Stop Building Glass Tombs

On Hidden Lives, Holy Weeks, and a Pastoral Word To Everyone Still Sealed Inside

This is the Holy Week nobody in MAGA wanted.

Two stories broke within forty-eight hours of each other, and together they cracked something open that all the legislation in the world isn’t going to reseal.

1. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 8–1 to gut state bans on conversion therapy for minors, handing the religious right a permission slip to psychologically torment LGBTQ+ kids in the name of Jesus.

2. The husband of one of MAGA’s most prominent anti-trans crusaders was exposed for allegedly spending over $25,000 messaging fetish models, cross-dressing, and writing to one of them: “You turn me into a girl... should I put on leggings?”

If you think those two stories are unrelated, stay with me.

First, I want to clearly say that I am not here to mock Bryon Noem. He should have and feel the freedom to pursue his sexual interests, without fear or shame, as long as there is mutual consent and lack of harm. What I’m about to say is not about cruelty but clarity.

This moment is a mirror. And when the mirror gets held up this close, at this volume, during Holy Week of all weeks, a pastor who’s paying attention doesn’t get to look away.

So. Let’s talk about the glass tomb that Bryon, and sooo many others, are trying to hide within.

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The Supreme Court Just Gave the Church a Hammer to Hit Kids With

This week, on March 31, 2026 (which is Holy Tuesday, for those keeping liturgical score) the Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar to effectively gut Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. The majority found that because conversion therapy involves talk—words, pressure, prayer, manipulation—it is protected speech under the First Amendment. The state cannot regulate it as healthcare. The lone dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who argued that states absolutely should be able to protect children from harmful practices. Eight justices disagreed.

Eight.

Every major medical and mental health organization—the APA, the AMA, the AAP—has already concluded that conversion therapy is both ineffective and harmful. The ruling means that in more than twenty states where similar bans exist, those protections are now dangling by a thread.

And here is what the research says about what we just greenlit:

LGBTQ+ young people who are subjected to conversion therapy are three times more likely to attempt suicide.

The Trevor Project’s 2024 National Survey found that 39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered suicide in the past year, including 46% of transgender and nonbinary youth. A 2024 Stanford Medicine study confirmed conversion practices are directly linked to depression, PTSD, and suicidality.

We didn’t protect free speech this week.

We endangered children … during Holy Week.

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The Glass Tomb

The same week, this week, the Daily Mail published a bombshell: Bryon Noem, husband of former DHS Secretary and MAGA stalwart Kristi Noem, had allegedly been living a secret double life, cross-dressing and messaging sex workers who specialize in the “bimbofication” fetish. He reportedly sent hundreds of messages, spent over $25,000, and in one exchange told a performer: “You turn me into a girl.”

When reached for comment, he did not deny it.

His wife—the same woman who spent years making political hay out of attacking transgender people, drag queens, and gender nonconformity—said the family was “blindsided.”

If I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t believe that she was.

But if I’m being pastoral, I have sympathy (whether she was blindsided this week, or some other week long ago), because that is exactly how the glass tomb works.

The glass tomb is not like an ordinary closet in which many LGBTQ hide.

The glass tomb is not sealed or opaque.

The people closest to it can often see something—they just don’t say anything, or they explain it away, or they throw themselves deeper into the culture war as a kind of penance-by-proxy. The person inside can see out, too. They can see every queer kid they’re targeting. They know. On some level, they always know.

And that knowing … that unbearable, unprocessed knowing … is exactly what converts into cruelty.

This is what happens when MAGA, Conservatives, and Evangelicals force their LGBTQ+ members into hiding. That deep repression eventually leads to the oppression of others, an act of avoidance and self-hatred.

From their glass tomb, they harm others … and themselves.

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The Pattern Is Not a Coincidence

Let’s be honest about what this week’s news is part of.

It’s no anomaly. It’s a pattern.

• Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, one of MAGA’s most virulently anti-LGBTQ+ power brokers, was sued for allegedly groping a male campaign staffer.

• Larry Craig, the Idaho senator who co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport men’s restroom.

• Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was involved in a same-sex encounter while her husband called for banning LGBTQ+ education.

• The Advocate has documented at least 18 anti-gay political and religious leaders who were later exposed as gay or bisexual themselves.

The list is not short.
The list is not new.
The list is not getting shorter.

And I want to tell you something about that list that doesn’t get said enough:

It is not evidence of gay people being bad. It is evidence of suppression being catastrophic.

Here’s what the statistics nobody in the evangelical pew wants to read actually say: according to Gallup’s 2024 data, 14.2% of Millennials and over 22% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+. These people are in your churches. They are in your political parties. They are in your families.

Not former Christians. Christians. Active, church-going, Bible-reading people.

According to PRRI data, only 6% of LGBT Americans identify as white evangelical Protestant, not because queer people don’t grow up evangelical, but because the church has made it agonizing to stay in the church when one is queer.

So you either leave your faith, or you go into hiding.

You don’t create glass tombs by accident.

You build them, board by board, sermon by sermon, vote by vote.

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The Theology of Self-Hatred

I spent years inside a version of faith that told me, told us, that certain parts of ourselves were broken. That desire itself was the disease. That the cure was suppression, prayer, accountability groups, and if all else failed, a counselor who would “speak truth” to your “unwanted attractions.”

That is what conversion therapy actually is.

It is not a healing. It is a hopeless road of ineffective self-humiliation that changes nothing.

Conversation therapy doesn’t change who you are. You cannot change your sexuality.

The research has been conclusive for decades.

What trying to change your God-given sexual wiring does do is teach you to hate who you are more efficiently. And when you get very good at hating yourself, when you have built an entire theological architecture around the shame of your own desire, then you need somewhere for all that energy to go:

• You become an anti-gay crusader.

• You write political platforms filled with hate.

• You vote for bans on people created just like you.

• You give homophobic sermons.

• You cry at the altar about other people’s sin, because at least that’s not your sin, right out in the open where anyone can see it.

The glass tomb doesn’t make you straight. It makes you dangerous … to yourself, and to everyone you project your self-hatred onto.

The cruelest and most diabolical thing the church has done is hand people a theological hammer and tell them the nail is someone else created in the Imago Dei.

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Holy Week Was Made for This Moment

Here’s where I need you to stay with me, because this is where it gets sacred.

It is Holy Week.

This is the week when Christians confess that something had to die before something else could live. This is the week of tomb-sealing and stone-rolling, of the worst Friday in history and the most impossible Sunday morning. This is the week that the tradition I love—despite its many, many betrayals of people like me—insists that death is not the final word. That burial is not the destination. That what gets sealed in the dark will not …cannot… stay there.

Coming out—truly coming out, not just publicly but internally, to yourself, to God—is resurrection language. Let me say it plainly:

Coming out is resurrection.

You cannot experience the Easter of who you fully are until you allow the Good Friday of who you have been pretending to be. The false self has to die. The performance has to be buried. The shame-construction that you have been calling “faith” and “values” and “family” has to go into the ground first.

And yes.
It will feel like death.

That’s the point. That is the whole point.

The queer theologians have been saying this for years: Holy Week is, in a profound sense, queer week. That the body of Jesus, beaten, mocked, stripped, and hung out for public spectacle by a coalition of religious and political power, looks a great deal like the bodies of LGBTQ+ people who have been tried and condemned in the court of religious opinion.

Resurrection is not the erasure of the wounds.

The risen Christ kept his scars. He showed them. He let people touch them.

Your queerness is not a wound to be healed away. It may be the very thing that gets glorified.

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A Pastoral Word to Everyone Still Sealed Inside the Glass Tomb

I am talking to you now. Not about you… to you.

I don’t know your full story. None of us do. But I know the weight of a secret that feels like it would kill you if it got out. One that is slowly killing you because it’s staying in.

I know what it costs to stand next to someone’s political crusade against people like you, performing loyalty to an identity that was never quite yours. I know the spiritual and psychological mathematics of suppression: how much energy it takes, how it leaks out sideways, how it eventually …always… finds the light.

You are not broken.
You were never broken.

You were told, very early and very loudly and by people who held spiritual authority over you, that a part of you was a mistake. And you believed them. Most of us do …for a while.

But here is what I’ve learned—in the gym, in the pulpit, in the therapy room, and on my own knees: you cannot build real strength on a foundation of self-hatred. It looks like strength. It performs like conviction. But it’s compensatory. It’s brittle. It’s the kind of structure that fails under real pressure, usually publicly, usually at the worst possible moment… like Bryon’s did.

Don’t get me wrong: The work of coming out—really out, into wholeness, into honesty, into your full self—is the hardest and most holy work you will ever do. Trust me, I know.

It will cost you something. It may cost you a great deal. But on the other side of that loss is a life you don’t have to hide. A faith you don’t have to weaponize. A self you don’t have to convert.

The stone has already been rolled away. You don’t have to stay in the tomb because the people outside are afraid of what walks out.

We can already see you.
God can already see you.
The tomb you are hiding in is glass.

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What the Church, and the Country, Needs to Do

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Chiles v. Salazar will be remembered as one of the cruelest institutional acts against LGBTQ+ young people in a generation. It must be resisted. Advocates, clinicians, parents, and people of faith who actually believe in do no harm need to mobilize at the state level to protect these bans where they still stand. The Trevor Project and Lambda Legal are already in the fight. Get behind them — financially, vocally, and politically.

And to the churches: stop building glass tombs.

Stop sealing people inside shame-constructions and calling it discipleship. The research is in, the bodies have been counted, and the verdict on conversion theology—whether it happens in a counselor’s office or a Sunday sermon—is the same:

It does not work.
It causes harm.
And it has to stop.

This is not a political position. This is a pastoral one.

This is Easter.

New life is waiting on the other side of honesty.

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Rev. Dr. Kevin M. Young is a Pastor, Biblical Scholar, Public Theologian, Certified Personal Trainer, Competitive Bodybuilder, and unapologetic member and advocate of the LGBTQIA+ community. He writes, preaches, and lifts heavy things in pursuit of integrated wholeness — body, soul, and spirit.