A community is successful when its members are living healthy, quality lives. People in a community need to be able to work together to better the lives of each other, and when this fails to happen, the community as a whole suffers.

There are individuals in every community that don’t see themselves as a part of a larger network of wants and needs. These people often choose to only engage with things that directly affect them. But this makes them deaf to the needs of their neighbors and eliminates any hope for a truly fair society.

Morally and civically responsible people understand that a threat to their neighbor is a threat to themselves and to the entire community. Therefore, ethical people make an effort to defend others from social injustices, even when they are not directly hurt by the problems themselves.

The move by the Massachusetts state legislature to ban conversion therapy is a positive one that will help limit injustices not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for everyone in the state. However, a morally and civically minded population should have taken action to ban these violent and damaging methodologies many years ago. We should not be the 17th state to have done this.

For the future, Massachusetts residents need to realize that for all the years these injustices were legal, the entire community was hurt. A truly moral population cannot wait decades to ban something that harms the most vulnerable members of the community we all share.

~The Suffolk Journal Staff