The Nehor

I don’t believe you. Henry was never right. Edit: Also, who is Henry?

So if I am following correctly….. Smac strongly believes in a parent’s rights to decide what events their children will attend. Smac believes he should get a blanket veto for events in general about what events other parents will take their kids to attend because events that he will never attend might still exist and thus live rent-free in his head forever. Smac believes the rights of other parents are supreme except when Smac’s own morality determine that some events shouldn’t exist at all for the safety of the children.

There is a double standard. All those things you listed above that are heterosexual events that children often attend or participate in ARE NOT being persecuted like queer people and transgender people and crossdressers are. You act like pride parades get a pass when there is a huge media machine dedicated to not giving them a pass. To the point that transgender people are being singled out and vilified and are scared to exist in public. The double standard is the exact opposite of what you say it is and I think on some level you know this which is why you dance around and use doublespeak and obfuscation. Stop it.

Yeah, I should probably have a threesome tonight or an orgy or something as a wholesome palette cleanser after reading about all this Church-sponsored deviancy and after reading smac’s imagined lurid deviancies he and his propagandist friends cook up that he is shamelessly sharing and projecting onto other groups. Bunch of deviant weirdos.

I have no difficulty believing that the people involved in this project were that stupid. I also suspect that they were stupid enough to use child porn. Both of these seem like plausible scenarios.

They do but they do it in defiance of the text and not due to any nuanced textual reading. This reading is due to people bringing their conception of who and what God is to the text and then selectively editing it to fit with their worldview. This is helpful in resolving the inconsistencies in the Bible to the advantage of the reader but it also means the reader is unlikely to gain much from the text or understand what the original writers were actually saying.

And you still won’t define what you mean by that. In common use “sexualizing children” is a phrase used where you make children into a kind of sex object in some way. Some forms of child beauty pageants, having them dress or act provocatively, etc. This isn’t happening. A child being exposed to something sexy is not “sexualizing children”. It would be children viewing something sexually explicit or being exposed to something. I am not even conceding that that is what is happening. I think this is mostly a lot of pearl clutching. There are real sexual crimes against children. Fixating on queer people being a particularly dangerous threat is ridiculous if this actually involves worry about the safety of children. Considering the people in hysterics about this typically show indifference to school shooting, refuse to adequately fund CPS agencies, and the like I don’t believe this concern for “the children” is sincere. And of course there is the gutting of USAID which is killing over a thousand children a day and has killed hundreds of thousands of children. I don’t think this is about children. I think this is about adults being uncomfortable and not being willing to come to grips with that. And just plain old bigotry since “protect the children” has always been a cover story for bigotry. See blood libel, the Satanic panic, and the gays grooming the kids. But this time with transgender people it suddenly is actually about children in danger? Nope. People who genuinely care about children get involved in fixing the problems that are causing huge amounts of suffering for children. I don’t believe in this rhetorical smokescreen. In time it will be seen as just another foolish moral panic that people will shake their heads over and wonder how those idiots in the past could have possibly believed this tripe. Hopefully not while simultaneously talking about how the aliens on Beta Centauri are secretly eating babies and thus we should make sure that children never learn about those deviants existing. Oh, and we should fund a Death Star JUST IN CASE they get uppity.

It described teen pics only so in fairness they could have meant teenagers who are legal, meaning 18 and 19 year olds.

In addition there are many who support gay marriage and transgender people in the abstract but then fall apart when it is a child or a sibling that is queer and try to “fix” them or talk them out of it. Being fashionably open-minded in the abstract but rejecting it when it comes too close to home.

Any interaction with anything sexy anywhere will warp them forever? Oh please. So the weirdos giving their ten year old son a birthday party at Hooter’s were warping him forever? Or showing him a PG-13 movie? Being propositioned or assaulted or coerced into sex WILL do everything you said but transgender people aren’t the primary culprits in that sense. It is the cishet men doing most of that. You should go after them. Or are they not an easy enough target?

[citation needed]

Yet you insist they “sexualize children” which is a term you won’t define because it is useful rhetorically but doesn’t commonly mean what you keep trying to make it mean. Also drag reading hours are not deliberately sexualized because obviously. Also why no mention of drag kings? Boo to drag king erasure!!!!! Nope. By your weird standards any movie ot TV show with sexual innuendo would be ‘sexualizing children’. You have made this concept so broad it is useless. This is a common rhetorical trick you learned from propagandists. See also “grooming”. Bur not refute it? Do you know all this is happening or are you just guessing? They read a story about two married male penguins and this is “sexualizing children”? So mentioning marriage to a child is “sexualizing” them? Uh-oh, the church’s Primary program is GROOMING CHILDREN!!!!!!!!

Okay, so I ask why you think something is sexualizing children and you take that to mean I am a predator. You also continually misrepresent what I said throughout your response even when I said the exact opposite. You’re also denying that your responses had anything to do with what you were responding to and deliberately misunderstanding, and assume knowledge of queer culture you don’t have. And we’re also back to the generic “grooming” accusations and misuse that word yet again. And one important point. No one is scaring these kids. They are already scared. If anything we are trying to tell them things will (eventually) be okay. If your whole premise is that helping children trapped in potentially dangerous situations is grooming then you are beyond hopeless. I really hope none of your children are going through this right now. They would be scared to say anything and they would be right to be scared to do so. And we aren’t seeking these teens out. They show up on queer websites and subreddits and forums and ask or beg for help. Characterizing this as manipulation is just you being malicious and viewing us all as sexual deviants which is not surprising at all considering how you talk about us.

Yeah, and then when the minor that suddenly loses the people that are supposed to care for them and are homeless and dealing with all kinds of emotions they very often turn to drugs to cope and then using drugs is blasted as “the gay lifestyle”.

Some of those sources are years old. The word queer is still in the process of being reclaimed. A simple definition would be “not cishet”. There are some edge cases and fuzzy boundaries but I would have to start throwing around terms most people here are unfamiliar with. On the whole the word is inclusive and involves everyone within the LGBTQIA community and it is faster to say than saying “the LGBTQIA community”. There are a few groups that tried to get in and were rejected. Thinking of the semi-bisexual identity which might have been a trolling campaign and poly people who hold that poly is an identity are not included. I consider it much less important than the child’s safety and security. So if you live your entire life based around a law around sexuality you are going to talk about sex constantly? So if you followed some standard that you held as divine, let’s call it the Law of Chastity, that means you are going to talk a lot about sex? Uh-oh….. I know, you are the default. You don’t have to think about your identity because it is assumed everywhere and celebrated and expressed everywhere. Congrats on that I guess. Yet I bet your church membership and relationship to God is something you do identify with. It is not the default. Same with being a lawyer. Not the default so you have to think of it more. Nope, it is not that trivial. You throw out these inane analogies all the time and they never work. Straight people can flirt. If queer people flirt in a non-het way they get pulled over. Neither is violating the LAW of chastity but the rules aren’t the same. You keep pretending they are. You are wrong. Yes. Until the parent attempts to force that stance onto their child. Not “many years”. The Church copied its views on homosexuality from the surrounding culture with all the abuse and homophobia that included. They were dragged kicking and screaming away from the kind of alienation and othering that many faiths at the time inflicted on their queer kids. Church leaders made horrible statements about why kids were gay and what caused it and did suggest that being gay was sinful in and of itself. Then the data showed they were wrong and they slowly and reluctantly withdrew to higher ground only when they were about to be swept away. The water is still rising so it is questionable whether the current standard will hold if reality continues to make the church’s views untenable. They only taught that when they could not longer realistically get away with teaching what they previously taught. Yes they did. Did anyone ever undergo church discipline for kicking their gay kid out of the house or alienating them? They didn’t outright tell parents to do this but they didn’t counsel against it and there was no social stigma for a long time in doing it. It was just politely ignored and the child suffered. The messaging has got marginally better but many members took the old teaching in and still follow it. Some even think Church leaders are saying this stuff because they feel they have to in order to mollycoddle some members but these people know better. That you think it is all about sex. Queer people are depraved sex fiends. I mean, I am but that is just a coincidence. Many aren’t Asexual people especially. It is not just sexual boundaries that are being enforced. If someone find out their son has a crush on a girl they will probably enforce sexual boundaries but view the crush as normal and even healthy if treated in the right way. If their son has a crush on another guy RED ALERT!!!!!! We aren’t just enforcing not having sex, we are policing the desires themselves as unhealthy and should be discouraged and fixed as soon as possible. It is hilarious that the state is acting to out queer kids via mandatory reporting and you are whining about the state subverting parental rights when I suggest that state actors should not be policing kids for non gender conforming behaviors. Warning about the dangers of imaginary fascist behavior by your enemies while defending fascist behavior that supports your worldview. Yes, all that great scriptural and prophetic authority. The scriptural authority on queer issues includes such gems as the Old Testament suggesting that queer behavior makes the land ritually impure and the New Testament states that queer desire only exists in people that are actively rebelling against God. The Church doesn’t teach either of those things anymore though. And the prophetic authority in the 50s? The 80s? The early 2000s? Or now? All very different. And chopping up what I say to make rhetorical points. How juvenile and completely expected. Yet you are defending it for some reason. But it doesn’t work. Nice weasel wording. That could be harmed a lot. They can be abused a lot. I have seen the aftereffects of this kind of abuse. It is not pretty. It was the norm for kids in the Church until pretty recently. Something something about millstones and jumping into the sea…… Ummm….yes. Now you are being ambiguous again though. Do you mean talking to them about choosing not to have sex before they are ready or are you policing any same-sex behavior? You want to make it solely about sex so you can see they are ‘just being treated like a cishet child’ or something like that. Someone violating all therapeutic standards is not relevant to a discussion of whether the therapeutic standards as they stand work. If I went to a bog witch to cure my ADHD and she had me drink swamp water is that relevant to whether ADHD treatment in general is effective? No. You only want it to be relevant because you want to imagine that your swamp witch is the norm. You could, you know, check the numbers and see how many minors are actually getting gender affirming surgeries. You would even find that most such surgeries on minors are for cishet minors and elective transgender surgeries are very rare and almost exclusively to those who are 16 or 17. So why live in ignorance? Go look at the data. Or be lazy and just keep insinuating I am lying. Your choice I suppose. WRONG! Prove it. Put up or shut up. Dozens? There are literally dozens of lawsuits? There are literally dozens of malpractice lawsuits in my area right now. Medicine is fundamentally flawed!!!!!!!! I guess I will have to go back to that bog witch. Yeah, we are. Uh-huh. I don’t think you understand this case at all. It is just a rhetorical device to you I suppose. Clearly. You think that you are a literal child of an immortal anthropomorphic deity and want to police whether other people’s views conform with observable reality? Really? Lots of people humor you in that belief and just go along with it to get along. It seems like you are not capable of returning the favor. Also quit picking on all the cute puppyboys. They didn’t do anything to deserve this. The original teachings or the ones that the philosophies of men changed so that we no longer teach that being gay is inherently sinful and now only behavior is a sin? A guy crossdressing is highly sexualized behavior? Ummmmm……you’re weird. Is everything about sex with you? I mean, I’m a pervert but you are in a league of your own if seeing a guy in a dress is making you think sexy thoughts. And you imagine that seeing that makes prepubescent kids think about sex? That is REALLY WEIRD. Temporarily, it is unlikely to last. Enjoy it while you can I suppose. You mean like your histrionics about drag queens? However, as I have said the reality is that state actors are being required by law to monitor minor children for any non gender conforming behavior and are required by law to report it to the parents. You are flipping it around and suggesting that state actors NOT surveilling children is somehow deeply creepy. It is a cute rhetorical trick to play the victim while actually being the…… Couldn’t have said it better myself. Yeah, abuse is bad. Again, this is about forcing people to report and police children’s behavior. It has changed since then. In this context meaning that you fully support state actors actively seeking to monitor children for even innocuous non-gender conforming behavior and reporting it to parents and that failure to do so is criminal behavior. Law enforcement is unlikely to be able to do anything and reporting will likely make the matter worse for the queer kid. So minors who are terrified because they realize they are queer in some way and know their parents will not accept them should be just left alone to hide and suffer. Got it. No giving hope that it will get better or encouragement to do what you have to do to survive. You are worried about the parents who have most of the power in that relationship. I am worried about the kids who are nearly powerless and feel alone and scared and trapped and hopeless. No one has to scare them. Yet they are. Routinely. It is pretty much standard. Which I said after that but your need to splice everything up leads to such inane commentary. Yep, all those support hotlines are wrongful and deeply creepy. Being accepting of kids in online spaces that are scared and need reassurance that life will not always be this hard should be left to twist in the wind lest we damage the (clearly very healthy) parent-child relationship. I am going to live in the world where obvious cause and effect don’t need to be proven. I was working with kids who had been removed from the care of their parents due to abuse or negligence. I sometimes advocated for the parent to regain custory and sometimes advocated for parents to permanently lose their rights so yeah, I guess you could say I subverted parent-child relationships. Sometimes that volunteer work made it hard to sleep at night but not because of that part of it. So people are taking puberty blockers and hormones and having elective surgery for the glory of the cause? And to spite people? I am kind of scared of you now. You think this is how people think? Is this how you think? Oh, nice. The old disproven the gays are converting our children so they can have sex with them rebranded. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is pseudoscience. It is based entirely on surveying the parents of transgender children who answered that the whole transgender thing came out of nowhere and that it must be those new kids the child is hanging out with. Everything was fine before they showed up. When you ask the actual transgender person they almost always talk about dysphoria lasting for years and finally having the courage to open up about it. So ROGD is based on observers guessing what is going on in someone else’s head. It is junk science. And we are going to trust Grok, the AI owned by a guy who is in an ongoing feud with his transgender daughter…..uh huh. Sure Jan. Do you get turned on by Drag Queen Story Hour where a crossdresser reads a cute children’s story? What do you think is going on in the heads of children in that setting that would warp them? How does this sexualize the children? You are just throwing around the word because you happen to think crossdressing is deeply deviant. Children really don’t. I have come to the conclusion that this whole “the gays are sexualizing our children” is more about the parents being uncomfortable with things and the children are fine and don’t think any of it is sexual in any way. And want teachers to monitor the kids for deviant behavior! Which is really what you are defending but you won’t say that because it sounds horrible. Because it is horrible and creepy and dehumanizing in a way that drag queens aren’t. The scriptures do warn about vain repetitions. Be careful. Wouldn’t want you to start sinning. That is a really badly worded question and the kind AI will flub. Which it did. Congrats. And already scared kids should not be supported. Parents should be allowed to isolate them if that is their desire. This is not at all creepy and disturbing and my repeating this line endlessly is winning this discussion in so many ways. Doubt it. So in an article on bisexuality you reached the conclusion that social and cultural factors shift sexuality based on…..what? Your intuition? The intuition of a cishet guy who stated earlier that you have never ever ever ever been attracted to another guy but somehow your intuition is going to suss out what impacts sexual fluidity when you say you have never experienced it. Well, here I am a bit of a subject matter expert. My sexuality can be fluid. I experience something called the bi-cycle. Many bisexual women experience the same thing. It is where your attractions shift over time for no discernible reason. It is annoying. Thankfully mine settled down most of the time to somewhere in the middle. For a time I would really be attracted to women for a while with only marginal attraction to men and then it would reverse. This is what that study is describing. If there was a simple intuitive way to calm down or influence this cycle I think we would have figured it out by now. The only thing a lot of bisexual people agree on that self-acceptance tends to calm the cycle down. Not always, but often. Oh, so it the queer equivalent of all those insane projections of China’s economic growth. ”It is growing really fast now and if that continues indefinitely they will rule the world” When anyone who understood the situation would tell you that is not how modernizing economies work. The statistics aren’t in dispute? Which ones? The real ones or the projected ones? Only Alex “they’re turning the frogs gay” Jones thinks this plan for queer world domination is viable. I guess the “Islam is outbreeding us” conspiracy got dull and now somehow the queers are infecting us is coming back? How exciting and original. No, not really. It is standard “just asking questions” which have been answered repeatedly and pretending that there are no answers. Standard right-wing schtick. It is ironic to see a cishet white guy telling queer people that “it is not always about you”. We know that already. It is almost always about heteronormativity. It is everywhere in our culture and is celebrated and accepted without anyone consciously trying to do so. That is why your claims that queer representation in media is so intrusive are hilarious to us. It is the majority that can’t handle it not always being about them. Then they project it onto us. le sigh

I strongly believed that it was a choice when I was a teen. It made perfect sense. I had good attractions and I had bad attractions and I was supposed to choose the right (i.e. the girl). I assumed all “straight” guys like me secretly had crushes on other guys and we were all just politely pretending we weren’t and the homophobic banter was a way to let off steam. When I found out that straight people didn’t feel that way my mind was blown. I have a private theory that the whole ‘being gay is a choice’ thing was created by closeted bi/pan people who viewed the conflict as a kind of internal spiritual warfare the way I did. Now I am just baffled as to why so many straight people believed it. Not directly. It does allow therapists to try to correct sexual orientation through therapy though it will probably not be a practice that is endorsed by agencies that license therapists. I am betting some members will use this for themselves or for their children if they feel desperate or scared or angry or whatever.

What purpose do you even serve in this situation if you want AI to do everything and then someone else to check the work? Also LOL at the idea that using AI will eliminate bias. Do you know how AI works at all?

No idea. They failed though. I mean, they didn’t even have a single combat-ready chariot.

It is not at all a nebulous concept. This is a stupid tangent. You are acting as if this is all about sexual conduct. As if the Church or your ideology teaches that queer kids and non-queer kids are being treated the same. They are not. Which leads to the question of why so many want government to enforce their standards for them. Sounds pretty authoritarian. Which is not what the Church wants or teaches. At least not in the same way they seek to curtail sexual behavior in cishet kids. It is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Cishet kids generally aren’t afraid their parents will throw them out or disown them for having a crush on someone. Reducing everything to sex acts is weird and is just a rhetorical device you regularly use to pretend you are being evenhanded on some non-existent idealized equal playing field that never existed and you know it doesn’t actually exist. LOL Which is not what is being achieved. So if the methods don’t accomplish the goal. They aren’t talking about it but it very much is being glossed over and ignored which is the same thing as condoning it. No, and you know I wasn’t and we aren’t talking about “talk therapy” about not having sex. We are talking about “talk therapy” to “fix” someone’s sexual orientation. Again you are obsessed with actual sexual behavior and not conversion therapy. Of course it is doable. It is just very often harmful. Which is where the abuse happens which you dismiss. The abuse is a natural byproduct of what you want to do. Pretending that it doesn’t exist is just willful ignorance. Policies impact the real world, not your imagined ideal one where abuse wouldn’t happen for some reason. Your feelings about it aren’t really a priimary concern. You keep pretending this isn’t what it is. Talk therapy for the purpose of conversion of someone’s sexual orientation. You are being your nebbish little self and pretending this is some idealized talk therapy that is intrinsically harmless by trying to make this about talk therapy in general being harmless. Some of what is called talk therapy is verbal abuse. Deal with it. Ah, whataboutism. So now talk therapy is harmful but only if it isn’t conversion therapy. And some propaganda. How typical. No, the general consensus is to limit surgical interventions regarding minors until they are of age. Exceptions exist due to extreme distress but they are rare. Use of puberty blockers are sometimes used in cases where dysphoria is acute. He was convicted of medical malpractice for what he did. He didn’t follow approved practices. He wasn’t trained to treat transgender patients. This is akin to banning heart surgeries because one rogue doctor recommended a patient have unnecessary surgery. This kind of thing only works against transgender people because of transphobia. If you tried to make this argument about any other kind of medical care being too dangerous because the doctor might ignore medical standards you would be laughed out of the building. And on some level you know that but choose to believe this spurious argument anyways. And the doctor was punished for it. Hopefully severely. You are pretending a criminal doctor is the norm. And I see a world of difference between a doctor prescribing pain medication for a patient who is suffering and a doctor using their license to create opioid prescriptions that are intended for sale. Also if telling a child their dysphoria is real and there are things they can do to alleviate is somehow luring them away from their religious beliefs maybe the religious beliefs ARE the problem. You’re assuming criminal medical personnel are the norm in gender-affirming healthcare. It is a giant strawman and you are lovingly stuffing it and propping it up. Sexualizing children? So another assumption that it is always about sex acts and sexual desirabllity. And we are supposed to be the perverts? Really? You’re wrong. Nope. Ah yes, and the human impact on climate change is a highly contested area of science. That the small percentage opposed to it (often funded by political groups) is very loud doesn’t mean there is no consensus. Enjoy your little bubble of copium. And by soberness and moderation you mean banning everything and making sure trans kids are alone, afraid, and can’t access any help because there is a small chance the help might hurt them or a doctor might violate standards of care and give improper treatment. Again, no other field of medicine is held to this insane standard. Hardly soberness and moderation. You want it to be shut down. All of it. This isn’t a secret. Of course gender affirming care for minors that is invasive is rare. Very rare. Yet you and your propaganda fixate on it to the point you think it is a norm. You are unfamiliar with what you are talking about. You are ignorant of what gender affirming care involves. You don’t know what LDS views have to do with Idaho lawmaking. Uh-huh. You are being deliberately dense again. They were never “for” the “trans” movement whatever that is. I love how not behaving in a ‘correctly gendered way’ is considered to be a crucial element of a child’s welfare. And it is so vague that it leads to the hysteria we already see of “transverstigation” where cis women are accused of being transgender because they don’t look female enough in the eyes of bigots. No, wait, I meant I hate it. Also again, this enables abusive parents. Most such laws have exceptions to reporting when there is a risk of danger to the child. These kinds of laws have been tried before. It results in suicide hotlines having to hang up on minors that call in unless they get parental approval. Definitely don’t trust their parents. I mean, if they could realistically trust their parents with their queer identity they should. Many try even when they shouldn’t. I have a younger friend in their early 20s going to college and living with parents. They realized over several years they were non-binary and genderfluid. They don’t want any surgery or hormones. They shared this with parents. They were verbally and emotionally abused and physically threatened. They wisely walked it back and claimed they were depressed that day and didn’t mean it. Now they are cutting short their educational goals to get economic independence more quickly. So they are ducking their head down, lying like they have to in order to survive, and are planning to get out from under their parents asap. That is the same advice I would have given them. This doesn’t always work. There is a reason a lot of queer kids are homeless. Many are physically abused by parents. That friend is relatively well off. He isn’t still a minor so they are unlikely to try to force my friend into some kind of program though his dad was reportedly looking for something in their local church. Some in evangelical homes get exorcisms or other ‘treatment’ options. Abusing kids is even more problematic and the idea that somehow it is the state alienating the parents is insane. The parents are alienating themselves. Their kids learn they can’t trust their parents early. So we are going to pretend that the majority religion in Idaho is somehow not (directly or indirectly) leading politicians to vote this way. Okay, I am going to live in the real world. You enjoy your fantasy realm You’re wrong. DEAD WRONG. Supportive parents are like crack to queer people who don’t have them. They love them. You’re just eating up propaganda and wanting to believe it is true. Children love their parents. Even when they shouldn’t. I used to volunteer in child services. It is weird. It is counterintuitive but that is how it works. What is the supposed point of this imagined ideology? Why do their want to alienate kids from their parents? What is the goal? Think your conspiracy theory through and work through human motivations that would lead people to act the way they do. Not conspiracy minded delusions that they are all depraved and are serving Satan or the liberal agenda or whatever is being called ultimate evil these days. These are humans. People. With real motivations and desires. They aren’t doing this for some vague ideology or because they like being persecuted and marginalized. I have been told I am attracted to men because I am mad at my parents or because I think it wins me clout or prestige or that I am lauded for it. None of that happened. I didn’t make out with other guys because I wanted to make a used jet-ski salesman in HogPiss Alabama angry that I exist. They were never for “trans” ideology whatever that means. An unsubstantiated charge that is assumed to be true because all non cishet people are assumed to be child predators. This despite the evidence that in our society on a per capita basis pedophile predators are most likely to be cishet white men. And the people in power are the ones sexualizing children and who is in power? Stop blaming marginalized communities with limited power for pervasive social problems. This is just blood libel style anti-semitism with a new coat of paint. Parents are not angels sent from heaven with a divine mandate. Of course this is the opposite of what is happening. In what I pointed out the organs of the state are being used to “out” marginalized kids to their parents. Yet somehow the other side that thinks this is bad is somehow authoritarian and is subverting the state. LDS can’t pretend to be a marginalized and persecuted minority in Idaho where this law passed with veto proof majorities in both houses of the state legislature. They have the power and the duty to use that power responsibly yet when I point out that this is government overreach you retreat to the idea that those in power are under supreme threat from literal children who aren’t being reported on for any kind of gender nonconforming behavior. Thanks you for critiquing the children trying to get out of abusive situations and those worried about their safety for not being sufficiently virtuous examples to win you over. As if that were possible. It is not and we know it so why try? This would be the one part of queer focused research you would accept and then completely misunderstand. Did you miss the part where we know of no way to influence that sexual fluidity? That talk therapy and other more coercive methods have universally failed to force such fluidity in a desired direction? Even when you hit on something true you misunderstand it and pervert it to match your goals.

The desire for the child to not be queer. Being willing to scare the child into hiding their queerness. Being willing to abuse the child to make the “problem” go away. This isn’t rare. It is disturbingly common. Yes, because this scenario you present is incredible naive and unrealistic. In your view the child decides they wants help dealing with their queerness and somehow voluntarily goes to a therapist and gets help on their own. No, the parents are paying for it. The parents are probably pressuring the child to get this “help” and choosing a therapist that will work to “fix” their child if that is what the parents want. The child isn’t an empowered independent part of the process. They are along for the ride. Pretending it is always harmless because it is ‘just talk’ is ridiculous. Imagine someone hauling you into an office with a therapist who wants to “help” you stop being LDS and just being expected to continue doing that until you are “fixed”. We don’t have a broad spectrum of equally valid viewpoints. We have a general professional consensus on these issues. We know that talk therapy and all other kinds of therapies DO NOT WORK in changing someone’s sexual orientation. Yet some people want to do it anyways. It is intrusive and creepy to do this to kids. Unfortunately LDS have a continuing history of doing this to the queer kids in their midst. Look at the exciting new law in Idaho requiring that teachers and therapists and other mandatory reporters are now required by law to report to parents any ‘gender non-conforming behavior’ to the parents. No exceptions if it is suspected that will put the child in danger. No clear definition of what that behavior even is. It is a clear shot fired telling trans kids that they had better keep their heads down and they must TRUST NO ONE. This is what the church wants. They want queer kids to be afraid and ashamed and closeted. They want them to stop being disruptive by existing. And of course this will scoop up a lot of cis kids with no desire to transition and no dysphoria who just don’t neatly fit into their assigned gender box. They also need to be “fixed”. If the Church leadership deeply cares about the health, emotional wellbeing, and safety of queer kids in the church they have done a terrible job of passing this message onto their membership because they are legislating those kids into the closet and creating a surveillance state to make sure no one steps out of line. This isn’t a mistake or unintended consequences. This is the goal.

I think you are ascribing higher evidentiary value than the facts allow. A better analogous situation would be if Joseph Smith was in a dispute over land or something and there is a missing contract. The contract that spells out the original agreement was not in English. So Joseph Smith shows up in court and has family and friends as witnesses that say they saw the original contract though they couldn’t read it but it looked authentic to them. Then Joseph Smith produces a purported translation of the contract that he made despite not being familiar with the original language. Also Joseph Smith can’t produce the original contract for the court either. Do you think the translated contract would be accepted by the court as authentic? I don’t. If Joseph claimed the original was taken by an angel into heaven I think the evidentiary value would plummet even further.

Aversion therapy targeted at gay people is a form of conversion therapy. I doubt you meant to suggest otherwise but it is a subgroup and not something distinct from it. While there is some distinction between the Church and BYU there is a difference between a school doing a normal school thing like a business competition and a church school doing studies to “cure” sinful desires. One is just normal operation and the other is clearly aligned with the Church’s goals specifically.

You can stop pretending and just genuinely like them now. If you genuinely don’t like them then….ummmm…..what is wrong with you?

Sort of, but not due to age-related issues. Most die in office. A few were excommunicated. Moses Thatcher is a weird outlier. He refused to sign a political manifesto requiring that church leaders seek approval before seeking or taking any political office. He saw this as violating the church’s pledge of political neutrality. He was removed from the Quorum of the Twelve but he remained an apostle and continued to serve in other areas of the church. You could argue there were other apostles that stepped down from their office but these were usually the apostles that were ordained but never added to the Quorum of the Twelve.

It depends. For the workaholics it would be a punishment.