(LifeSiteNews) — On this episode of Faith and Reason, plastic surgeon and Catholic Deacon Patrick Lappert joins John-Henry Westen and Deacon Keith Fournier to discuss his powerful conversion story from an atheist to a Catholic deacon. The panel also discussed the alarming manipulation tactics gender clinics use on children, the permanent damage of “gender-affirming” surgeries, and more.
Deacon Keith began the episode by asking Deacon Lappert to share his conversion story. Lappert explained that he was raised in a Jewish household in South America before his family emigrated to the United States. His prayer life blossomed at a young age when his mother gave him a Hebrew and English prayer book, which he used daily until his parents’ divorce shook his world.
“And I became a very cynical child, and I became a very cynical adolescent boy, and I became an atheist. And I was an atheist until I was 40 years old,” Lappert said.
Eventually, during his first year in medical school, Lappert met a devout Catholic girl who wound up becoming his wife. To get married in the Church, he was bound by an oath to raise their children Catholic and bring them to Mass regularly, which he honored. Soon after, he wanted to talk a residency colleague out of her Catholic faith, so began studying Catholicism.
“I started reading the Bible so that I might talk her out of her faith. And I would read the Bible every morning before going off to rounds in the plastic surgery department at Memphis. And I would start listening to Christian broadcasters so I could learn their arguments and thereby talk Diane out of her faith,” he said.
But by the time Lappert finished his residency, he was convinced of the faith and soon became Catholic.
Later in the episode, the panel turned to “gender-affirming” surgeries.
Lappert first emphasized that what “transgender” activists are doing is attacking the innocence of children.
“The most horrifying thing abroad in the world today is the sexualization and the destruction, physical and spiritual, of children. It is the image of the slaughter of the innocents. It is the image of the enemy of man seeking out to destroy Christ in the world. And it’s that and nothing less,” the deacon said.
“That’s what gender ideology is about; it is an attack on the image of God in the world. It is an attack on the innocence of children who are made for chaste love in their sexualization of children; they are trying to destroy that image,” he added.
Then Westen asked Lappert why we can’t just accept that these minors want to “transition” to be happy.
The deacon stressed that while young children sometimes have anxiety and obsessive-compulsive tendencies that lead to cross-sex self-identification, they’ll typically grow out of that as they get older. However, with the rise of gender ideology and gender clinics, fewer children are growing out of these tendencies.
“But what has happened now with the introduction of gender ideology is that gender clinics are actually crafting … a professionally created obsessive-compulsive process by which the child’s fears and anxieties become sexualized and that the relief that’s offered to these poor children is an obsessive-compulsive process. They’re given an idea that they obsess over, that their unhappiness has to do with their appearance, how the world judges their appearance, that it’s the sexual nature of their appearance that is the source of their sorrows,” Lappert said.
He added that gender clinics will continue to affirm the child’s obsessive-compulsive thoughts, which often leads them to look for relief through puberty blockers and, eventually, “gender-affirming” surgery.
“And one of the difficulties that it has is that the relief that it promises is always short-lived. If you take an anxious child and you give him affirmation, affirmation messages are encouraging to anxious children, and they will cling to it. You can lie to a child; if it’s affirming, they’ll feel better. … You sprinkle fairy dust on the sleepless child who’s anxious in bed, and he’ll sleep better. It’s a lie because that isn’t fairy dust you’re sprinkling. So it’s the same with the gender ideology gender clinics,” Lappert said.
“They’ll tell them, ‘Well if we block your puberty, you won’t develop those secondary sex characteristics.’ And so they feel relief for a time. But when the puberty blockade has stunted their growth and their intellectual development and all their classmates have grown on beyond them, then their anxiety comes back. And so then they’re offered cross-sex hormones. And when the cross-sex hormones reach their limit of effect, and still the anxiety is there, they’ll move on to surgery,” he added.
For more discussion on how gender clinics manipulate children, Deacon Lappert’s full conversion story, and much more, tune in to this episode of Faith and Reason.
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