Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order that he says protects the “L-G-B-T-Q-I-A-plus” community from so-called conversion therapy.
"Conversion therapy is a traumatic practice based on junk science,” he said in a statement, “that actively harms the people it supposedly seeks to treat.”
Alexis Sneller of Pennsylvania Family Institute sees things differently. The governor’s order, she says, prevents Pennsylvanians from seeking licensed counseling and hinders the free speech of those professionals.
“It threatens to punish those with convictions on sexuality and gender," she says, "that differ from the governor's."
Back in July, Gov. Wolf vetoed a sports-related bill that sought to ban biological males from participating in women-only sports. That issue was glaringly obvious because of the women's swim team records set by Will Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania, but the governor amazingly framed the bill as an attempt to "bully and oppress vulnerable children."
