A couple of weeks ago, Pastor Robert Jeffress, a MAGA cultist who always defends GOP cruelty and ignorance, insisted that his church would remain open even if the NBA was shutting down over COVID-19.

“I know some people are saying, ‘Well, the NBA is cancelling games. Why don’t you cancel church services?’ What we do is more important that what the NBA is doing. NBA is entertainment. Optional. Worship is essential,” Pastor Jeffress explained.

He said that even when social distancing was becoming a familiar term and other churches were quickly moving to online-only sermons. What he said was dangerous — and we knew it.

And yet now that even Republican governors are doing what they should’ve done, issuing stay-at-home orders and the like, Jeffress is suddenly criticizing pastors whose biggest crime is acting just like him.

Speaking of Florida Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who was just arrested for hosting services over the weekend and creating a public health crisis, Jeffress is ironically critical:

“There are a few fanatical nutjobs among evangelicals right now who are doing stupid things like holding mass church services and promising they will heal anybody who has the coronavirus,” he tells OneNewsNow. “But most evangelicals I know are doing exactly what the government is asking them to do. Like our church, they’re abstaining from large church meeting and worshipping online.”

Those guys are evangelical nutjobs, but Jeffress is somehow the sensible one? I guess even he doesn’t listen to himself.

If the only difference has to do with taking cues from the government, then even Howard-Browne was in the right considering how Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis didn’t mandate social distancing until his order issued yesterday — and churches are deemed essential services and therefore exempt from the public gathering rules (though they still have to limit the crowd to under 10 people).

So Jeffress, as usual, is just talking out of his ass.

