Obama Backs Efforts to End Ex-Gay Therapy for LGBT Teens | Sojourners

Obama Backs Efforts to End Ex-Gay Therapy for LGBT Teens

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza / RNS
President Barack Obama with Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, center. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza / RNS

President Obama is lending support to efforts to end “conversion therapy” that seeks to change the sexual orientation of gay, lesbian, and transgender youth.

Responding to a petition on the White House website calling for a ban on conversion therapy, Obama writes that “tonight, somewhere in America, a young person, let’s say a young man, will struggle to fall to sleep, wrestling alone with a secret he’s held as long as he can remember. Soon, perhaps, he will decide it’s time to let that secret out.”

Obama adds: “What happens next depends on him, his family, as well as his friends and his teachers and his community. But it also depends on us — on the kind of society we engender, the kind of future we build.”

The White House petition, which has more than 120,000 signatures, calls for enactment of “Leelah’s Law to Ban All LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy.”

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