Pastor Who Wants Death Penalty for Gays Rails against Pride Month

“I don’t understand why we celebrate what used to be a crime not long ago,” Jonathan Shelley said at an Arlington City Council meeting in Texas.
ADVOCATE: A minister who preaches that homosexuality merits the death penalty railed against Pride Month at the Arlington City Council meeting in Texas this week, saying the Bible teaches “we should hate pride, not celebrate it.”

“God’s already ruled that murder, adultery, witchcraft, rape, bestiality, and homosexuality are crimes worthy of capital punishment,” Jonathan Shelley, pastor of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth, said at the council meeting Tuesday.

The council was taking public comments on whether to proclaim June as Pride Month. It has issued such proclamations for the past several years, TV station KERA reports. Arlington is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, and Shelley said he has church members from Arlington and does business there.

“I don’t understand why we celebrate what used to be a crime not long ago,” Shelley said at the meeting, in an appearance captured on video and shared on social media. He cited passages in the Bible condemning gay sex and noted that the Texas antisodomy law is still on the books, although the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas has made it unenforceable.”

He claimed that by celebrating Pride, the city is promoting “disease and AIDS,” and he falsely claimed that LGBTQ+ people are child molesters. “They say that they love so much, but they hate children,” he said. “They hate Baptists, they hate Christianity, and they hate God.”

He called on the city to eliminate its LGBTQ+ liaison and recommended that everyone in attendance watch a film he directed, The Sodomite Deception, “which would clearly illustrate what the Bible says on this issue, providing actual stats instead of bullying people.” » | Trudy Ring | Friday, May 27, 2022

Radical Islam Tortures, Beats American Pastor Beyond Recognition

CHARISMA NEWS: We have just obtained a new letter from imprisoned American Pastor Saeed Abedini written to his wife, Naghmeh, and his family in Iran. In it, as in his previous two letters written inside the brutal Evin Prison, he documents the results of the continued abuse and torture he endures.

This letter, likely written weeks ago, was received by his family just yesterday. Written on the margins of scraps of newspaper, it is only the third letter Abedini has been able to get to his family in the past nearly 180 days of imprisonment and underscores the difficulty of getting any information from Iran about his condition.

Abedini writes that he cannot even recognize himself after all the beatings and torture he has endured: “My hair was shaven, under my eyes were swollen three times what they should have been, my face was swollen, and my beard had grown.”

After multiple beatings in interrogations at the hands of the radical Islamic regime, Abedini wrote that the nurse who was supposed to treat injured inmates told him “‘in our religion we are not suppose to touch you, you are unclean ... Christians are unclean!’” He explained, “they would not give me the pain medication that they would give other prisoners because I was unclean.” » | Jordan Sekulow/ACLJ | Tuesday, March 26, 2013