While most people don't expect it to happen, should the presidential candidacy of former Vice President Mike Pence gain any momentum at all, there's no question what the media will drudge up to destroy him. It will be the same accusation they've been using against him for years: [to be read only when a suitable amount of pearls are in close enough proximity to clutch] "Pence once supported conversion therapy for gay kids!"
The first year of his vice presidency, ABC was still running stories about the exaggerated claims:
As a candidate for Congress in the 1990s, Pence's campaign website included a statement that fueled belief that he was in support of "conversion therapies" for gay youths.
"Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior," the website said, under a header reading, "The Pence agenda."
Basically, the "Pence agenda" was that kids struggling with their sexual urges should be able to get counseling to help them. Rather than acknowledge the extreme rationality of such a position, those in the press who receive a paycheck for the sole purpose of slandering the right (and especially those who wear the name of Jesus) slap the "conversion therapy" label on it because they know the connotations.
They know that the general public will likely read only the headline, and if people are left with the impression that Pence favors strapping children to the electroshock machine to zap the gay out of them, the media is totally fine with that.
But here's what's funny about all this. There really are people who believe in conversion therapy. There really are people who are actively putting gay youth through it right now. There really are people who are tricking gay kids into undergoing surgical procedures, promising them that they can "change who they are," even as they know the only real consequence will be bodily mutilation and scars. There really are people seducing gay kids into taking a strict regimen of hormone-altering chemicals that poison their bloodstream, injure their bodies, and wreak havoc on their minds.
And those people who really are doing all that aren't conservative Christians. They are progressive transgender activists.
The sad truth is there are a great number of well-intentioned individuals, some even in the church, who legitimately want to help the tiny percentage of kids who experience true gender dysphoria, as well as the much larger percentage of kids who have been persuaded and confused by the social pressures of pop culture.
They've come to believe that by adopting the bizarre, new brown/pink/blue rainbow overlay on their Facebook avatar, or by publicly identifying themselves as an "ally," or by posting their pronouns to their Twitter bio, they are somehow helping. Instead, they are tying their credibility to the character of those who are willfully abusing kids in order to advance the latest manifestation of our ongoing sexual revolution.
Willfully abusing kids by lying to them, preying upon their confusion, and forcing them into a conversion ritual that leads to this:
What you just watched is a girl who was growing up a tomboy. She found that she liked another girl. But rather than being allowed to grow, mature, choose to follow her same-sex attraction impulses or resist them, she was snatched from innocence and put through 21st-century American conversion therapy – supposedly converting a gay kid out of gayness and into a different gender.
In their 2017 article blasting Pence for supporting "conversion therapy," ABC noted that the practice was "long-discredited." It would be nice, particularly for girls like you just watched, if they would pass that word along to the trans activists.
