The Evangelical world (which I know well because I grew up in it and my family is part of it) is simply saturated with the notion that God will make gay people not gay if they have enough faith.

This notion, which evangelicals believe strongly and almost without question, is contradicted by the entire history of the Christian reparative therapy movement. Every single Christian ex gay leader who promised to be able to help people find cures from homosexuality has since recanted. Many of them were gay themselves and later revealed that they never stopped having sex with men.

This just keeps happening, right up until present. It's like a game of whack-a-mole. The moment one ex-gay leader confesses that he was wrong or actively fraudulent, another pops up.

The consequences are fraught indeed.

Almost a year ago now, I interviewed an Evangelical mother and her gay teenage son the day after he was released from the hospital on the occasion of his second serious suicide attempt.

She gave me an interview because she had finally decided that her religion was wrong about homosexuality.

Note that she didn't change her mind after the first suicide attempt.

After the first suicide attempt, she continued to punish her son for being gay, to send him to pastors to pray the gay away, and to deny him professional mental health care.

When she finally woke up, she was devastated to critically examine her behavior, the behavior that led directly to her son trying to take his own life.

The same family were interviewed a few weeks ago, by the way, by reporters from Vice, featured in an article about the toxic consequences of the activities of Moms for Liberty, a connection I did not explore in my own article, but which I knew about when I wrote it.

I was more focused on the toxic consequences of Evangelical hatred for gay people, consequences that almost literally led to a mother killing her own son.