http://www.bilerico.com/2012/05/ex-gay_therapy_bill_passes_california_senate.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BilericoProject+%28The+Bilerico+Project%29&utm_content=Google+Reader (http://www.bilerico.com/2012/05/ex-gay_therapy_bill_passes_california_senate.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BilericoProject+%28The+Bilerico+Project%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)
By a party-line vote of 23-13, California Senate Democrats passed SB 1172, a bill that would crackdown on unethical so-called "reparative" therapy that promises to change a person's sexual orientation. If the bill next passes the Assembly and is signed into law by Gov. Brown, it would make California the first state in the nation to protect vulnerable LGBT people from such harmful and unnecessary "treatments."
"The entire medical community is opposed to these phony therapies," Sen. Ted W. Lieu (D-Torrance), said in a statement right after his bill passed Wednesday, May 30. "Just a few weeks ago the man who brought any legitimacy to reparative therapy, Dr. Robert Spitzer, renounced his study and apologized to the LGBT community. Everyone agrees that this quackery needs to stop."
Go California! Maybe this will start a national trend, or will send a message to Capitol Hill in D.C. that they need to pass federal legislation outlawing this practice or even the suggestion of it nationwide! I saw plenty of my fellow LGBT youth put into psych programs and thrown onto medication because their parents wanted to "normalize" them for their own image and emotional stability as parents because they were homophobic, transphobic, etc.