Apr. 8, 2026, 6:06 PM EDT

When President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran shortly before his own deadline for Tehran to comply with U.S. demands or be wiped off the Earthhe didn’t simply say hostilities had halted.

He said the United States had favorably received a 10-point proposal from Iran and billed the two weeks not as a temporary end to fighting, but a chance to simply formalize a deal the countries had been negotiating since before the U.S. and Israel attacked at the end of February.

“Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday night.

Since then, the two sides seem to have agreed on very littleincluding whether the war has actually been paused. Iran has alleged it has faced attacks even after the ceasefire was announced; the U.S. military has said it was not them.

That 10-point plan — the one Trump called “a workable basis on which to negotiate” Tuesday night — was dismissed Wednesday by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as “fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded,” saying the president literally threw it in the garbage.

In fact, after thousands of deaths, more than a month of regional instability and a hit to the global economy, it’s unclear how much of what’s on the table even differs from the lead-up to the war.

Here’s a closer look at some of the points of contention that could determine whether the ceasefire holds:

The Strait of Hormuz

Trump called the ceasefire contingent on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow trade route at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which about 20% of the global oil and gas supply passes. He even floated the strange possibility of Washington and Tehran jointly collecting tolls on tankers that use the lane.

Iran said it would only reopen the strait once a series of conditions were met, including some that may be beyond Trump’s control, such as whether Israel withdraws from Lebanon.

Control of the strait is arguably Iran’s greatest strategic advantage. After it was attacked, Iran effectively closed the tightly curved passage by striking ships that tried to sail past, sending the price of oil and other goods skyrocketing. Trump’s threat to destroy an entire civilization was meant to force Tehran to allow tankers to once again pass through, even though he has insisted over the course of the conflict that he would leave other nations to cope with the closure since the U.S. sources relatively little energy from that route.

Nuclear enrichment

The U.S. has demanded Iran completely stop its uranium enrichment, and of the shifting reasons the Trump administration has provided for why it went to war alongside Israel, this one eventually became the most consistent.

Before the war, Iran was working toward enriching its nuclear fuel to the point that it could be considered weapons-grade, well beyond the level agreed upon by several countries in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement during his first term in 2018, calling it a bad deal. Tehran responded by ramping up enrichment despite international pressure to stop.

In its ceasefire proposal, Iran emphasized its right to enrichment. Without a return to something like the 2015 arrangement, this could be the single biggest sticking point.

Sanctions

Iran has been burdened with its own economic crisis even before the war started. Iran’s national currency, the rial, fell to a record low in December, leading shopkeepers in Tehran to take to the streets in protest. U.S. sanctionson Iran, some of which have existed since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, have further strained an already struggling economy. Iran has called on the U.S. to lift primary and secondary sanctionswhich not only directly affected Iran, but also prevent third parties from conducting trade with the country.

The most crippling U.S. sanctions are on Iranian oil.

“We are, and will be, talking Tariff and Sanctions relief with Iran,” Trump said Wednesday.

Lebanon

Iran has demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, an unlikely scenario considering the positive relationship between the U.S. and Gulf Arab countries that host its military bases. More immediately pressing is the issue of Lebanon.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who has emerged as a the primary diplomatic intermediary in the war, said all parties agreed to “an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.” Israel and the U.S disagreed.

Lebanon was dragged into the war after the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah mounted an attack against Israel in retaliation for assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Not even 24 hours after the ceasefire was announced, Israel struck central Beirut in what Israel called the largest coordinated military strike in the war, with more than 100 Hezbollah targets hit within 10 minutes in Beirut, southern Lebanon and other areas.

Israel’s attack on Lebanon could jeopardize the fragile agreement, with Iran threatening to pull back. Following the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, “The U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both. The world sees the massacres in Lebanon,” adding that “the ball is in the U.S. court.”

What’s next?

Sharif proposed direct talks between the U.S. and Iran on Friday in Islamabad. Leavitt said Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, will represent the U.S. in negotiations, though Trump said it was possible Vance would not attend due to security concerns.

In the meantime, Sharif asked all warring countries to adhere to the ceasefire amid reports of attacks in the region. While Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon, countries such as Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait said they have continued to intercept missiles and drones coming from Iran.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

Apr. 8, 2026, 5:46 PM EDT

ByHannah Holland

Garrard Conley begins his 2016 memoir “Boy Erased” in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights. Conley, then 19, had only just arrived at Love in Action, a cruelly named so-called gay conversion center, in Memphis.

One of the practitioners stood in front of Conley and his cohorts, all dressed in uniform, and said: “The first thing you have to do is recognize how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God.”

“We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s Twelve Step program,” Conley writes in his memoir, “a set of principles equating the sins of infidelity, bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality to addictive behavior such as alcoholism or gambling: a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for what counselors referred to as our ‘sexual deviance.’” It would only get worse.

For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse for them, too. Last Tuesday, an 8-1 Supreme Court majority rejected a Colorado law that effectively banned gay conversion therapy for young people. Passed in 2019, Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law prohibits licensed mental health professionals from providing “any practice or treatment” with the express intent to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

The case challenging the law was initiated in 2022 when Kaley Chiles, an evangelical Christian and licensed talk therapist, sued the state, arguing that her First Amendment right to discuss her faith and beliefs on “biological sex” was being violated. Colorado is one of 23 states and Washington, D.C. with similar legislation in place.

Conley joined the Velshi Banned Book Club, the franchise on MS NOW I edit and produce, this past week, to discuss the Supreme Court ruling and share his thoughts as someone who has lived through the harrowing experiences of conversion therapy.

Using flashbacks, Conley’s book explores the moments that lead up to Conley’s “treatment” — his religious upbringing as the sole child of devout Missionary Baptists, how he grappled with his sexuality in secret for so many years and how he was brutally outed to his parents by the very person who raped and assaulted him (Conley refers to the perpetrator using a pseudonym in his book) — and then what happened behind closed doors at Love in Action.

In our pre-interview on Friday, an exploratory time before a guest joins the host on a live television show, Conley explained the enduring significance of conversion therapy: “To me conversion therapy is connected to so many other issues that really animate me, like free speech, freedom of thought, open-mindedness, fundamentalism and what it does to our country. You’re looking at the way this kind of fundamentalist thinking works on a large scale when you watch what is happening in this country right now.”

Also inherent to this ruling is an acute medical threat, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to in her lone dissentwriting, “[The Court has] open[ed] a dangerous can of worms. It threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect. It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

I asked Conley, what comes next? He echoed Jackson’s dissent, saying, “This ruling could open up really dark avenues of thought. If I go to a [licensed practitioner] I am expecting them to be more educated than I am and be up on the science. I hope that they would at least offer some scientific basis for what I’m talking about in a therapy session. It is opening the flood gates for dangerous quackery that I thought we were rid of.”

According to LGBTQ+ nonprofit suicide prevention organization the Trevor Project, there were more than 1,320 conversation therapy practitioners in 48 states and Washington, D.C., in 2023. Fifteen percent of LGBTQ+ youth report being threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy, the organization reports. Thirty-five percent of those exposed to conversion therapy over the past year reported suicide attempts. That is 1 in 8.

Suicide and suicidal ideation are a painful refrain in Conley’s memoir. Conley writes in stunning frankness about his own suicidal ideations after being outed to his parents and about how common, almost pedestrian, it was at Love in Action. Not 30 pages into “Boy Erased” we’re introduced to a person called only T: “T, an obese middle-aged man wearing several black cardigans, stood before our group to confess, stone-faced, that he had once again attempted suicide. This was T’s seventh suicide attempt since coming to the program.”

Conley told Ali Velshi, “What’s even more damaging for the LGBTQ+ community is this idea that we are subject to be debated, that our very existence is something that can be argued over and is open for interpretation based on free speech. Every major medical organization in the country knows that LGBTQ+ people exist. It feels like an attack.”

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling is just the latest in several decisions that appear to favor conservative Christians. In 2023, a web designer was allowed to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. In 2022, a football coach was allowed to pray at the 50-yard line. There are more examples.

Justice Neil Gorsuch centered freedom of speech in the majority opinion, which included liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, writing, “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety, but the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

Here, in this Supreme Court case and behind the closed doors of conversion therapy, fundamentalism and freedom of thought are inexplicable from each other.

“I am not attacking religion when I talk about this,” said Conley, who is a religious Christian. “But fundamentalism doesn’t allow for any open discussion. It shuts people down, it takes cheap shots … there is only one meaning, there is only one right way.”

Despite the odds, “Boy Erased” is ultimately about wholeness: “[Love in Action] was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. […] You became all telling with no showing: not the extraordinary extra, but the stock player in a harp-and-halo bit. I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn’t matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest. I had prayed for purification, but the minute I felt its icy baptismal waters burning away everything I’d ever loved, I’d begun to open myself up, instead, to a former possibility: un­conditional love, the original flame that had drawn me closer to God and my family and the rest of the world.”

Conley is happy to tell you how he survived his time in Love in Action, the long road of healing after he left and where he finds the strength now to revisit a terrible time in his life day after day: his parents (despite their role in placing him in conversion therapy) and his stubbornness. “[My dad] taught me from a young age if you believe something then you should be willing to stand behind it for as long as it takes. And my mom’s compassion is the other part of that. The main thing is I am stubborn. There is a part of me that is like you’re not going to get away with what you’re doing to these people. Even now.”

What Conley endured and overcame should be relegated to the same dusty and dark place where other antiquated medical brutalities, like leeches and trepanation, exist. His story and his perspective, while inspiring and beautiful, should not exist. Not today and not ever. This ruling means more people suffering like “T,” more lives turned to statistics and more shame. Even if a young person’s journey with their sexual identity doesn’t include a stop at a place like “Love in Action,” just knowing these centers exist is tremendously harmful.

The message is clear from this ruling: You are not free to be who you are. I hope that the next generation of young people who find themselves sitting in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights find the wholeness that Conley writes of. Sadly, there’s no guarantee of that.

If you are an LGBTQ young person in crisis, feeling suicidal or in need of a safe and judgment-free place to talk, call the TrevorLifeline now at 1-866-488-7386 or the Rainbow Youth Project at 1-317-643-4888.