For They Know Not What They Do (Documentary)

This documentary is basically about one thing, the American religious right going hard against the LGBTQ community and the damage it causes to families who are stuck between their faith and the love they have for their own kids. The whole film takes this very gentle, patient approach and is really trying to get people with conservative religious beliefs to see that there's no reason to be fighting the LGBTQ community. It stays focused on parents, how they reacted when their kids came out, what the family had to go through, and how they eventually got to a place where they could be supportive.

It opens by talking about the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage and the backlash that followed in a lot of parts of the country, but that's actually not the main point of the film. The real focus is on four families. The first is an evangelical family in Washington state whose whole world gets rocked when one of their sons comes out as gay. The parents are very open about how they tried conversion therapy on him and how things got so bad for him internally that he ended up with serious drug problems and eventually died. Two other stories are about transgender children, one a boy and one a girl, and both are really compelling because the prejudice around trans people is so much heavier given how small that community is. And you can see things are slowly changing because one of the people featured here is Sarah McBride, who became the first trans person to ever speak at a national political convention when she addressed the 2016 Democratic convention. The fourth story is about a gay Puerto Rican immigrant whose grandmother abandoned him but whose parents accepted him wholeheartedly. He was also at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando the night of the shooting. He survived by hiding in a bathroom but lost close friends that night and still blames himself for being the one who brought them there.

What all these families share is this painful struggle of trying to square what their church has taught them about LGBTQ people with the love they have for their own children. There's a line from Bishop Gene Robinson that really stays with you, he says that when people talk about religious liberty or religious freedom what they're really asking for is a license to discriminate. All the kids, now grown up, share their coming out stories and they all seem genuinely at peace with who they are. Religious leaders in the film also offer their own reading of scripture that pushes back on the idea that God thinks same sex relationships are sinful. The doc is thoughtful and well edited but it doesn't really build a strong enough theological case for why LGBTQ people are children of God just like everyone else, which feels like something was left on the table. But you can tell the filmmaker cares more about reaching people who don't already agree than about making a film for those who do.

Gentle, warm and well meaning even if it doesn't go as deep as it could have. (6.5/10)