Not content after state lawmakers spent years failing to act, the elected leaders of a small city just north of Detroit forged ahead with their own ban on conversion therapy — the widely discredited practice that tries to turn gay people straight.

By a vote of 5-0 on Tuesday night, and celebrated with loud applause, the city commissioners of Huntington Woods banned the controversial practice within city limits.

Violators "will be guilty of a municipal violation,” said a news release from the town that has 6,300 residents, according to the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), and whose homes border the Detroit Zoo.

“Huntington Woods is now the first and only city in Michigan to ban the practice,” the release said. The ordinance was proposed by City Commissioner Joe Rozell, who said after the vote that he'd seen an article relating the serious harm suffered by youths who underwent the treatment.

“I just felt compelled to do this because our state Legislature keeps refusing to act,” Rozell said. Some psychologists have said conversion therapy put gay subjects, especially youths, at risk of suicide and mental illness.

In April, state Rep. Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, introduced bills in Lansing that would ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ youths in Michigan. But the odds of passage are slim because Republican majorities in both chambers of the state Legislature have steadfastly opposed such a ban.

In 2014, 2016 and 2018, Democrats in Michigan’s House and Senate also tried to limit or ban conversion therapy. Their bills died without ever receiving hearings, much less being voted on by lawmakers.

The common theme in each thwarted attempt? GOP control. Many Republican voters are religious conservatives who oppose gay rights and are receptive to the idea that being gay is a learned, sinful lifestyle, according to online critics of conversion therapy. Around the nation, at least 17 states and the District of Columbia have passed bans on conversion therapy.

Yet, the idea persists among isolated practitioners. Last year, south of Detroit in Riverview, Metro City Church advertised a six-week, $200 course pegged as the "Unashamed Identity Workshop," which supposedly would help girls ages 12 to 16 who think they are gay or bisexual to, through prayer, transform themselves into "the true sexual identity given by God at birth." The church's website this week makes no mention of any such course but it does display posts by nonmembers who expressed disdain for the church's tie to conversion therapy.

Those who practice conversion therapy generally use either spiritual or pseudoscientific approaches, according to the National Association of Social Workers website. Last week, the group’s Michigan director Maxine Thome posted a commentary in which she endorsed a statewide ban.

“In my private practice, I have seen multiple clients … who went through conversion therapy and still suffer from the pain and trauma every day,” Thome wrote.

The ban in Huntington Woods passed on the second business day of June, celebrated by the LGBTQ community as Pride Month. That tag commemorates New York City's Stonewall riots, which, in June 1969, kicked off the first major demonstrations for gay rights in the United States.

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Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com. Staff writer Allie Gross contributed to this report.