Pastors and Republicans Show Their Hate and Hypocrisy

Many Republicans and more than a few fundamentalist pastors are showing the hate, lies and hypocrisy that under gird their poisonous beliefs.  Additional pastors have applauded the slaughter of gays in Orlando and foul hypocrites like Ted Cruz ignore their own role in creating the toxic, discriminatory atmosphere in which LGBT Americans continue to live.  Indeed, as the Sacramento CBS affiliate reports, a Baptist pastor's sermon on Sunday morning praised the deaths of the Orlando victims:

A Sacramento Baptist preacher’s sermon praising attack on an Orlando nightclub that killed 50 people has the local LGBT community outraged.

Recordings of the sermon by Pastor Roger Jimenez surfaced under the Verity Baptist Church’s YouTube account.

“Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?” he said in the sermon. “Um no, I think that’s great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.”

The remarks were delivered on Sunday morning, hours after the attack happened.

Jimenez’s sermon went on to call for even more death at the hands of the government.  “If we lived in a righteous government, they should round them all up and put them up against a firing wall, and blow their brains out,” Jimenez said in the sermon.

While Christian apologists will fume and say that Jimenez's remarks do not define Christianity, sadly they do.  Through the centuries Christianity has left a trail of death and destruction in its wake.

On the political front, in addition to Donald Trump, other Republicans have jumped on the "blame the Muslims" bandwagon even as a more bizarre portrait of the Orlando shooter is emerging.  Moreover, some of this self-prostituting Republicans ignore their own roll in fanning the flames of homophobia and encouraging anti-LGBT violence.  Ted Cruz perhaps best personifies this as Joe Jervis lays out:

Last fall Ted Cruz stood smiling on the stage with a Christian pastor who had just called for exterminating homosexuals in the name of White Jesus. But somehow that scandal seems to have slipped his feeble mind. From his Facebook page:

For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians. ISIS and the theocracy in Iran (supported with American taxpayer dollars) regularly murder homosexuals, throwing them from buildings and burying them under rocks. This is wrong, it is evil, and we must all stand against it. Every human being has a right to live according to his or her faith and conscience, and nobody has a right to murder someone who doesn’t share their faith or sexual orientation. If you’re a Democratic politician and you really want to stand for LGBT, show real courage and stand up against the vicious ideology that has targeted our fellow Americans for murder.

Take it away, Right Wing Watch:

We wonder why Cruz himself didn’t display such heroism when he spoke at a conference late last year where the main speaker, Kevin Swanson, a long-time and notorious advocate of the government instituting the death penalty for gay people, said repeatedly on stage that the Bible calls for gays and lesbians to be put to death and argued that America should introduce capital punishment against unrepentant homosexuals once society is moved in that direction.

That conference was also attended by Cruz’s father and his then-rivals Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal.

The summit, called the National Religious Liberties Conference, even distributed literature calling for the death penalty for gay people and others, mentioning stoning and throwing people off cliffs as possible forms of executions.

And yet now Ted Cruz has the gall to lecture liberals about the importance of showing “real courage” in the face of those who want to put gays to death.