HRC Blog

Late last night, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law SB 1172, a bill that will put an end to dangerous and disproved efforts designed to change a young person’s sexual orientation or gender expression that have proven to inflict great emotional harm.  

We are grateful to Gov. Brown for his leadership by standing with California's children.  LGBT youth will now be protected from a practice that has been proven to have drastically negative effects on their well-being, but also has been debunked as junk science by all major medical and mental health organizations.

This week nearly 50,000 of you signed our petition urging the Governor to sign the bill.  This outpouring of support showed Gov. Brown that we will not tolerate these harmful efforts.  We, along with our friends at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and Equality California (EQCA) will continue our fight against these practices.  

This newly signed law is now a model for the country, and our hope is that other states will adopt it in short order to end this child abuse.