Tag: Conversion Therapy

Perkins Celebrates SCOTUS Ruling On Ex-Gay Torture Because “God Created” All People To Be Heterosexuals

Remember a couple of things as you read this below.  First there is nothing wrong with being LGBTQ+ and the feelings associated with those letters.  Second most children are desperate to fit in to the majority, to be “normal”.  The country was well on the way to reassuring these kids / adults that those feelings were normal and OK.  That the child was not damaged not an abomination to god, and did not need to be fixed.  Then the right wing religious hate machine managed to pass don’t say gay laws, bathroom bills, and “lets make those who are not straight or cis be attacked outcasts again” laws. 

There are two errors not really mentioned here. Minors who are going to these “religious anti-LGBTQ+ be straight cis only” therapest  / religious leaders are normally forced there by parents who have been convinced by religious leaders in their church that their child is damaged and needs to be fixed as they are sinning just for feeling as they do and so will be going to hell.  (Side note Jesus never said anything like that.  I remember being told that I was “acting gay / doing gay things” because I liked sinning.  To which I replied, You have it backwards.  I was born gay and I like doing / being gay and so I don’t care that it is sinning to you.)  The child is often told this to the point where even if they don’t fully hate themselves they are willing to do anything their parents want to “be normal” or get their parents off their backsides about it. And often the child is threatened with being thrown out of the home if they don’t go to conversion therapy.  And then the religious therapist reinforces the message that they are damaged, broken, that they cannot be as they are but must be fixed, must be healed of the sin / feelings.  Every major medical association has reviewed and studied conversion therapy and they conclude it is harmful, has no basis in science and those kids who go through it are far more likely to try to end their lives  so they recommend helping young people to accept themselves and their feelings except for the minor one started by a religious group that has rejected all the studies and findings for the religious belief that god wouldn’t create anyone that way and because we are not that so those people / kids that feel that way must be forced to change to make them and their god happy.  

There are facts, and then there are religious beliefs that disregard those facts.  The fact is that the data and medical studies show that helping non-straight non-cis children accept that they are normal also shows that gender afirming care is the most beneficial way to help young people who are LGBTQ+ and struggling with the idea of wanting to be “normal” or like the other students are.  I did not want to be gay as a kid growing up. I knew my attraction perhaps sooner than most kids due to my childhood situation. But all the time growing up I heard about how bad and horrible people who had the feelings I did were and how doing what I was being forced to do made me the worst possible human.  I was attacked at school even though I was not out but some thought I was different and that was enough.  When I had to join the church to get to leave my abusive home to get to safety I heard constantly how bad / sinfull / an abomination I and people like me were to god who wanted mankind to wipe me out… wait why does god need mankind to do that, especially white Christian men to do that, can’t he just stop making  gay people with out a demon in them? 

At my church school a lot of the boys were flirting with same sex attractions as they were horny teen boys separated from girls. Similar to the situation I found in the military where I had a group of “straight” guys asking me to go on passes with them.  And it was very fun, but they always claimed not to be able to remember what happened on those trips.  But each of those kids and some of those adults I had consensual fun with blamed themselves for failing god and failing to be normal.  I had one really cute fun guy who I would go on passes with who couldn’t wait to get into the hotel room to have sex.  And it was not just one way either.  He received as he gave and what he enjoyed he returned if you catch my trying not to be too explicit. But that was the same with all the guys, they were not hung up on straight norms while in a hotel room with me.  But this one guy would always on the way back to base tell me we couldn’t do that again.  It was wrong.  It was something we shouldn’t do.  I did not argue.  But 3 weeks or a month later he was begging me to go on a four day pass with him.   

My point was this guy was 18 / 19 like me.  I had already long accepted who I was and how I felt. He had taken the be normal message to heart.  He could have used therapy to accept his feelings and needs.  But the one thing he did not need and would have been harmful was conversion therapy. That guy was with me in Germany, after a wonderful weekend he again said we couldn’t do that again,  He got married and it lasted a year, then he got divorced.  I lost touch with him.  But lives were harmed because he just couldn’t face he was gay, couldn’t tell his religious parents he was gay, and would have been placed in conversion therapy if his parents had known as a teen he struggled with same sex attraction and was not straight. Hugs

 

Perkins Celebrates SCOTUS Ruling On Ex-Gay Torture Because “God Created” All People To Be Heterosexuals

From the Family Research Council’s website:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a major win for the free speech rights of counselors and therapists, ruling in an 8-1 decision that a Colorado law prohibiting licensed counselors from engaging in talk therapy to help a person “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies]” unconstitutionally violated the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

FRC President Tony Perkins called the decision “A Supreme Court win for free speech and biological reality.”

“I’m encouraged to see the muzzle removed from therapists seeking to help willing patients come to terms with, and be at peace with, how God created them,” reflected Perkins in a statement to The Washington Stand.

“The Left is using the levers of government to block families and individuals seeking help. Under Colorado law, a girl could legally seek a therapist’s help to change her gender but could not seek help from that same therapist to align her identity with her biological sex. Where is the fairness or logic in that? I commend the court for striking down this deeply invasive and unjust law.”

Read the full article. In 2013, Exodus International – then the nation’s largest ex-gay group – disbanded. Its longtime president Alan Chambers declared that not one of his group’s thousands of victims had ever become heterosexual.

Conversion therapy is discredited junk science that inflicts harm on LGBTQ youth.The Supreme Court’s decision is disappointing and puts vulnerable kids at risk.

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@governor.ca.gov) 2026-03-31T17:09:16.486Z

 

 

SCOTUS Strikes Down Colorado Ban On ‘Conversion Therapy’ For LGBTQ Youths

Coloradans who underwent conversion therapy could sue for damages under proposed bill

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/coloradans-conversion-therapy-lawsuit-damages-proposed-bill/

By

 / CBS Colorado

A newly introduced bill at the Colorado State Capitol would allow LGBTQ individuals to sue for damages caused by so-called conversion therapy, or therapy aimed at changing the sexual orientation or gender identity of a person.

The practice was banned in Colorado in 2019, and the American Medical Association – among other medical and mental health organizations – has said it is ineffective and can lead to depression, anxiety, and other psychological injuries. 

Colorado State Capitol 2026 legislative session
DENVER, CO – JANUARY 14: Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie in front of the House Gallery starts the 2026 legislative session at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver, Colorado on January 14, 2026.RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Sponsors of HB26-1322 say many of those harmed by the therapy don’t come forward for years. Their bill would eliminate the statute of limitations in cases involving conversion therapy.

Individuals could sue their therapists, facilities that hired the therapists, and anyone who knew or should have known about the therapy and didn’t take reasonable steps to stop it.

Plaintiffs could recover economic and punitive damages if they could prove that the therapy was a substantial factor in their psychological injuries.

The bill is sponsored by State Representatives Alex Valdez and Karen McCormick in the House and State Senators Lisa Cutter and Kyle Mullica in the Senate.

The House Judiciary Committee will hear the bill this Wednesday.

Robin Abcarian: Should therapists be allowed to tell gay kids God wants them to be straight?

https://www.arcamax.com/politics/opeds/s-3886919

 

Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times on Published in Op Eds

I had a difficult time reading the gut-wrenching accounts from the parents of gay children who are part of the Supreme Court case about conversion therapy bans and freedom of speech.

All claim their family relationships were seriously damaged by the widely discredited practice, and that their children were permanently scarred or even driven to suicide.

The case, Chiles vs. Salazar, arose from a 2019 Colorado law that outlaws conversion therapy, whose practitioners say they can change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms. The therapy is considered harmful and ineffective by mainstream medical and mental health organizations.

At least two dozen other states have similar laws on the books, all of them good-faith attempts to prevent the lasting harm that can result when a young person is told not just that they can change who they are, but that they should change because God wants them to. The laws were inspired by the horrific experiences of gay and transgender youths whose families and churches tried to change them.

The case was brought by Kayley Chiles, a licensed counselor and practicing Christian who believes, according to her attorneys, that “people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex.”

Colorado, incidentally, has never charged Chiles or anyone else in connection with the 2019 law.

Chiles is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian law firm known for its challenges to gay and transgender rights, including one brought to the Supreme Court in 2023 by Christian web designer Lorie Smith, who did not want to be forced to create a site for a gay wedding, even though no gay couple had ever approached her to do so. The Court’s conservative majority ruled in Smith’s favor. All three liberals dissented.

As for conversion therapy, counselors often encourage clients to blame their LGBTQ+ identities on trauma, abuse or their dysfunctional families. (If it can be changed, it can’t possibly be innate, right?)

In oral arguments, it appeared the conservative justices were inclined to accept Chiles’ claim that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy amounts to viewpoint discrimination, a violation of the 1st Amendment’s free speech guarantees. The liberal minority was more skeptical.

But proponents of the bans say there is a big difference between speech and conduct. They argue that a therapist’s attempt to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity amounts to conduct, and can rightfully be regulated by states, which, after all, lawfully impose conditions on all sorts of licensed professionals. (The bans, by the way, do not apply to ministers or unlicensed practitioners, and are generally not applicable to adults.)

Each competing brief whipsawed my emotions. The 1st Amendment is sacred in so many ways, and yet states have a critical interest in protecting the health and welfare of children. How to find a balance?

After reading the brief submitted by a group of 1st Amendment scholars, I was convinced the Colorado law should be ruled unconstitutional. As they wrote of Chiles, she doesn’t hook her clients to electrodes or give them hormones, as some practitioners of conversion therapy have done in the past. “The only thing she does is talk, and listen.”

Then I turned to the parents’ briefs.

 

Linda Robertson, an evangelical Christian mother of four, wrote that she was terrified when her 12-year-old son Ryan confided to her in 2001 that he was gay. “Crippling fear consumed me — it stole both my appetite and my sleep. My beautiful boy was in danger and I had to do everything possible to save him.”

Robertson’s search led her to “therapists, authors and entire organizations dedicated to helping kids like Ryan resist temptation and instead become who God intended them to be.”

Ryan was angry at first, then realized, his mother wrote, that “he didn’t want to end up in hell, or be disapproved of by his parents and his church family.” Their quest to make Ryan straight led them to “fervent prayer, scripture memorization, adjustments in our parenting strategies, conversion therapy based books, audio and video recordings and live conferences with titles like, ‘You Don’t Have to be Gay’ and ‘How to Prevent Homosexuality.’ ”

They also attended a conference put on by Exodus International, the “ex-gay” group that folded in 2013 after its former founder repudiated the group’s mission and proclaimed that gay people are loved by God.

After six years, Ryan was in despair. “He still didn’t feel attracted to girls; all he felt was completely alone, abandoned and needed the pain to stop,” his mother wrote. Worse, he felt that God would never accept him or love him. Ryan died at age 20 of a drug overdose after multiple suicide attempts.

As anyone with an ounce of common sense or compassion knows, such “therapy” is a recipe for shame, anguish and failure.

Yes, there are kids who question their sexuality, their gender identity or both, and they deserve to discuss their internal conflicts with competent mental health professionals. I can easily imagine a scenario where a teenager tells a therapist they think they’re gay or trans but don’t want to be.

The job of a therapist is to guide them through their confusion to self-acceptance, not tell them what the Bible says they should be.

If recent rulings are any guide, the Supreme Court is likely to overturn the Colorado conversion therapy ban.

This would mean, in essence, that a therapist has the right to inflict harm on a struggling child in the name of free speech.

_____

‘[He] Helped Me … Hate Myself’: Conversion Therapy Survivors Speak Out

Sakler says she was white knuckling it, trying to get through life as a “shell of a person.” She began cutting, hitting and hating herself because of the rejection from her church community.

He was given a treatment plan that involved limiting time with LGBTQ affirming friends, reading articles designed to redirect his attractions, and practicing what the therapist called “male characteristic activities,” such as taking charge and asserting control. He told his therapist that his marker of when things would be better was “life [going] back to normal.”

The therapist also worked with his parents, telling them they had failed by allowing the “gay agenda” to threaten their family and “let the devil get into the house.”

 

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/he-helped-me-hate-myself-conversion

As the Supreme Court appears poised to reverse Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, survivors of the discredited practice speak with Uncloseted Media.

Sam Donndelinger
Oct 11, 2025

Design by Sam Donndelinger.

Editor’s note: This article includes mention of suicide and self-harm. If you are having thoughts of suicide or are concerned that someone you know may be, resources are available here.

“You don’t feel secure in your masculinity,” Sam Nieves remembers his licensed therapist telling him at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “Go grab a Playboy and find a way to enjoy it,” the Mormon therapist told him.

“He told me I can’t be straight if I don’t go fishing with my dad,” says Nieves, who was 20 at the time. “He told me I needed to play more sports, listen to country music, stuff like that. He told me something was wrong with me.”

After these sessions, which lasted about a year and a half, Nieves started experiencing crippling shame and self-loathing. He eventually developed excruciating migraines and memory loss.

“My therapist just helped me find better ways to help me to hate myself,” Nieves, now 41 and living in Seattle, Washington, told Uncloseted Media.

Sam Nieves as a young adult. Photo courtesy of Nieves.

What Nieves was experiencing was conversion therapy, the discredited practice that seeks to change one’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and other major mental-health organizations have long condemned the practice as pseudoscience and incredibly harmful.

Fourteen countries have a national conversion therapy ban, while many more have state or provincial bans. In the U.S., religious leaders can practice nationwide, though licensed therapists are not allowed to apply it to kids in 23 states.

While research around torture and mental health consistently suggests the practice should be banned, almost 700,000 LGBT adults have received conversion therapy at some point in their lives, including about 350,000 who received it as adolescents.

Despite all of this, on Oct. 7 the Supreme Court heard arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case that challenges Colorado’s conversion therapy ban and—if overturned—would have implications for the rest of the states with bans in place.

While the verdict will likely not be announced until June, the court seems poised to overturn it, suggesting that restrictions on therapists might violate the First Amendment’s free-speech clause.

“I’m emotionally devastated for the children who will lose the protections we fought so hard to give them,” says Nieves.

Conversion Therapy and Self-Hate

Unlike many young Americans who are forced into the practice by their parents, Nieves—who was raised Mormon—opted to see a conversion therapist because his church community said that if he didn’t change his sexuality, he was letting them down.

“I actively didn’t want to be attracted to guys,” he says. “And so it was always this confusing, gaslighting situation where they would tell me to stop being gay, even if I wasn’t doing anything. I was trying really hard not to. That’s when [the church] referred me to conversion therapy.”

Sam Nieves in his 20s. Courtesy of Nieves.

Nieves’ therapist insisted that his mom was too overbearing and his dad was not actively parenting, causing him to be gay. As his therapist continued to recommend that he engage in stereotypically masculine activities, he began to withdraw, cutting off friendships and avoiding community gatherings. His Mormon upbringing had taught him to feel shame, but conversion therapy solidified it.

“Conversion therapy gave me validation for why I hate myself. It was just building on top of what the church had already taught me,” he says.

Links to Dissociative Identity Disorder

Nieves became depressed and eventually developed a mild type of dissociative identity disorder (DID), where he experienced one persona that carried shame and recognized he was gay, and another that tried to act straight. Headaches and mental fog were persistent. Thoughts of ending his life flickered through his mind.

“It was just nonstop, massive disassociation,” he says. “There was the Straight Sam and the Gay Sam. And the whole time, everyone was telling me Satan was working on me because something inside me was trying to be gay. So it was insane making. They were making me clinically insane.”

According to medical experts, repeated trauma like medical procedures, war, human trafficking, conversion therapy and terrorism can cause DID when it overwhelms a child’s ability to cope, causing their sense of self to fragment into distinct identity states as a survival mechanism. The trauma disrupts the normal integration of self, leading to symptoms like memory gaps, dissociation and distinct personality states.

When Hunter Moore, a 29-year-old queer woman now living in Washington, was subjected to conversion therapy from her church and parents, she developed DID.

Raised in rural Idaho and immersed in an Independent Fundamental Baptist church that condemned queerness as sinful, the constant fear and shame brought on by her church’s conversion therapy program fractured her sense of self. She attributes her condition to repeated trauma that caused her brain to wall off painful memories.

“I didn’t know how to handle it other than just to check out,” Moore told Uncloseted Media. “I still have a lot of memory gaps from the conversion therapy because of how intense it was. … Once I didn’t have the restraints of that church anymore, the memories started to return.”

Fear, Shame and Suicidal Ideation

Similar to Nieves and Moore, Addy Sakler, who grew up in a conservative Protestant community in Ohio, says conversion therapy was “slowly killing” her.

“I figured I liked girls in kindergarten but did not have the language to describe it,” she told Uncloseted Media.

Sakler knew she wouldn’t be accepted at her church, so she put herself in conversion therapy throughout her young adulthood.

But it didn’t work. Sakler remembers the first sneaking moments of affection between grad school classes with her first crush. But after each kiss, the joy was followed by shame.

“We’d feel a lot of guilt and break up and immediately go repent,” she says. Both women were part of a church ministry that promised to “pray away the gay,” a 12-week program of lessons and deliverance sessions meant to convert them to heterosexuality. Instead, Sakler says, it nearly destroyed her.

Addy Sakler and her boyfriend before she came out. Photo courtesy of Sakler.

“I felt like a zombie walking around. I was depressed and I tried to commit suicide,” she says. “I was in the hospital for a month, two different times. It created a lot of trauma.”

Sakler says she was white knuckling it, trying to get through life as a “shell of a person.” She began cutting, hitting and hating herself because of the rejection from her church community.

Addy Sakler as an adult. Courtesy of Sakler.

“You believe what they’re saying. They’re telling you you’re broken and to be right with God you have to be heterosexual and if you’re not changing, then you’re being attacked by Satan.”

For nearly 15 years, Sakler attended conversion therapy conferences across the country, including one put on by the now dissolved Exodus International.

According to the Williams Institute, LGBTQ adults who have undergone conversion therapy have nearly twice the odds of attempting suicide and 92% greater odds of lifetime suicidal ideation compared to those who haven’t. Among LGBTQ youth, the numbers are higher, with 27% of those who experienced conversion therapy attempting suicide in the past year.

In addition, survivors experience disproportionately high rates of depression, PTSD and substance abuse. According to the findings from one Stanford Medicine study, the psychological harm caused by conversion therapy mirrors that of other severe traumas known to cause PTSD—like sexual or physical assault, the loss of someone close, or even experiences of war and torture.

Isolation and Families Torn Apart

When Curtis Lopez-Galloway told his parents he was gay at 16, they drove him two hours away from his house in southern Illinois to a conversion therapist who used the sessions to berate him for not trying hard enough to change into “the man that God wanted” him to be.

Curtis Lopez-Galloway as a teenager. Photo courtesy of Lopez-Galloway.

Lopez-Galloway remembers being told that his attractions to other men were a symptom of a deeper lack of masculinity, that he needed to “study women to understand what kind of man he was supposed to be” and that he should “bounce his eyes, and change his thoughts to something else whenever he begins to have an attraction toward a male.”

Curtis Lopez-Galloway’s treatment plan, courtesy of Lopez-Galloway.

He was given a treatment plan that involved limiting time with LGBTQ affirming friends, reading articles designed to redirect his attractions, and practicing what the therapist called “male characteristic activities,” such as taking charge and asserting control. He told his therapist that his marker of when things would be better was “life [going] back to normal.”

The therapist also worked with his parents, telling them they had failed by allowing the “gay agenda” to threaten their family and “let the devil get into the house.”

Lopez-Galloway, who now runs the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, a nonprofit that connects survivors of the practice, recalls frustration and shame spilling into screaming matches that tore his family apart. “My parents were miserable, I was miserable, and we would just take it out on each other,” he says. “I went to [my therapist] for six months, and he just abused me and made life worse. It pushed me deeper into the closet and made me anxious and depressed.”

Curtis Lopez-Galloway as a teenager. Courtesy of Lopez-Galloway.

“[My therapist] would use therapeutic ideas but twist them in a way that was trying to change sexuality. … He would try to manipulate me in that sort of way and really broke me down as a person,” says Lopez-Galloway.

We reached out to the center Lopez-Galloway went to for treatment but they did not respond to a request for comment. Lopez-Galloway says his parents now acknowledge the harm the therapy caused, and he says their relationship has improved.

Life After Conversion Therapy

For many survivors of conversion therapy, the trauma can last a lifetime.

Even 21 years later, Nieves still gets triggered. He dropped out of college during his last semester of counseling school because the practices were too similar to those manipulated and weaponized by his therapist. “The hardest part was fighting … to no longer be suicidal every single day,” he says. “I would say that’s the hardest part. … It’s the suicidality that you fight with once it’s over.”

Nieves and Moore have both found support in Lopez-Galloway’s survivor network, where they meet weekly and heal together in community. Sakler has found healing in therapy for PTSD, and has found acceptance with her wife and her queer community in Sacramento, California.

Despite this, the trauma often requires undoing self-hatred and discovering self-worth.

“[We’re] constantly saying, ‘We don’t know who we are,’” Nieves says. “We don’t know how to enjoy life. We don’t know what the meaning of life is. We’re like The Walking Dead. Because just like how you break a horse, they broke our spirits. They told us everything about us was wrong and we needed to conform. But no matter what we did, we couldn’t conform.”

Even with these survivors’ experiences, along with countless testimonies from other Americans over decades, the Supreme Court looks poised to overturn Colorado’s ban, with multiple justices describing it as “viewpoint discrimination.”

Nieves strongly disagrees and advises kids who are experiencing conversion therapy right now to stay strong and ask for help when possible. “This may very well be the most difficult time of your life. For many of you, it’s going to feel like a living hell, and you may even pray for death every night. I know this, because this is how [I] felt too,” he says. “Often, [conversion therapists] break other laws. If you think someone might be breaking the law during your conversion therapy, please seek out a trusted adult and let them know,” he says.

Above all, Nieves tells kids to push through no matter what. “It can and will get better if you promise yourself that you deserve authentic joy, free of lies and coercion. Community is out there waiting for you, if you can just hold on for one more day, one more hour, or even just for one more minute.”

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Google Sends Parents of LGBTQ Kids to Conversion Therapy Websites. Why?

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/google-sends-parents-of-lgbtq-kids

We asked Americans to Google five queries looking for resources for LGBTQ people who are struggling. Far-right religious groups dominated the results.

Sam Donndelinger
Aug 30, 2025

Google Sends Parents of LGBTQ Kids to Conversion Therapy Websites. Why?

We asked Americans to Google five queries looking for resources for LGBTQ people who are struggling. Far-right religious groups dominated the results.

Sam Donndelinger
Aug 30, 2025

Design by Sam Donndelinger. Google logo is a trademark of Google LLC and this image is not endorsed by or affiliated with Google in any way.

Google is the most powerful search engine in the world, commanding nearly 90% of the global search engine market and generating over $348 billion in revenue last year. Over half of Americans say they trust Google more than their formal education.

But how does Google’s algorithm decide which results show up? And how do these results influence LGBTQ kids, their parents and Americans at large who are searching for help?

Uncloseted Media asked five Americans from around the country to Google five common queries related to LGBTQ identity, religion and parenting.

The results were alarming and raised an urgent question: With nearly 40% of LGBTQ youth seriously considering suicide just last year, what happens when a queer teen or the parent of a gay kid in crisis turns to Google?

Photos courtesy of participants Mark Just, Genna and Melanie Brown, April Samberg, Tommy O’Neil. Photo of Genna and Melanie by Kaoly Gutteriez.

“I’m Christian, my daughter is a lesbian,” Melanie Brown, a Southern Baptist from High Point, North Carolina, types into Google.

When Brown presses enter, Bible Bulletin Board comes up as the third result, with the suggestion of “offering hope for change,” and “lead[ing] the way to the alternative to homosexuality.” It goes on to explain that “homosexuality is contrary to God’s Word. It is sin and as always results in sin’s destructive effects on the individual and on those close to them.”

In the living room, Brown’s 15-year-old daughter Genna, with her dog on her lap, Googles “accurate information on gay kids and what to do.”

 

Focus on the Family (FOTF) is the first result. She clicks the link and lands on the platform of a hyper-religious organization known for promoting conversion therapy and labeling her sexuality as sinful.

The site, which presents itself as a reputable religious source, features a tab titled “Understanding Homosexuality” and a section under their resources for “Homosexuality.” It states: “[FOTF] is committed to upholding God’s design for the expression of human sexuality: a husband and wife in a marriage.”

It offers suggested reading on “redemption” from a gay lifestyle, along with 11 counseling resources aimed at changing sexual orientation, including The Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, which guarantees “professional assistance … for persons who experience unwanted homosexual attractions.”

The language is intentionally padded, which means Genna and her mom—and many of the other millions of Christian parents of queer kids—may never know that Google led them to a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group. FOTF is known for its long-standing opposition to LGBTQ rights, for spreading anti-LGBTQ disinformation and for framing homosexuality and transgender identity as sinful and disordered.

Screenshot courtesy of Genna Brown. Photo by Kaoly Gutierrez.

In South Boston, Virginia, Tommy O’Neil Googles, “My daughter just came out as trans and I’m a Christian.” As a father of two, he wants what’s best for his kids. According to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Google’s second result, O’Neil should recognize that God doesn’t make mistakes when assigning sex and give sympathy for those who are indoctrinated in the “transgender cult.”

What O’Neil might not know is that this seminary made the list of Worst Campuses for LGBTQ students. And in 2016, it was granted an exemption to Title IX, allowing it to discriminate against LGBTQ students for religious reasons.

Thousands of miles away in Anchorage, Alaska, 38-year-old bisexual woman April Samberg Googles, “I am bisexual and have a husband who is Christian, am I going to hell?”

The third result is once again an article by FOTF that tells April that “same-sex-attracted strugglers” and “transgender and homosexual lust and behavior are wrong.”

In Cincinnati, 44-year-old Mark Just Googles, “accurate information on homosexual kids and what to do.” FOTF is the top search result.

“I don’t feel good about it,” Just told Uncloseted Media. “It’s disturbing because if there are people out there who want to accept and understand their children or loved ones, this is what they’re being pointed to.”

“[I feel] fear for the queer kids with Christian parents who will be seeing that and thinking it’s good advice, and sorrow for the kids with parents who already have,” says Genna Brown, who was a “self-loathing, suicidal kid” who thought God would punish her for being gay before she came out to her now accepting parents. “It’s pretty awful that this is what’s being pushed for advice. This has no doubt harmed people.”

Uncloseted Media also asked folks in Taiwan, Lebanon, China, Hong Kong, Canada and India to Google similar queries. All of them had FOTF turn up as a top search result.

Why Does Google Allow This?

Google, like other search engines, compiles information and directs users to various websites by referencing the titles of web pages that it judges to be most reflective of what was searched.

“Google’s algorithm is notoriously a black box,” says Jesse Ringer, founder of Method and Metric, a search engine optimization (SEO) growth company. “That’s intentional to keep their competitive advantage.”

What we do know is that Google ranks search results by first crawling the web with an automated program called “spiders” to follow links from page to page and collect data.

It uses text matching to identify documents that it thinks are relevant to a query and then ranks them based on a combination of popularity, freshness, location and previous links clicked.

But for people searching for reliable information, its process can be problematic.

“Google doesn’t rank based on accuracy, but on popularity and query matching,” says Dirk Lewandowski, professor of information research and retrieval at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. “This is based on clicks and a network of how many other links are directed to this website. … Of course, users click what is shown in the first position. So we have kind of a rich get richer.”

How to Get a High Ranking

As websites with the highest rankings continue to receive more clicks, websites like FOTF can also employ other tactics to keep their prominent placement.

Backlinking—the process of having other web pages hyperlink back to your site—is one of the ways to maintain your high ranking.

“Backlinks are a big part of popularity. So the relationship between other websites linking to this source is a big part of Google’s algorithm,” says Ringer. “There are SEO businesses that build link farms so that the content of their clients can go higher. They create a network effect and they link to each other. It is not unreasonable to think that [FOTF] has hired either an SEO person or they’ve hired an external agency to contribute to that.”

According to Francesca Tripodi, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, ranking can also be gamed by matching keywords to content. Tripodi looked at the metadata of progressive and conservative companies and found that conservative content creators “are much better at doing this.”

“They are savvy at creating new sets of words and tagging their content with them,” she says. “That’s not something I’m seeing with progressive content creators.”

Tripodi says that not only does conservatism thrive online, it might be the only perspective returned.

“They are well-funded companies with large production budgets and effective digital marketing teams,” she wrote in a 2019 testimony about conservatism and Google searches. “This is why when you search for liberal phrases like ‘gender identity’ or ‘social justice’ the top returns … are conservative content creators.”

Google declined to speak on record with Uncloseted Media for this story.

In an email, a spokesperson said: “Like any search engine, Google indexes the content that’s available on the open web, relying on systems like keyword matching to surface relevant results. We are largely guided by local law when it comes to removing pages from search results.”

What If It’s Harmful or Illegal?

The United States notoriously protects harmful or misleading content—including anti-LGBTQ hate speech—under the First Amendment.

“The situation in [other countries] is a bit different than in America,” Lewandowski says. “For instance, Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. So Google bans these sites, but they don’t ban them in the U.S.”

Section 230 of the U.S. law protects Americans’ freedom of expression online by implying that we should all be responsible for our own actions and statements on the internet. This law largely takes legal pressure off of Google.

And in 2003, an Oklahoma court ruled that Google’s rankings are subjective opinions and thus constitutionally protected.

Google’s policies for tamping down on harmful content “don’t apply to web results.” Thus, there is little moderation on the web pages that pop up for Americans who use the search engine.

The spokesperson for Google says that “[they] hold themselves to a high standard when it comes to legal requirements to remove pages from Google search results” and that “they don’t remove web results except for child sexual abuse, highly personal information, spam, site owner requests, and valid legal requests.”

But according to the company, “determining whether content is illegal is not always a determination that Google is equipped to make.”

Tripodi says this might be why groups like FOTF are still showing up, even though conversion therapy is illegal in 23 states. She says these groups may have found a loophole in Google’s policy by “tricking” the search engine into thinking they are providing “resources” and not simply a recommendation for conversion therapy.

What Can Google Do to Fix This?

“Google has a responsibility for what is coming up in their results because people trust [them],” says Lewandowski. “They think something is correct or accurate because it is number one in Google.”

Fifteen-year-old Genna Brown is one of the 85% of Americans who feel this way, according to a 2025 study.

“Isn’t the first result typically ranked most credible?” she says. “Because I typically trust the first result more.”

“It’s pretty concerning what comes up when you search for these things,” Ringer says. “There needs to be more done to educate the people who are doing the searches on understanding news and information.”

But vulnerable groups, like LGBTQ kids who are living in households where they are told they are going to hell and parents who are often confused and in crisis themselves, are being led by Google’s algorithm to believe that being queer is wrong.

“1000% yes, these results concern me,” says Genna Brown. “We’re talking about organizations that promote practices like conversion therapy, which is insane. … I wish there was some disclaimer. Like, ‘Google has determined this to be a subjective query. As such, we can’t verify the following results. Proceed with caution.’”

Tripodi says she thinks consumers are responsible for about 20% of the burden by researching and verifying the sources they learn from. But she agrees with Brown in that Google carries an ethical responsibility for the content it chooses to rank and promote.

“As a global corporation that gobbles up all other possibilities for information, Google has a responsibility to ensure that its content is accurate and not harmful,” Tripodi says. “[It’s their job] to ensure that the information that they surface is accurate and reliable because we know people trust that information.”

Uncloseted Media reached out to Focus on the Family, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Bible Bulletin Board. They did not respond to our request for comment.

Additional reporting by Sophie Holland and Spencer Macnaughton.

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