A screenshot from Bill Nye's Netflix series explaining the impossibility of gay conversion therapy.

Screengrab via Bill Nye Saves The World/Netflix

Bill Nye uses this cute ice cream video to explain the impossibility of gay conversion therapy

In the video, vanilla tries to get other flavors to convert to its one true flavor.

 

Samantha Grasso

Parsec

Posted on Apr 30, 2017   Updated on May 24, 2021, 4:03 pm CDT

Netflix released Bill Nye‘s new series Bill New Saves The World more than a week ago, and conservatives are losing their damn minds over the science guy’s revelations on gender and sexuality.

So far, conservative blogs have challenged Nye’s assertions on climate change, his “flip-flopped” belief on gender (which was proved to be absolutely false), and his speculation on population control (which, admittedly, does sound a little too eugenics-y for comfort, though the show doesn’t rest on punishing people with “extra kids” as a solution to overpopulation).

But now the same publications are taking issue with Nye’s very cute video of animated ice cream cones explaining that “converting” to other “flavors” is impossible.

The video, about 2 1/2 minutes long, shows several ice cream cone flavors gathering for a meeting called by Vanilla, who demands that the other flavors convert to the “most natural of the ice creams,” vanilla, which Vanilla thinks is the “one true flavor.”

Strawberry then spins out into a panic and has to be comforted by Salted Caramel, which tells Strawberry that no one can change it from being its own flavor. Vanilla then asserts that the “big ice cream in the sky,” is also Vanilla, while Chocolate challenges that assumption.

The video goes back and forth explaining that the ice creams don’t get to “choose” what flavors they are, a metaphor for people being unable to choose their sexuality and who they’re attracted to, and it ends with the ice cream flavors all jumping in a bowl to create a Neapolitan concoction.

Conservatives are steamed over the video, with the Daily Wire, PJ Media, and Twitter personalities blasting Nye over the video’s lack of scientific basis, the Huffington Post pointed out.

“There is no scientific basis for anything that is in this video… Just on a scientific basis, ice cream does not have genitalia,” Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro said during a segment of his show.

Yes, illustrated ice cream doesn’t possess genitals (though, for the record, sexuality is completely different from whatever genitals a person is born with) but the metaphor from the video still stands—there is no “one true sexuality,” and you can’t just force other people to be straight, or gay, or bi, or any other sexuality if they aren’t. It just doesn’t work that way, no matter what gay conversation therapy supporters would have you believe.

Politics aside, some of these critics may want to take a step back and recognize that this is an animated clip. About ice cream. Take a breath, folks.

H/T HuffPost

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*First Published: Apr 30, 2017, 12:46 pm CDT