that there might be a way for Colorado to write a law that doesn't have this issue.

But the fact that there was this, what they call the legal term is viewpoint discrimination, where the

The counselor was arguing that if she wanted to counsel a youth to go one direction, she was allowed to, but if she wanted to counsel the youth in another direction, she couldn't.

That made the case very difficult and to be considered constitutional.

And so...

You know, people might assume that in culturally divisive cases like this one, you're going to get a 6-3 ideological divide.

The six conservative justices on one side, the three liberals on the other.