Monday, May 28, 2012

A North Carolina pastor is making outrageous comments




A North Carolina pastor is under fire for making outrageous comments against gays, lesbians and the transgender community during a recent religious service when he suggested that they be herded into electrified fences until they die off.

“I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers,” Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina, says in a chilling description that sounds an awful lot like a concentration camp.

“Build a great, big, large fence — 150- or 100-mile long — put all the lesbians in there ... do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out."

"Feed 'em. And you know what, in a few years, they'll die out,” Worley says in a viral video uploaded onto YouTube. “Do you know why? They can't reproduce."

Critics have launched a Facebook page calling for “a PEACEFUL protest against Pastor Worley's bigoted and hate filled rhetoric,” a message on the site says.

On other social networking sites, many users have condemned the pastor’s speech. On Twitter, Ashley said, “I refuse to be friends with anyone who thinks this is okay … I don’t care how long we’ve been friends.”

Read more: Church member to CNN: 'Lay off my pastor'

ThinkProgress reported Wednesday that Worley said in a 1978 sermon that gays “40 years ago” would have been hung “from a white oak tree.”

The righteous indignation has reached such a point that even a church with a similar-sounding name – Providence Baptist Church in Charlotte about 30 miles away – has had to issue a press release to emphatically deny any affiliation with the Maiden church.

“In recent hours we have been incorrectly identified as the church in another town where hatred and violence have been advocated from the pulpit," the church says in a statement posted on its website. "Jesus preached a Gospel of love. So do we. Jesus preached that we love our neighbor, whether that neighbor is like us or not.”