The California Assembly on Tuesday
approved a bill which would ban therapies that attempt to alter a
minor's sexual orientation from gay to straight.
The measure (Senate Bill 1172),
sponsored by Senator Ted W. Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, cleared
the chamber with a 52 to 21 vote. The Senate approved the bill in
May, but amendments added in the Assembly means it must first return
to the Senate for a concurrence vote before heading to the desk of
Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat who has not said whether he'll sign
the bill into law.
In applauding the bill's passage,
Clarissa Filgioun, board president of gay rights advocate Equality
California, called such therapies “dangerous.”
“These dangerous, unscientific
practices have caused too many young people to take their own lives
or suffer lifelong harm after being told, falsely, that who they are
and who they love is wrong, sick or the result of personal or moral
failure,” she said.
Ryan Kendall described his experience
to the California Legislature earlier this year, saying the therapy
“destroyed my life and tore apart my family.”
“In order to stop the therapy that
misled my parents into believing that I could somehow be made
straight, I was forced to run away from home, surrender myself to the
local department of human services, and legally separate myself from
my family,” he testified.
The National Association for Research &
Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a group which promotes the therapy,
called the measure “another triumph of political activism over
objective science.”
On its website, the group claims that
passage of the bill would “likely increase harms to minors
through its unintended consequences.” Parents, the group
explained, would be forced to seek out therapy for their children
from “unlicensed, unregulated and unaccountable religious
counselors.”
“The vast majority of anecdotal
accounts of harm to children from SOCE [Sexual Orientation Change
Efforts] seem attributable to these types of counselors and to
religiously oriented programs.”
Meanwhile, the “ex-gay” group
Exodus International recently announced it would no longer offer such
treatments, saying
they don't work.
(Related: Dr.
Robert Spitzer regrets 2001 study supporting “ex-gay” therapy.)