News & Stories

The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to go ahead with its plan to restrict military service by transgender people while court challenges continue.

(FOX 9) - The new U.S. House and Senate are underway in Washington as the 116th Congress was gaveled in, including four new representatives from Minnesota.

One hundred women were sworn in Thursday, including two from Minnesota - Angie Craig and Ilhan Omar. Craig, who is openly gay, joins Omar, the first Somali and refugee to be elected to Congress.

They make up a freshman class that this country has never seen before.

“I’ve had many days of my life when I wanted to just die.”

Wil Sampson-Bernstrom was a teenager in Alabama in 2007 when he attended a conference run by Exodus International – the largest “ex-gay” Christian organization at the time. That was one of his first experiences with conversion therapy.

Now an ordained minister who lives in south Minneapolis with his husband, he remembers being separated from his parents and forced to sit through hours and hours of classes. He doesn’t remember clearly what all the instructors told him. Some said the reason he thought he liked boys was because of some grave error his parents made raising him – that they were going to make him right again. Some tried to cure him of being gay by making him act and talk a certain way – to sit without crossing his legs, to speak with a certain voice.

A newly elected member of the Minnesota House has announced that he is going to work toward the state banning so-called conversion therapy for gay people.

State Rep.-elect Hunter Cantrell said successful legislative action would make Minnesota the 15th state to prohibit the practice, which aims to change the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians but has been discredited by mainstream mental health experts.