Texas Baptist Pastor Prays for injured Orlando Survivors to Die

Pastor Donnie Romero - the face of hate

I know that I am beating a dead horse, but if one wants to know how the Republican Party became such a foul organization, I say again, look no farther than the rise of the Christofascists in the party. The decline of the GOP directly correlates with the rise of the self-congratulatory, self-centered, hate-filled "godly folk" in the party.  To get an idea of just how foul the Christofascists are in fact, Pastor Donnie Romero of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth gave us an up close glimpse this past weekend as he celebrated the deaths of 49 LGBT individuals and their allies in Orlando.  But he did not stop there.  He prayed that the other survivors struggling to recover in Orlando hospitals would also die.  

Yes, I know that Christian apologist will bristle and say, but real Christians don't speak that way.  But where are they in condemning this hideous mindset and demanding to make statements of condemnation on news cameras and elsewhere. The "good Germans" allowed Hitler to destroy Germany.  Nowadays, we see the "good Christians" allowing horrible monsters destroy Christianity. For myself, I care nothing about the survival of Christianity - over all I see it as a net evil in the world and its death cannot come soon enough.  But for those who still claim to be Christians and oppose hatred, their time for acting and stopping hate mongering in the name of God and Christ is running out.   Roughly a third of the under 30 generations have walked away from religion.  Rantings like that of Romero will accelerate the exodus.  With Romero, Tony Perkins, hate-filled Catholic bishops who protect sexual predators are becoming the face of Christianity.  If the "good Christians" not stir themselves and get off their self-satisfied asses, sooner or later they will find themselves members of a nearly dead religion and deservedly so.

But back to Romero.  The Raw Story looks at his ugly sermon which is all too representative of what is the norm in fundamentalist churches and denominations.   Here are highlights:

In the wake of the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida last week, many right-wing Christian religious leaders have celebrated the shooter’s actions, but a Texas pastor is taking that to a whole new level.

Pastor Donnie Romero of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth told his flock he agrees “100 percent” with Baptist Pastor Roger Jimenez, who made news with his sermon advocating that the government should use a firing squad to “blow their brains out.”

“These 50 sodomites are all perverts and pedophiles, and they are the scum of the earth, and the earth is a little bit better place now,” Romero said in the Sunday sermon. “And I’ll take it a step further, because I heard on the news today, that there are still several dozen of these queers in ICU and intensive care. And I will pray to God like I did this morning, I will do it tonight, I’ll pray that God will finish the job that that man started, and he will end their life, and by tomorrow morning they will all be burning in hell, just like the rest of them, so that they don’t get any more opportunity to go out and hurt little children.”

Romero went on to cite Sodom and Gomorrah, which he called the first ever “queer mass murder” and called out mega churches, whom he believes are too soft on preaching anti-gay sermons. Biblical scholars believe the “sin” in the story had nothing to do with homosexuality, rather it was about inhospitality.

In a twist, Romero was ordained by Pastor Steve Anderson, who also made the list of anti-LGBT religious leaders standing with the actions of the shooter. 

As several friends have noted, one can only wonder how long it will be before we see Romero's name in a list of convicted pastors - either for embezzlement of funds or sexual abuse of minors.  I did get a complimentary copy of Free Thought Today published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and was amazed to see two full pages of arrests and convictions of crimes by the clergy under the "Black collar Crime Blotter" - something that is published in each issue.  And, yes,  a large percentage of the crimes involved sexual abuse of children and conservative, anti-gay denominations were involved in a majority of the cases.