Death Penalty-Affirming Pastor Says Clergy Members with Gay Kids Should Resign

Thursday April 13, 2017

Anti-LGBT Pastor Kevin Swanson has bashed everyone and everything from Harry Potter to Girl Scout Cookies. Now he's going after members of the clergy with LGBT children.

Swanson, the hard Right-wing preacher who once called for gays to receive the death penalty and labeled Girl Scout Cookies a gateway drug to lesbianism, is calling on members of the clergy with gay children to resign.

As reported by Right Wing Watch, during an episode of his Generations radio program last month, Swanson responded to 2014 blog post written a North Carolina former pastor who stated that he would accept a gay child and "pray for God to protect them; from the ignorance and hatred and violence that the world will throw at them, simply because of who they are."

Swanson took the North Carolina pastor's words of acceptance as words of failure.

"[T]here may be something very, very wrong with the pastor himself," Swanson told listeners, adding that the gay-accepting pastor should be "tearing of the clothes, crying out to God for mercy" and repenting "that there is something terribly wrong with our family" and "that there is something terribly wrong in me."

"As a pastor, if your children turn out to be sinners," he continued, "if it turns out they abandoned the faith while they are in the household, accused of riot and unruly debauchery, et cetera, within the household, you need to resign as a pastor." gay [would not] then not turn to himself and see there to be something of a problem with himself."

Swanson's recent comments on the hypothetical parenting of a gay child is hardly inconsistent.

In 2015, after famously interviewing failed GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal at his "National Religious Liberties Conference," he said that if he ever found out that his own son was gay and invited him to his wedding, he would show up in "sackcloth and ashes" and then smear himself in cow manure as he sat on the steps of the church and wailed lamentations.