Show Notes
Tim Schrader Rodriguez spent eight years trying to "pray out the gay". He modulated his voice. He stopped listening to music with female lead singers. He sat weekly with a therapist who watched him come apart — and said nothing.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that therapists have a First Amendment right to pursue conversion therapy with their patients, upending a Colorado ban on the practice.
This isn't history, nor is it a Colorado-only case. Bans that advocates spent years winning in state after state will unravel.
The number of LGBTQ youth being engaged in conversion practices nearly doubled in the last year alone — from 10 to 20 percent.
What Tim's story makes clear is how ordinary this harm looks from the outside. It's not electroshock. It's not boot camps. It's a weekly therapy appointment. It's a trusted relationship. It's the promise that if you pray hard enough and want it badly enough, God will change you.
And when it doesn't work, the program tells you that's your fault too.
Amanda Henderson talks with Tim this week about what eight years inside that world actually felt like — and what it means that the one protected space survivors thought they still had is now gone.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Complexified
Religion has always been part of American politics.
Televangelist Jim Bakker is dead at 86. And whatever else can be said about him, he was a true American original.
Soldiers are trained for physical combat. But war also confronts them with death, killing, grief, guilt and questions of meaning.
Across YouTube, podcasts and church conferences, a new group of pastors and influencers is promoting an openly racist and baldly antisemitic vision of Christian America. They present themselves not as extremists, but as respectable religious leaders defending truths that others are afraid to say.
Republican leaders across Texas are repeatedly warning that Sharia is an urgent threat to the state- making it a rallying cry as we head into the midterm elections. The Muslim community, who has long stayed quiet, is now organizing and speaking out.