Asshole for Jesus, Pat Robertson, had some choice words for the distraught mother of a lesbian teenager: put your kid in a Christian "re-education" camp.
Terry Meeuwsen: "I've been having issues with my daughter lately. She's always been a good Christian and regularly attended church and gone on mission trips with her youth group, but recently she "came out of the closet" and introduced me to her "girlfriend." I've tried to talk her out of it, but she simply refuses to give up the LGBT lifestyle. What should I do?" — LILLIAN.
Pat Robertson: I tell you, you ought to pray very hard and just let her know you don't approve of it and let her know she's not following the commands of the Lord, and just pray that God will straighten her out. It may be a phase she's going through. I mean, a little teenage girl doesn’t know what dress she’s supposed to wear much less what kind of sex she’s supposed to be.
Meeuwsen: Of course there's so much pressure in the culture today.
Robertson: There's so much pressure. There’s so much lesbian stuff, I mean, lesbian this, lesbian the other, so much homosexual that the media is pushing this as hard as they can possibly push it. I don’t know what to do, maybe get her in a camp, a Christian camp in the summer where they are really on fire for the Lord and she'll straighten things out.
We all know the struggles of the teenage girl getting dressed in the morning: "Do I wear the polka-dot knee length or my flannel lesbian dress today?"
Christ, the stupidity burns. First of all, Pat, we aren't dealing with the question of gender identity here. We are dealing with a teenager who knows she is a lesbian. It is not all that difficult to understand that they are two entirely different circumstances.
That being said, your advice to ship this poor young woman to one of those evangelical reform schools is cruel. Much work has been done to expose the extraordinarily harmful abuse that takes place at these "camps." Much work remains to be done. They are as dangerous or perhaps even more dangerous than reparative therapy which is actively and rightfully being banned all across this country.
I know that Pat is low-hanging fruit when it comes to these issues. Of course he is batshit insane, but that doesn't mean he should be left to his own devices. When he instructs parents to do harm to their own children, he needs to be called out loudly—every single time.