
Perkin’s flooded home
Donald Trump is reported to have just donated $100,000 to help Louisiana residents affected by disastrous floods. Generous? Well, he just put it in the hands of an anti-LGBT church whose interim pastor is Tony Perkins, head of the infamously homophobic Family Research Council. CNN’s Ashley Killough reported the donation on Twitter.
As I reported on Saturday, Perkins himself was directly affected by the floods and there is more than a little irony in this fact. Perkins has previously blamed gay people for bringing God’s wrath in the form of natural disasters before. He is also the guy that blamed the Boston marathon bombing on “sexual liberalism” in Massachusetts.
At the invitation of Perkins, Trump visited the Baton Rouge church as well as making other stops in the area. The church is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, which believes that being LGBT is a sin. The Greenwell Springs church’s website includes a “Statement on Marriage and Sexuality,” which reads in part,
“We believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God.”
Three quarters of the church’s members were affected in some way by the flooding.
In October of last year, a minister named Jonathan Cahn appeared on Perkins’s radio show and said Hurricane Joaquin, which hit the Bahamas and threatened the East Coast of the U.S., was a sign of God’s dissatisfaction with the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. Perkins commented on Cahn’s claim by saying that perhaps God was
“trying to send us a message.”
Perkins was a Louisiana delegate to this year’s Republican National Convention and took credit for helping to create what even the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay conservative group, termed the most anti-LGBT platform in party history. He and the GOP continue to oppose marriage equality, denounces the Obama administration’s call for transgender students’ access to gendered facilities of their choice, and contends that parents have a right to enroll their children in any kind of therapy.
(via The Advocate)