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You guys, JD Vance is Catholic. Just super-Catholic. He is so Catholic that he wrote a book about Catholic-ing that had a country mountain Methodist church on the front, the kind where you’re always running into the pope when the holy Papa is in the mood for some of that good old time religion. (But, like, not as old as his religion, which is way older.)

And that is why when JD Vance sits down to talk about his deep and abiding and legitimate and real Catholic faith, he starts yapping about the Antichrist and the End Times like some kind of rapture-obsessed evangelical who just read his first Hal Lindsey book.

He yapped about it recently in an interview with some bro-y Christian extremist bigot podcaster named Bryce (of course) Crawford.

“Do I think that we’re in the End Times? I don’t know,” said JD. He said he doesn’t think he should focus on it, though, even though he’s “fascinated by it.” Buuuuuuut:

“I think that there are, like, things about that world that make me feel like, not shocked, if the Antichrist was walking among us, but again, I try not to focus too much on it.”

Cool, sure, you bet.

JD explained in that interview that he actually has a lot of history being a rapture-obsessed evangelical who just read his first Hal Lindsey book, except that for him he says it was his first Bible, the John Hagee prophecy Bible — you know, that crazy bastard who called the Catholic Church the “great whore” and is really into all the prophecies about God throwing unrepentant Jews into the lake of fire — that got him into it. The Left Behind books were also mentioned. (For me, personally, it was Hal Lindsey, although I am not particularly older than JD Vance. Oh yes, I had that phase.)

I guess he just doesn’t understand yet that Catholics don’t talk this way. But anyway, about his new Catholic book, on Catholicism!

He also said:

“I’m trying to focus on doing as much of God’s work as possible right now. And if that leads to the end times, okay.”

If JD Vance brings about the apocalypse, that’s fine! He also said just after the quote above that “if that leads to, you know, us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great, too.” So if he makes the world a better place, that’s fine too!

Glad he’s flexible.

Of course, small bone to pick, it’s a tiny thing, but in the evangelical John Hagee prophecy Bible and the Left Behind books and all the Hal Lindsey books about how Jesus was probably coming in 1972, just kidding probably 1974, just kidding probably 1976, etc., the Son of Man doesn’t come on the clouds — with or without swooping all the white evangelicals up in the rapture first, which is absolutely not remotely in the Bible and if you think it is, fuck off — because humans are doing such a great job creating God’s kingdom on earth.

Jesus comes back for a lot of reasons, according to the evangelical extremists, but none of them is to give humanity a smack on the ass and say “Good game.”

So either JD is bringing about the apocalypse or he’s doing God’s good work on Earth. It is not both, according to JD’s own Catholic (not Catholic) belief system.

Anyway, so to recap, here is JD Vance, thinking the Antichrist might be walking among us, and that maybe his work is bringing about the Apocalypse, LOL, but maybe it’s not, YOLO, Make Armageddon Great Again, suicide cults are so awesome.

(By the way, we are supposed to be real scared of the religious extremists in Iran right now, and the ones who are almost certainly scheming to impose Shakira Law upon New York City and Michigan. The Beltway media says so, must be true. But when Republicans do actual religious extremism, which is always? Aw shucks.)

JD Vance didn’t mention in this interview who he thinks the Antichrist walking among us might be, but a lot of people are joking that ha ha, JD Vance works for him, it’s the guy he once compared to Hitler, I guess back when he was anti-Hitler.

And yes, I have speculated before on the Moral High Ground — just for fun! — about whether Donald Trump could be the Antichrist. But JD Vance said he thinks the Antichrist might walk among us, not waddle, and none of the prophecies mentions the Antichrist having some blonde sycophant named Natalie who feeds them their daily pureéd Big Mac and AI slop about how much everybody worships them.

So unless your version of the Antichrist eats a lot of pudding cups …

But is there another guy JD Vance knows whose name should be entered in contention for “Which Of JD Vance’s Friends/Bosses/Puppetmasters Is The Antichrist?”

Perhaps!

Like maybe, por ejemplo, the weird libertarian technogay billionaire who looks like an actual lizard wearing a human suit, who runs around the world giving speeches on the Antichrist like he thinks nobody will suspect he is the literal Antichrist if he is always out there talking about what a stinker the Antichrist is? That guy even has a South Park song about how much he knows about the Antichrist, while not actually being, himself, the Antichrist!

It’s kind of like when conservative Christian closet cases condemn gays THE LOUDEST, like without even needing prompting. “I’m so full of the Lord, I couldn’t imagine adding a bunch of dicks!” is a thing they might say, heterosexually, and no one suspects a thing.

That guy? Is the guy who actually happens to have co-founded a creepy, evil surveillance company that, on its best day, could potentially someday create something that could be a Mark Of The Beast, something without which “no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark.”

That guy? Also happens to be the guy who has bought and sold JD Vance, who plucked this empty, unimpressive, off-putting, ugly little nothing of a man out of obscurity and gave him everything he now has, who has imprinted upon JD Vance all the things Vance now claims to believe. Without Peter Thiel, JD Vance would just be that thing his mom missed the opportunity to trade for drugs.

By the way, have you heard about how Thiel and a bunch of other tech billionaires are certainly acting like they might about about to bring about the apocalypse, creating remote bunkers for the super-rich in Argentina? Seems like an interesting data point!

Will JD and Usha also get to go when/if/when Trump/Thiel/Vance/Antichrist/whoever completely ends the world sometime soon or just after the midterms, if none of Republicans’ schemes to steal those work?

Just curious.

This has been a post about how JD Vance thinks maybe his work will bring about the Apocalypse, maybe it won’t, what’s the harm in trying, probably time for the media to book another panel discussion on whether Abdul El-Sayed did 9/11 when he was in high school.

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We are reaching a point in this midterm election cycle where — 77 days out — it may indeed be reasonable to start expanding our idea of the possible. We simply have never had a situation where the incumbent president is simultaneously a bloodthirsty fascist and also literally the stupidest person who ever lived and so thoroughly loathed. For Christ’s sake, he’s trying to blame the grass that got damaged during his 4th of July White House Country-Fried Inbreeding Hootenanny on vandals. What happened, Mr. President? Line-dancing without a permit?

His approval rating is negative LOL percent, he and his dumbshit Defense secretary continue to find new ways to lose the war against Iran they lost on their very first day, the military is running out of munitions, everything is unaffordable, ICE murderers are rampaging through the streets, people are exploding from diarrhea lettuce, and as Jon Ossoff said last night, Trump doesn’t even want to do the job, he “just wants to travel with Natalie” on his flying trash palace the Qataris bribed him with.

Yeah, it’s not a good situation for Republicans trying to get elected/re-elected to Congress!

Here’s a stat for you: Trump is 41 points underwater with Hispanic men. As in, one of the primary demographics that enabled him to manage the squeaker win he pulled off in 2024. He won them by 10 that year. That’s a 51-point drop.)

We’ll see what Cook does in coming days, but right now in the Senate, their tossups are Alaska, Maine, Michigan and Ohio. We are on record as believing the wringing of hands over Michigan is misplaced. We also think Maine is already moving back in the right direction. (Polling is still all over the place in Michigan. Meanwhile the last Maine poll that had Susan Collins up, Graham Platner was her opponent.)

Those other two “toss-ups”? Red states. Cook is getting more and more confident that Sherrod Brown will be taking that race in Ohio. They’re still calling Iowa “lean Republican,” and also Texas. Who knows, but Texas is getting polled a lot and James Talarico is ahead in almost every poll.

And then there’s their “likely Republican” category. That’d be Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn is giving it another go, and Kansas, where hardly any polling is being done, but the most recent one, by Public Policy Polling, shows incumbent Republican Roger Marshall one measly point ahead of challenger Adam Hamilton.

And y’all, if you didn’t know already, this Kansas race is a Moral High Ground race, just like Texas, just like so many other races around the country where people of faith are stepping forward and looking at the genocidal, murderous, Nazi fascist shit the Trump regime is doing at home and abroad and saying “Not in my fuckin’ name, and certainly not in my God’s name.”

So, Adam Hamilton! He’s a United Methodist pastor who leads a 24,000-member megachurch in the Kansas City, Missouri, suburbs, the biggest UMC congregation in the country.

And a number of people are suddenly asking if oh holy shit, Hamilton might be able to beat Marshall. (By the way, Marshall is one of those election-denying GOP senators who is a doctor, but the kind of quack you wouldn’t trust to give your hamster a Band-Aid because you’d be worried he might squeegee some Ivermectin up their butthole while he was down there.)

NPR notes that Kansas has been electing Republican senators since the early FDR era, 1932 to be exact, the longest streak of that kind that exists anywhere. But they’ve got a political scientist named Bob Beatty from Washburn University in Topeka who says we need to pay attention to this one. And Beatty notes that Kansas does elect Democratic governors. (Right now he doesn’t think they’ll do that this year.)

Beatty directly referenced Hamilton’s communication abilities as a pastor when it comes to the crucial last 11 weeks of this race, plus the fact that dude can raise money like nobody’s business. And you know what? If you listen to his victory speech, you will note that he sounds like a pastor. And not in the Southern Baptist “I protect pedophile youth group leaders” sort of way.

He actually sounds, well, pastoral.

My colleague at Wonkette noted that Hamilton’s message is replete with the sort of “bring us together while standing for what’s right” message that just might work in a place like Kansas. He said in his victory speech:

“Recently I was in Greensburg, Kansas, and a woman, a kind woman, came to me and she said, ‘Look, I feel angry and frustrated when I think of people of the other political party and I don’t want to feel that way. These are some of my neighbors, my family and friends, but I don’t want to feel this way towards other people. I want a senator who’s not going to divide us further, but try to bring us together.’

“But she also said this, ‘I also hope for a senator who will stand up for what’s right and good and true.’”

Beatty, the Kansas political scientist above, theorized that one reason the state regularly elects Democratic governors but hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in almost 100 years is that Republicans have been able to successfully tie Democratic Senate candidates to the national party. (You know the shit: coastal elite San Francisco values coming to do transgender abortions to white nationalist Jesus.)

But will that really work with this guy?

Dunno, watch his campaign announcement and tell us:

Washington Post conservative opinion writer Kathleen Parker — known in political circles as “The one who isn’t Peggy Noonan, we think?” — seems charmed by the idea of Kansas sending this Democratic pastor to the Senate. “God willing,” he’ll be elected, she says. (Or inshallah.) She emphasizes his empathy, and his very Moral High Ground reclamation of the very notion of right and wrong.

Parker writes, “[H]e replaces fire and brimstone with kindness and common sense imbued with biblical wisdom. He said his congregation includes Republicans, Democrats and independents in about equal numbers.”

He’s not mealy-mouthed — none of this new crop of Democratic candidates who number among the faithful is. He explicitly says he’s doing what he’s doing because of that motherfucker Donald Trump (he did not say “motherfucker”).

He calls the Trump regime’s policies “an assault on the values I preached and taught for 35 years.” He wanted someone to do something, and it turned out after some serious prayer and conversation with his wife that that someone was he. (Though he’s humble enough to admit he’s only “87.2 percent sure” this is God’s will for him. Sometimes God mumbles.)

Now, we should note that Hamilton, like James Talarico, is clearly a gay vegan six-genders potato taco-eating wokester from Wokeville, and probably also an Islamist jihadi. (Socialist communist totalitarian Bad Bunny lover.)

The Christian Post breathlessly reports on a “newly resurfaced sermon” Hamilton gave in 2022 where he preached that God is not going to send the atheists and non-Christians to burn in hell for all eternity. (Like this sermon was the secret his campaign had been hiding. Like they were gonna have to pay off whoever heard that sermon like Trump paid off Stormy Daniels.)

In a 2022 clip titled “Who goes to Heaven? Who goes to Hell?” Hamilton asked his congregation, “Does everybody else who doesn’t see through your same lens as clearly as you do, is everyone else going to burn forever in Hell because they don’t?”

He cited 1 Timothy 2:3–6, noting God’s desire that all people be saved, and explained that Jesus “has already paid whatever price needs to be paid for the sins of the world.” Hamilton continued, “Many of us believe that God can give the saving work of Jesus, God can take that payment Jesus has made and apply it to anyone he chooses based upon what he sees of their own hearts.” […]

Hamilton said he believes “there’s going to be a whole lot of people you’d be surprised are going to be in Heaven because of the grace of God. And when it comes to other faiths, I believe as a Christian that they are going to, when they get to Heaven, they’re going to see Jesus and they’re going to say, ‘Oh, it was you all along that I was searching for.’ But I don’t fear that those folks will spend eternity in Hell.”

AND THEN HE SAID:

“Here’s one thing I’m certain of: Jesus calls us to love our neighbors and even our enemies. We’re to practice love that includes our neighbors who are Muslim, our neighbors who are Jewish, our neighbors who are Hindu, our neighbors who are Buddhist, or atheists, or agnostic,” said Hamilton. “There’s just no question that we’re called to love, and we’re called to see them as God’s offspring.”

“They are our siblings, even if we don’t share the same faith,” he added.

Ooh, them’s fightin’ words, if you’re a white supremacist MAGA Christian!

It’s extremely threatening to them, because if you take away the punishment part of conservative Christianity, if you imagine a God who is bigger than the puny little bitch ass grievances of white Republican Christian men, if you rob them of their masturbatory fantasies that ONE DAY, YOU’LL SEE! their God is going to burn you queers and women and insufficiently respectful racial minorities IN HELLLLLLLLLLL …

Well then you’ve pretty much robbed their faith of its entire meaning. Conservative MAGA Christians hate Jesus, that’s not why they’re in church. They’re there because they’re too fucked up as humans to imagine a God who isn’t as much of a vengeful loser as they are.

Oh hello, speaking of the puniest little conservative Christian men God ever did phone it in while creating, Ted Cruz has something to say:

Imagine your concept of God being so pointless, shallow and needy that you think “No one comes to the Father except through me” simply involves babble-mouthing your way through the sinner’s prayer and then making sure you remain a homophobic racist little piece of shit all the rest of your days. And imagine Ted Cruz thinking he understands the Bible better than this theologian with a masters in divinity.

Adam Hamilton’s Jesus, on the other hand, has enough compassion that He’d even save Ted Cruz, even though Ted Cruz’s entire life is an exercise in missing the point, and he is obviously the kind of gargoyle piece of shit Jesus was talking about in Matthew 7:21-23.

(What if God saves literally everybody except the Ted Cruz types? Hahahahahahaha.)

Roger Marshall — speaking of Matthew 7:21-23/Ted Cruz types — is going to struggle mightily against Adam Hamilton, we reckon, if the first days of the general election are any indication. He’s trying to call Hamilton “too woke” for Kansas, lying and saying that in a 2020 sermon, Hamilton said “we need to repent from eating beef in a state like Kansas.” (They’re just going to dig through every sermon he’s ever preached.)

To which Hamilton replied with more of that Christ-like “love your neighbor” shit that is like garlic to white supremacist MAGA Christians:

“When did caring about your neighbor, being concerned for children, being concerned for the poor and vulnerable become woke?” Hamilton said. “And I think if you’re so far to the right on the political spectrum that being in the center and having compassion for people sounds woke, but that’s not woke. These are Kansas values.”

Hamilton told AFP in July that “The Christians we’re hearing in Washington don’t reflect the Jesus of the Gospels.” He’s just relentless with this stuff.

By the way, it should be made clear that, while Hamilton talks a lot about bringing people together, and while he did reference the “center” right there, he’s not compromising when it comes to people’s rights and dignity. About abortion, he says that “I do not believe that politicians should be making these decisions for women,” and he has been opposed to the amendments that have gone up in Kansas to try to take abortion rights away from people. (Kansas has notably voted to tell those amendments to fuck off each time as well.)

He has also long been very pro-LGBTQ, first as a pastor for decades, and now as a candidate.

Which brings us to Roger Marshall’s attack on Hamilton the other day, as he pledged to save Kansas from drag queens and the liberal beef police:

Whatever, weirdo.

Hey, you wanna know another thing? Hamilton preached at the prayer service for Barack Obama’s second inauguration. So basically he is Jeremiah Wright, speaking of digging through sermons.

To wrap this up, we’ll go back to Kathleen Parker, who quotes Hamilton speaking on a Wizard of Oz theme in the town of Liberal, Kansas:

“Lots of people [in Washington] have lost their minds,” he said, referring to the Scarecrow’s search for a brain. “A lot of them have lost their hearts. And there’s a lot of cowardly lions afraid to say what they know to be true. They’re so afraid they’ll be bullied and primaried that they go along with it until they lose. Then they’ll speak up. But it’s not courageous when you’re on the way out. It’s courageous when you have everything to lose and say, ‘You know, this is wrong and I’m sorry, I can’t support this.’”

I’ve been saying that the real Democratic intra-party struggle right now is not DSA vs. establishment or progressive vs. centrist, or any of that media-manufactured bullshit. Rather it’s “Team Fight” vs. all the Democrats who can’t get their thumbs out of their fuckin’ asses long enough to meet the moment, who are so desperately naive that they think once Trump is gone, they can go back to trading selfies at prayer breakfasts with their Republican colleagues, that the spell will be broken and the fascists will just become normal once again, so better preserve that good old bipartisan collegiality!

Thing is, Team Fight actually doesn’t look the same in every race. Could Adam Hamilton be what Team Fight looks like in Kansas?

Sure looks like maybe.

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Abdul El-Sayed has been the nominee for approximately seven minutes in the Michigan Senate race, and already conservative MAGA Republicans have settled on what they believe is their most potent weapon against him: he is a Muslim with a Muslim-sounding name! When has there ever been one of those in Michigan before?

They know this attack works because the last time they used that weapon against a young, attractive, highly educated midwesterner with a booming voice and a Muslim-sounding name, he was never heard from again. Also they use it because their followers are ignorant xenophobes and racists, and because it’s all they have.

It’s not like white MAGA Republicans have anything else to offer to voters, or to the human race in general.

One of the TPUSA never-nudes is saying ooga-booga words about how El-Sayed is an “Egyptian-descent Muslim man who is part of a larger scheme of the Islamification of America.” OK. Braindead Dan Bongino asserts that El-Sayed is somehow “Islamofascist and a communist at the same time,” because words don’t need actual meanings as long as they make MAGA morons shit their underpants. Joe Gruters, the head of the RNC, says El-Sayed “would have been friends of the guys flying the plane” on 9/11. Benny Johnson called El-Sayed a “dirty bastard” and an “absolute rat” and a “parasite.” Not sure if Russia wrote those words for him.

Ben Shapiro, who still thinks he gets to declare who is and isn’t a Jew, says El-Sayed is a “radical Muslim” and a “radical advocate for Muslims, including terrorists.”

One of the interchangeable white dumbfucks on Newsmax says voters “can’t spell” El-Sayed’s name, and that he is going to do Sharia law to them. (More like Shakira law if you’ve seen the video the above screengrab came from.)

I mean, you name it, and these inbred trash MAGA Americans are saying it, because they’re too stupid and fearful to wrap their heads around the concept of a progressive Muslim doctor who just wants to give them healthcare. And they know this is a surefire way to get their followers to dribble piss out of their pantlegs all the way into the voting booth, because their followers are incontinent racist morons.

Out of all the deranged reactions to El-Sayed, though, for sheer unbridled ignorance and babbling hate, we have to give it to reigning Stupidest Man In Senate History, piggy piggy piggy piggy piggy piggy piggy pigfuck cornpone hick garbage mouthbreather anal lesion Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville.

Tuberville, completely making up shit, claimed this week about El-Sayed that “The guy was basically a cheerleader for 9/11,” and more, as Jason Kyle Howard reports at Salon:

“I mean, come on,” Tuberville continued, “the country’s changed, but it hasn’t changed this much to put people in [office] that are basically terrorists.”

When I asked if he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, the senator replied, “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”

On Twitter, Tuberville, who still refers to himself as “Coach” because he thinks it’s cool, as opposed to invoking images of what happens when high school coaches are asked to “teach” an academic class, amplified his comments:

Tuberville, who is currently running for governor of Alabama (like GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan, he appears to be much more of a Floridian), also said this week that Alabama might need to “build a 30-foot wall around” itself to keep out the Islamics.

“I can see it coming, I can hear it coming. You can just smell it out there, that they want to take this country over.”

“They’re a lot more aggressive than we are as Americans,” he said.

Yep, somebody’s got the derangement syndrome.

And Christ, is there anyone alive who’s more of a cucked weenus than an American conservative Christian Republican man?

Speaking of derangement syndrome, there’s a new contender for the most severe case of Mamdani Derangement Syndrome on record, which is very similar to El-Sayed Derangement Syndrome (ED for short) in that both men are young, sexy and make white conservative MAGA types feel very, very insecure.

Rudy Giuliani, it turns out, is not dead yet, and he went on an amaaaaaazing rant this week about the man who has replaced him in the history books as America’s Mayor, now that Giuliani has turned into a demented pile of disbarred dogshit who’s respected by no one.

Media Matters has the video and the transcript:

GIULIANI: He wants to have free, free pre-K starting at 6 months old. Six months old. What the hell is he going to teach them at 6 months old?

How to hate the parents, that’s what he’s going to teach them.

How will Mamdani teach babies to hate their parents? Unclear. Ms. Rachel probably involved, I reckon.

Also Giuliani says Mamdani will teach the babies how to chop their penises off:

GIULIANI: How — hey, did you ever think of being a girl, kid? Not bad being a girl. Come on, it doesn’t hurt to chop your penis off.

Well this is New York, so their woke parents are probably also teaching them that at home.

Anyway, Rudy Giuliani says Zohran Mamdani is going to teach the six-month-old babies to chop off their penises, and that’s a normal thing to believe, definitely.

GIULIANI: Am I kidding or am I not kidding?

Third option that takes into account that Rudy Giuliani’s brain is made of expired pudding?

GIULIANI: Am I being a little crude to make the point? You’re damn right I am. Is it a point that needs to be made dramatically? You’re damn right it does.

Not sure how he’d say less crudely that Zohran Mamdani is going to teach the little babies to cut off their penises, but yes, he is being very dramatic.

From there Giuliani pivoted into a rant about communists and socialists and liberals who have “concept of money” and “who’s going to pay for it!” and all that typical past-its-sell-by-date Republican Boomer shit, as if he hadn’t just made the extraordinary claim that Zohran Mamdani wants babies in pre-K so he can teach them to cut off their chrams.

It made for quite a juxtaposition. Very “Back in my day babies had to push their strollers uphill both ways to Dr. Penis Chopper’s office, and you had to pay for it in cash!”

He came back to it the full weirdness, though:

GIULIANI: Are you doing that so that you teach them how to read and write? That they, at the early age, like the young people of Greece, learn critical reasoning so they can be independent people who can make judgments on their own and not be brainwashed by your communist educational institutions and your communist media?

No. You don’t do that. You teach them that it’s OK to be a transvestite.

Like this?

GIULIANI: In fact, you have transvestites come to school and give lectures to show them it’s perfectly OK.

Mamdani’s New York now featuring Transvestite Career Day!

GIULIANI: And if you want to change your — if you want to change your gender and you don’t want to tell your parents, perfectly — parents are the enemy.

Mom and Dad think their kids still have penises! Hahahaha, DUMB.

GIULIANI: I’m explaining to you Democrat philosophy that is ruining your children. This is the reason that they’re like they are.

You betcha.

So like I said, a new leading competitor in the Mamdani Derangement Syndrome category.

To be fair, though, Mamdani is literally Rudy’s negation, and when Giuliani dies, like all Trump ass-lickers, literally nobody will ever think about him again except to occasionally wonder how he’s doing in hell. (How’s it going, Lindsey Graham?)

There were already a lot of contenders in the Mamdani derangement contest, obviously — that’s an exhaustive link right there — including Fox News guest Sid Rosenberg, who went on Fox & Friends just this weekend and declared of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani that “This guy is a terrorist. That’s the bottom line, I’ll say it. You don’t want to say it, I’ll say it. He’s a terrorist, he’s a jihadist. He hates the Jewish people. He hates America.” Even Fox News had to apologize on-air for calling the mayor a “terrorist.”

That guy didn’t suggest Mamdani was going to teach babies how to use their safety scissors for elective peener-ectomies, though, so Rudy wins for now.

To be clear, this is who these people are talking about:

And this is who they’re talking about with El-Sayed:

Yeeeeeah, somebody’s got the derangement syndrome. And it ain’t us.

Easy to see why they’re shitting their pants scared, though. We would be too, if we sucked as much as they do.

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Earlier this week there was a poll of the Texas Senate race that made me sit straight up in my chair. It was from Texas Public Opinion Research, and it showed James Talarico with a five-point lead over crime fraudster pervert Ken Paxton.

At Wonkette I innocently asked if calling Talarico a gay vegan who eats the wrong breakfast tacos was somehow not working. Also not working would seem to be attacks from right-wing bozo fascists like Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick strutting up on stage in his wife’s sassy TJ Maxx faux-leather jacket, going after Talarico’s faith and saying he is going to go to hell for — in essence — bein’ too fuckin’ Christlike.

Of course, that poll, as I noted, was just one poll, and Talarico has to keep his eye on the ball and keep it going all the way to the finish line, just like every other candidate. Plus, it wasn’t a five-point lead with Talarico over 50, which matters. It was 45-40, which leaves room for a bunch of undecideds to be not so sure until the very end, at which point they might just pull the lever for the fascist (it’s Texas).

But now there’s a new poll out from Fox News. (Which is a reputable and quite good polling outfit, unlike its associated network.) It’s not five points, it’s three, but what did we just say about fitty percent?

Uh oh! Time to call Talarico a gay transgender vegan fake Christian who eats potatoes on his breakfast tacos some more! Because it’s literally all they got, and they are even more terrified than they were yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that.

Right on cue, we have a coordinated attack from the RNC, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, Stupidest Man On The Internet Jim Hoft and more, which reveals that — OMG! — James Talarico reads exotic mystical gay Sharia law Muslim Rumi poetry, and even more than that, he says it’s taught him things about his Christian faith!

Great. Just great. He’s gay and transgender and vegan and made of potato tacos, and now he’s a Muslim. Great.

“EXPOSED AGAIN!” screamed Stupidest Man On The Internet Jim Hoft AKA Gateway Pundit . (We always imagine Jim typing things with his mouth hanging open and his nostrils flaring, like Will Ferrell’s Harry Caray character.)

The RNC similarly screamed “UNEARTHED!”

Hoft continued:

In newly surfaced audio from an April 2024 appearance on The State of Belief podcast alongside Muslim state Rep. Salman Bhojani, Talarico openly credited Islam for molding his religious beliefs.

Openly credited Islam! Openly!

“I know personally that I’ve learned as much about my faith from Salman’s tradition, from the Islamic mystics, from poets like Rumi, as much as I have from Christian authors and Christian writers,” Talarico said.

He continued by praising interfaith dialogue for bringing “new flavors and new colors” to his tradition and even quoted the Islamic mystic Rumi: “In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.”

He reads? Burn him!

Also, Rumi is fuckin’ cool. Guarantee Jim Hoft is too stupid to know the difference betwteen regular Islam and the mystics, even as he types the words. He’s known as the Stupidest Man On The Internet for a reason.

Hoft continued:

This is the same James Talarico who previously described himself as “a Christian who hates Christianity.”

Yeah, yep. I love Jesus but I hate His followers. “I love your Christ but I hate your Christians because your Christians are unlike your Christ,” like Gandhi said. It’s the most common sentiment in the world, because that’s how bad predominantly white conservative Christians suck, they’re the fuckin’ worst people on the planet, and everybody knows it. It’s the most uncontroversial statement in the world, especially in a political environment where half of Gen Z says it doesn’t want to be anywhere near the doors of a church because of the way those garbage people spend all their time worshiping Donald Trump’s old balls and none of it serving Jesus, much less emulating Him.

It’s a damn bumper sticker. “Jesus, protect me from your followers.”

Yes, even in Texas. Honestly, likely even moreso in Texas than other states.

The Stupidest Man on the Internet, who also happens to be a gay MAGA conservative who loves acting as a servant to the types of MAGA Christian fascists who think he’s going to burn in hell for being gay when he dies, just babbled and babbled about how this makes Talarico a “supposed” Christian, this “man who hates Christianity” who reads “Islamic mystics and Sufi poetry.” Why, Talarico probably even understands Rumi, like a woke common transgender potato taco gay homosexual Muslim.

Hoft notes that Talarico doesn’t even think members of all religions besides conservative Christianity are going to hell. Does he even think Jim Hoft is going to hell, like the people Jim Hoft supports?

Yeah, so they’re still quite fuckin’ scared of James Talarico.

As I mentioned, The Daily Wire is snorting this line of bath salts too. If anything their article is even stupider than Hoft’s, and it’s written by a guy named “Leif Le Mahieu,” which is in and of itself funny. Bless his heart.

Leif whines about Talarico’s “uber-woke church in Austin” (does it even do cross-burnings or pledge allegiance to Trump?) and is beyond appalled that Talarico said on that podcast in 2024 that it’s a good thing that Texas is “the home of more Muslim Americans than any other state in the union.”

Then, revealing that he definitely is too much of a stupid conservative Christian white boy to know what “Rumi” or “mystic” is — or just that he knows the average Daily Wire reader is that fucking stupid — he types this filler “context” paragraph, presumably to goose his word count:

The creep of Islamic ideology into Texas has been a hot issue over the last few years, with Governor Greg Abbott designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a foreign terrorist organization in November 2025. Abbott accused CAIR of attempting to impose Sharia law on the Lone Star State. State officials have also moved to challenge planned Islamic cities, keep schools promoting Sharia law from receiving state dollars, and pushed backs on efforts to brand the Alamo as an “Islamic building.”

OK, simmer down, young Leif. You just sound like a dumbass.

But again, they’re fuckin’ scared.

And it sounds like they should be. Wanna see the other Fox News polls that came out yesterday?

Sweep those, let Troy Jackson take the fight to Susan Collins in Maine, give Abdul El-Sayed a chance to finally pivot to the general in Michigan — don’t listen to the doomsayers on that one, y’all — and that’s more than ballgame.

Then, accountability begins.

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As I mentioned Friday, there was much more to that interview, and encouraged people to watch/read it. As it happens, Uncloseted Media reached out and asked if I’d be willing to cross-post their interview here at The Moral High Ground, and I gladly agreed.

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This story includes references to sexual abuse. Viewer/reader discretion is advised.

In February, Doug Wilson made headlines after giving a sermon at the Pentagon as part of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s monthly Christian worship service. Wilson, the lead pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, holds a number of controversial views: He believes the U.S. should become a Christian theocracy, married women shouldn’t have the right to vote and gay sex should be illegal.

In his first interview with an LGBTQ publication, Wilson talks about his connections to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration. He estimates that 10 to 20 people in the government are aligned with his radical ideology. He explains that he thinks trans people are “sad,” certain elements of his idea of “homosexual behavior” should be punishable by execution and in certain cases of marital rape, both parties should be disciplined.

“UNCLOSETED with Spencer Macnaughton” is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

Watch the full interview above or read the transcript here:

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone. Welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today, I’m speaking with Doug Wilson, the lead pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and an increasingly prominent figure in conservative Christianity. Wilson has recently attracted national attention for his connection to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as his controversial beliefs, which many say align with Christian nationalism, and include denying married women the right to vote and banning gay sex nationwide. Here, he sits down with Uncloseted for his first ever interview with an LGBTQ news outlet. Pastor Wilson, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Doug Wilson: You’re most welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

Embedded with Hegseth and the Trump Administration

SM: Great. So first, you’ve made a lot of headlines this year in particular because in February, you were a guest pastor for the Pentagon’s newly instituted monthly Christian worship service, where you prayed alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth closed the prayer by putting his hand on your shoulder. That’s pretty, kind of, major to get that high up in the federal government. How did you develop your relationship with Hegseth and subsequently get invited to this very high-level prayer?

DW: I’ll give you a telescope version of that. Before Pete Hegseth was the secretary of war, he was with Fox News. He was involved in making a documentary on the state of education in America and met a friend of mine, David Goodwin, who is the CEO of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which is an organization I founded. He was so impressed by that kind of education that he moved to Tennessee to enroll his kids in a school like this, but he was still working for Fox. So he’d fly into Tennessee on Sundays, and the only church that was open in the afternoon was a CREC church, which is the denomination that I’m in. And after he was appointed as secretary of war, He moved to D.C., and I was in the Nashville area and filled the pulpit at that church, Pilgrim Hill Church. And as it happened, the Hegseths were back in Nashville. I met him there at church and we visited for a few minutes. And then we planted a church service in Washington, D.C., a little over a year ago, so he’s been coming to that church service. I’ve met him a couple of times there in D.C., and of course, I met with him when he invited me to the Pentagon. But that’s the extent of our meetings, like three times, maybe four.

SM: There’s reports that he considers you his spiritual adviser. What does that mean exactly?

DW: I’m not a policy adviser. But it would be the sort of thing where, if he were in some sort of newspaper conflagration over something or other, I’m functioning currently in a pastoral role. As it happens, this coming Sunday, the Washington, D.C., church service is going to be installing a pastor there. So for the first year or so, our church here in Moscow was supplying, sending and recruiting people to come and preach there, but they will have a full-time pastor starting this next Sunday.

SM: Wow. And you’ve spoken about how, you know, although President Donald Trump is not an evangelical by any stretch, you said, quote, “his administration is full of them.” So how many folks in his administration do you reckon are aligned with your church and might attend the church service that you guys are putting on in D.C.?

DW: I do know that if Kamala had been elected, the White House would have been pretty evangelical-free. She would not have been hiring people like me. But the Trump administration just has quite a few conservative Christians working there. And in our D.C. church service, there are a number of people that are either working for the government, you know, they’re assigned to the Pentagon, or they have roles in the administration.

SM: More than 10, more than 20? Roughly, how many would you say?

DW: Boy, I would say between 10 and 20.

SM: Wow, in the actual administration?

DW: I would say between 10 and 20 in the government.

SM: In the government, got it. And who else in addition to Hegseth would be part of that?

DW: Sure, no major players at the cabinet level or anything like that. And as for the people who are the next tier or two tiers down from that, I’d rather not say because I don’t want to ruin their day.

SM: You think it would ruin their day if you said who they are?

DW: Yeah, basically. For example, I did an interview with NPR. When the NPR video segment dropped, our church secretaries [had] to not answer the phone for three days.

SM: Wow. Why?

DW: Because they don’t want to be vilified.

Back in the Closet, Boys

SM: Understood. So yes, obviously, we’re an LGBTQ publication. Is this the first LGBTQ publication you’ve done an interview with?

DW: I believe that is… I think that’s fair, yes.

SM: Cool. So obviously we’re going to focus on some of the things you’ve said in that realm, right?

DW: Right.

SM: And one of the things you’ve said is that there should be anti-sodomy laws and other prohibition on sexual behavior in all 50 states. So sodomy obviously gets thrown around as a buzzword. What do you mean exactly by that when you said it should be illegalized? Are we talking about anal intercourse between two men or what exactly do we mean by sodomy?

DW: Right. Let me make a distinction and then back up and then answer your question. The distinction is there’s a difference between politics, which is the art of the possible: What proposals am I proposing right now? And secondly, what is my sketch of an ideal Christian republic 250 years from now? Those are two separate things.

SM: Even if it’s 250 years from now, what specifically do you mean by that? Like what becomes illegal when it comes to sodomy laws?

DW: OK. I would regard sodomy as male-to-male intercourse, anal intercourse or oral intercourse.

SM: Would hand jobs count or just anal and oral?

DW: No, between two men, between two men.

SM: Hand jobs as well.

DW: Hand jobs, oral sex and anal intercourse—

SM: Got it.

DW: —would be sodomy. In the old order, the legal definitions of sodomy would have included oral foreplay between a married heterosexual couple, right? So, I think that there were definitions of sodomy that went beyond scripture.

SM: So you’re OK with heterosexual people in oral foreplay or those sorts of things if they’re married?

DW: Yeah.

SM: And then what about women-on-women lovers? Like is oral sex OK for them under these laws or no?

DW: Well, “OK” is too loosey.

SM: Yeah, but in your ideal world 250 years from now, would that be illegal across all 50 states?

DW: No, and this is going to be interesting, because I’m a Bible guy. If you go through the Law of Moses, you won’t find any legal prescription of lesbianism. This brings us up against the difference between a sin and a crime, right? There are things that are manifestly sinful for every Bible-believing Christian, which I believe ought not to be criminal. You don’t have any penalty in the Old Testament attached to lesbian behavior. It would have been considered a sin, a form of sexual immorality, but not criminal.

SM: Got it. So then in your ideal world, gay men engaging in sexual behavior would be illegal under sodomy laws across all 50 states. You’ve mentioned, though, that you wouldn’t want it to be too heavily enforced because you don’t want to create a, quote, “sexual Gestapo.” So how exactly would this be enforced?

DW: Well, I would say that the main enforcement mechanism would be social expectations and a withholding of societal approval. It would be sort of “back in the closet, boys,” not because of fear of legal retribution, but because this is simply not done.

SM: But that’s different than what you’ve said in the past. You said sodomy laws, right? So would it be illegal, or are you kind of walking back?

DW: No, I’m not walking it back. I think it ought to be that society needs to express its disapproval of this behavior in law.

SM: So then if it’s a law, what’s the punishment if somebody makes that act, which would be illegal? What would the punishment be?

DW: So the punishment would vary. I’m reluctant to give the government excess powers of invading private homes.

SM: OK, so just theoretically, I get caught having sex with my boyfriend, what happens to me? What is the punishment?

DW: In the 1980s, there was a movement called Christian Reconstruction. And the Christian Reconstructionists wanted to take the Old Testament law, sort of with a grappling hook, and bring it over and drop it down on modern society. And that would mean the maximum penalty there for homosexual behavior would be execution. And so there were debates among the Reconstructionists of: “Do we have to stone the homosexuals?” And there were some people saying, “Well, firing squads are OK because they’re throwing very tiny stones at a high rate of speed,” but they were talking about execution. In that debate back then, I pointed out that King Asa and King Jehoshaphat in the Old Testament closed the bathhouses, and they exiled the sodomites from the land. And their behavior is praised in the text. That told me that execution, although a lawful penalty for homosexual behavior, was not the minimum penalty; it was the maximum penalty.

SM: And do you believe that still, that in your eyes the maximum penalty for homosexual behavior in an ideal world, in Pastor Wilson’s ideal world, would be execution?

DW: Yeah.

SM: You do?

DW: Yeah, if you ask me: “Could you ever envision a homosexual crime of any nature being visited with the death penalty?” Yes, I could.

SM: You, in other words, want to create a law where—a real law, in this country eventually—where the maximum penalty for me having sex with my boyfriend would be my execution? I just want to make sure that’s clear.

DW: No, no, no. That’s why I wanted to finish this scenario. I do want to create a society where the maximum penalty for a Roman Catholic priest molesting or raping an altar boy is solved and addressed with a tall tree and a short rope.

SM: Right, that’s pedophilia though, which is of course different than homosexuality.

DW: Well, it’s a species of homosexual behavior. So let’s say it’s a Roman Catholic priest and a 15-year-old boy. Or there’s all kinds of variations of human behavior. But there are homosexual crimes that are egregious enough that I would want to execute the person for.

SM: So you see pedophilia as an element of homosexuality, is that right?

DW: Yeah, if we’re talking about the alphabet people. Right?

SM: You’re referencing LGBTQ community?

DW: LGBTQ+. What’s under the plus?

SM: Not pedophilia. Would you consider adding a “P”? Do you think a P is meant into that umbrella of LGBTQ?

DW: Absolutely.

SM: You do? Because you conflate lesbians and gay people with, like, kind of akin to pedophiles. People who rape children?

DW: I don’t think that I’m making that association. I think the LGBTQ+ acronym, that whole chain, is sort of a sexual alliance of people who are defying traditional biblical norms. And pedophilia is one of those things that defies those norms.

SM: Do you see two men having sex as equally sinful as a man raping a girl?

DW: Yeah, they’re both violations of God’s law.

Conversion Therapy

SM: Obviously, if you’re seeing both of these as sinful, pedophilia and homosexuality, this is a very big concern for you, I would imagine, in society, right? So I wanted to ask, you know, in March, I’m sure you’ve been following this, the Supreme Court overturned Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. And you’ve called Canada’s conversion therapy ban a, quote, “wretched and misbegotten law.”

DW: I did.

SM: In your church, right, as the lead pastor, if somebody comes to you saying, “I’m attracted to the same sex,” should they be allowed to go through conversion therapy? And if so, what is the most effective form of conversion therapy in your eyes?

DW: I’m a pastor of hundreds of people, and I’m a pastor to people whose sexual temptations are homosexual. I’ve counseled people in that position and have seen them arrive at victory over those temptations.

SM: I see it based on the science and, you know, methodologically sound evidence-based research, it is a discredited practice, but I want to know from your perspective, what works?

DW: So what works is Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ forgives sin, and Jesus Christ empowers us to overcome sin.

SM: In layman’s terms, if you can, right? Are you just saying pray? Or is there more to it? Like what else—do you give them assignments? Do you give them homework? Are there things they need to do? Or is it simply just pray, pray, pray, pray, pray?

DW: Yeah, it would be easy to sort of dismiss what I’m saying as sort of “pray the gay away.” So when I’m counseling someone who is struggling with this and wants out, one of the places I start is with that person’s relationship with his father, that person’s relationship with his mother, that person’s upbringing. “Do you have a healthy relationship with your father? Do you hate your mother?” You know, it’s not like, “What do you do when you’re horny?” If you just start there, you’re healing the wound lightly, basically.

SM: Have you ever experienced same-sex attraction?

DW: Uh, no.

SM: Never?

DW: No.

SM: No. Got it. And so when they come, right, if say somebody comes to you and says, “Pastor Wilson, Pastor Wilson, I am experiencing this and I love your church, but I’m happy, I have a boyfriend.” Do they stay in the church, or what happens?

DW: Such a person would not be allowed to become a member. But such a person would be welcome to attend as often as they wanted. You’re welcome to attend, but if you were a member, there’s a commitment to becoming a member and that commitment means living as a Christian is obligated by the Bible to live.

The Path to Ending Obergefell

SM: Got it. And OK, so Obergefell, yes, I know you wanted to talk about that, because you said in the here and now, that’s something that you would want overturned.

DW: One of the reasons I would go to Obergefell as one of the action points is I think that that is actually a possibility. Just like Roe was overturned, I think Obergefell could be overturned and it might be a matter of as few as two Supreme Court justices.

SM: When you’re in D.C. or when you’re helping with prayer with Hegseth or other folks in the administration, are there rumblings that there’s a possibility that that’s within reach?

DW: Yeah, I’ve not had any conversations like that with administration officials, but I have certainly written a lot about it and I know that I’m read by people in powerful places.

SM: Of course, because if they align with you ideologically, then they must want that too, I would imagine, if they share the same belief systems as you, no?

DW: I’m not plotting with administration officials to make a move on Obergefell, but I am very vocal about it. So I think repealing Obergefell is an attainable goal in our current climate.

SM: When it comes to the legal issue behind it. What would be the kind of roadmap to overturn it?

DW: I think there’d have to be an increased number of conservative Christians in the Senate. You would have to have trained, capable judges who were evangelical Christians, who had been operating at lower courts, who were in a position to be nominated to that position and survive the character assassination battle, you know? Before, Senate confirmations, hearings were all about abortion. I think the next ones will be about Obergefell.

SM: You do?

DW: Yeah, I do. I think that that is going to be the issue. And so if you have more Christians in the Senate, if you have Christian men nominated, and the Senate has the kind of people who don’t fold under pressure, then it is a doable thing.

Trans People Are ‘Sad’

SM: Mm-hmm. All an interesting perspective. You’ve spoken less about transgender people.

DW: Yeah.

SM: I wanna know your thoughts. In your ideal world, what would happen to people who are trans? Do they have a place in society? What’s your view?

DW: Yeah, this is… no way to talk about it without talking about it. I think transgenderism is simply sad. I don’t think that it should be elevated to a category given equal carved-out rights. I think this should be treated with love and compassion and help, counseling.

SM: About 1% of the population identifies as trans and the vast majority of those people, once they get past stigma, live their lives healthily and happily, so I’m unclear what your issue is with it.

DW: The man is the image and glory of God, and the woman is the glory of the man. I believe God created us in such a way as to reflect his glory. And the transsexual movement, I think, is a movement away from that glory. And so when I see people who are… just… well…

SM: You can be candid. Be candid.

DW: I don’t want to give offense.

SM: You won’t offend, go ahead.

DW: So when I see people who are tatted up and pierced, dog collar, it’s hard for me to not see self-loathing.

SM: But what connection do those folks have to trans folks? I mean, that’s a different kind of, you know, I have a lot of trans friends, none of them are wearing those things.

DW: Well, I’m glad you’re more fortunate.

SM: Do you have a lot of trans friends who do wear those things?

DW: No, I have, I encounter people out in the community, and I have a pastor’s eye, right? And one of the things I can identify and see and greatly sympathize with is people who are miserable and they’re trying to… “Maybe this’ll work. Maybe this will give me a sense of who I really am.”

SM: Do you think trans people are dangerous? I mean, Trump recently included radical transgender folks in his counter-terrorism strategy. Do you have concern there?

DW: We’ve seen many instances of transsexual violence over the last few years. That doesn’t mean that all transsexuals are violent, but a disproportionate number of the violent episodes are coming from transsexual individuals.

SM: And I think a lot of the data that actually shows when you look at things like school shootings, the disproportionate number of cisgender people are perpetrating those, actually white cisgender men are the most common and disproportionately more likely even when you break it down per percentage of the population.

Disempowering Women

SM: Obviously we’re an LGBTQ publication, but we do stories on women too, right? And you’ve been in the news for your belief systems around women. I wanna know just more generally, what role do women have in society for you? In your world, should they be allowed to be anything they want? Doctors? Lawyers? Should they be allowed to serve in the military? How do they place in society in your view?

DW: Yeah, I don’t think there should be any legal barrier to women getting a medical degree, getting a law degree. But I don’t think there should be a legal barrier to women being in the military.

SM: Can they be in combat?

DW: No, that’s the one place I would limit them. I’d say women should be kept away from combat roles. I don’t think women ought to be put in front lines.

SM: Why not?

DW: Because I served on a submarine, a couple of submarines, and I just can’t get inside the head of the person who thought that was a good idea.

SM: Why? Just you don’t think women are as capable in that area?

DW: No, I think that if you have women on board a submarine, and we went to sea a couple of times, submerged for two and a half months, you’ve got 130 people locked up in this steel tube under the water for two and a half months. You put three women on board. That’s like, “Why shouldn’t I throw catnip into the pack of cats?”

SM: Well, there’s going to be gay people in the submarine too.

DW: Yeah. That’s another problem.

SM: And tell me, I have read a few things like, “Women should submit to men, obey their husband, obey their father.” What exact role do women have as it relates to their relationship with men? Men should be the head of the household? Clear up what you mean by women’s role in that dynamic.

DW: The Bible requires women, “A woman should submit,” Paul says, “to her own husband.” And what that means, my wife is submissive to me, but what that means is she doesn’t have to submit to all the other men.

SM: Say a wife and a husband are together and the wife says, “I want to go to med school and become a doctor.” And the husband says, “Nope, I want you to stay home and be with the kids.” Should she stay home?

DW: Yeah.

SM: She should. OK. Because she submits to the husband?

DW: Because she submits to the husband. Let’s say this is a counseling case for us, and the wife wants to do something and the husband has said, “No, I really don’t want you to do that.” We would say, “You married him and you vowed before God and witnesses that you would follow and obey him. And this is one of those cases where he’s made a decision and it’s a lawful decision and you should submit to it.”

Sexual Abuse

SM: When it comes to sex, right? Like, say the man says, “I want to make another baby with you tonight.” And the woman says, “No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to do this right now.” Should he still do it if he wants to? Should she still submit if she doesn’t want to have sex that night?

DW: No, I would say, basically, marital rape is wrong. So if he forces himself on her and rapes her, then I believe that that’s a sin.

SM: If he raped her, how would he be disciplined? Would you call authorities or would you deal with it internally?

DW: It would depend on the nature of it. It would, you know, it would depend on, a violent rape? Yes.

SM: You would call the police?

DW: What’s that?

SM: You would call the police?

DW: Yeah.

SM: What does a nonviolent rape look like?

DW: Oh, let’s say she just says, “I really don’t want to. I’m not into this. I don’t want to, please don’t treat me this way.” But he says “Too bad.” You know, he’s just being a boar. He’s being awful. And someone like that should be disciplined by the church, but there was no crime.

SM: And what line is there, like, she should just “give in,” right? Is she allowed to say no to the husband? Or should she just submit?

DW: Here’s why it’s a gray area.

SM: And it’s a gray area in terms of, you might not consider it a violent rape. For many people, it is not a gray area, no means no. And I think that’s the kind of understanding we have societally at this point in America, but perhaps, is it a gray area for you, I guess, is what I’m trying to ask.

DW: No, let’s say she’s had an absolute horrendous day, is fried, just is exhausted and she says, “Honey, I really, please, please no.” Does she have the right to do that? Absolutely, yes, she has the right to do that. Does she have the right to cut him off for six months? No.

SM: She doesn’t?

DW: No. So if she says, if that situation came to us, and the husband said, “Here’s the thing, we’ve been married for five years and we’ve not had sex for the last six months, and she just won’t.” Right? In this situation, she’s got the problem. And we’d address it like, “Look, we have to talk, you’re married, you need to act like you’re married.”

SM: So in month six, if she is in a space where she doesn’t want to have sex, and he rapes her, is that justified because she, in your view, has held out for too long?

DW: It’s not justified, but neither is her behavior justified. So that would, basically what you’d have there is a marital mess. And both of them sinning against each other.

SM: And when something like that happens, what’s the discipline you give to both the man and the woman in that case?

DW: We would say we want you to start coming in for weekly counseling, and we want you to agree that the end goal of this counseling is for you to be back together as husband and wife, living together, having sexual relations, the way a normal couple would.

SM: OK, got it. And there have been numerous accusations of sexual abuse at your church. And I’ll read them, I wanna let you respond, but when 14-year-old Natalie Greenfield reported sexual abuse by Jamin Wight to the police, there are allegations that you pushed for him to get lenient treatment. And you’ve officiated the marriage of Steven Sitler, who was arrested for sexual contact with a minor and later admitted to being sexually stimulated by his baby. When a man commits a rape in your church, like this, what happens? Walk me through exactly what happens, because obviously this is a pervasive issue in conservative Christian churches across the United States, and there have been these reports at your church. So what happens when you find out a man has committed a rape?

DW: Oh, what you do is call the cops.

SM: How many times have you called the cops, would you say, for issues of sexual abuse or rape?

DW: Oh. Maybe five?

SM: And how many times would you say a woman has said no, whether it’s that six month thing or some other thing, where you deal with it internally?

DW: No, the one accusation that’s out there about marital rape is an accusation that is coming from a stone-cold liar.

SM: So, you deny those allegations that have been...

DW: Yeah, I deny that we’ve ever sanctioned marital rape. That’s just flatly false.

SM: How many instances have there been when a woman has alleged or a child has alleged that they’re experiencing some form of sexual assault or S.A. where you deal with it internally?

DW: I can’t think of any.

SM: None?

DW: No, if you’re talking about a self-report of, if a child told me that “I’m being molested,” I wouldn’t ever sit on that.

SM: OK, and have you heard reports from other people where they say a child’s been molested and you didn’t sit on that?

DW: Yeah, so I’m going to make up an example, OK?

SM: Oh, no, no. No, I’m just curious. Like, have there been other bystanders or people in the church who have told you this child may be being molested, where you haven’t reported it?

DW: Oh no, what you want to do is follow up on it. You want to check and you know, is there something to this? Is the person reporting to you a rumor or something that they, “I saw them in the grocery store and the girl looked unhappy.” Is there anything to it? If there’s anything to it, you pursue it. You should be all over it.

SM: But are there instances where people have suggested this could be happening?

DW: And then we did nothing? No.

SM: Yeah. No?

DW: No.

SM: No. OK.

DW: Basically, we have an aggressive stance toward this thing. Reports to the contrary, notwithstanding. This is an area where we are lied about routinely.

SM: You have you mentioned the reputation that your church has of, you know, sexual assault or child molestation? Why do you think that exists?

DW: Well, because we’re the size of a small town. And these accusations have come up over the course of like 30 years. I would put a…

SM: But a lot of small towns don’t have accusations associated with them like that.

DW: Let’s put it this way. I saw a bumper sticker once in my grandma’s hometown in Nebraska. “You don’t see much in a small town, but what you hear makes up for it.” The human race is messed up and sexual misbehavior is a big part of that mess.

SM: Why do you think it disproportionately happens in conservative Christian communities?

DW: I think that’s false. I don’t think it disproportionately happens.

SM: You don’t?

DW: I don’t.

SM: So the statistics are just kind of false?

DW: Yeah. Yeah.

SM: One of my last questions, and thank you so much for your time—

DW: You’re welcome.

SM: —is, you know, I’m obviously an openly gay man. I have a boyfriend, we have sex, right? I don’t believe I’m gonna change at all as time goes on. In your view, where am I going? What happens to me?

DW: So, as an evangelical Christian, I believe that the only way to salvation is through Jesus Christ, through looking to him in his death, burial and resurrection. And the sin that you’re committing is homosexual sin. And so I believe that you are spiritually lost, excluded from heaven, and I believe they’re only ultimately two destinations: heaven and hell. So to be fair and perfectly honest and not trying to be rude, but I think you’re lost.

SM: And I’m going to hell.

DW: Apart from repentance, right.

SM: Got it. In a society that gives men so much power, do you ever get concerned that giving men power over women, does it not put them at greater risk of being abused? What happens when there’s no stop gaps and you have powerful men at the top who aren’t helping women who are struggling? Because that does happen a lot.

DW: If you have a patriarchal society, then you are creating the possibility that certain powerful men will abuse their position. Right, that’s true.

SM: Of course, yeah.

DW: OK, so I’m not disputing that. What I would argue is the way you deal with that, the most effective way to deal with that, how do you guard against evil men, predatory men? Well, you need good men to be protectors. So, I believe that fathers and brothers and pastors and elders should be a line of protection around their women.

SM: Obviously that doesn’t happen in a lot of instances. So if women don’t have their own voice and don’t have an outlet, what’s their recourse if the man who’s in charge of protecting them has failed? Like what should they do?

DW: Right.

SM: If they’re in one of these insular communities where the men in charge thinks it’s OK to abuse them.

DW: That’s a terrible dilemma. And I’ve seen it, right? I’ve seen women who need protection from their protector. I have seen that. But you don’t fix the problem by making women dependent upon a federal agency. Now what happens when they need-

SM: What if you just gave women more power and didn’t have it where they have to submit to the men?

DW: Who gives them the power?

SM: I mean a lot of spaces in society see men and women as equal and don’t ask them to submit to their husbands in this way.

DW: Yeah, but they do ask them to submit to them, right? In other words, you have structures in society. And these structures in society, if they say we’re going to stipulate that men and women are equal here, that’s just a statement, that’s just a proposition, that’s just words unless you police it. And somebody’s got to be the police.

SM: But the police should never be women.

DW: Yeah, because they won’t be able to do the job. Problem is, those women are going to be defeated. Men are aggressive, stronger than women. If it came to it, they wouldn’t, they’d be able to… It won’t be an effective defense so if you had… Let’s say we elected a woman president and she said, “As my first act I want the entire Secret Service detail that accompanies me all time, I’m the first woman president, I want all the Secret Service detail to be women also.” The assassins are going to say, you know, “Good job. Ha! Just made my day.”

SM: Yeah, we’ve been on for an hour and 15. So grateful for your time.

DW: You’re welcome.

SM: And we’re an objective news publication. And I think I can objectively say that I believe you’re homophobic, transphobic and sexist. Why should I think anything differently after this phone call?

DW: If your worldview is correct, then absolutely, that’s what I am. I don’t regard myself as homophobic by the standards of scripture at all. According to the standards of the sexual revolution, yeah, I’m homophobic and transphobic. You’ve never met anybody worse.

SM: I think that’s a perfect place to leave it. Pastor Doug Wilson, I really do appreciate you coming on and speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

DW: Right, thanks for having me.

SM: And if you liked that episode and want more of our journalism, go to unclosetedmedia.com or find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Additional reporting by Sophie Holland and Bella Sayegh.

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Doug Wilson, the most well-known leader of the creepy Reformed Christian nationalist movement to which Secretary Shitfaced Pete Hegseth belongs, is on a little media tour right now. There was an NPR interview that made a lot of waves that I meant to tear apart, but didn’t get to it, which is fine, because lots of people did that handily. Now, this man, who looks like a mall Santa on an episode of Law & Order: SVU that Elliott and Olivia bring in for tricking kids into reaching their hands into “Santa’s bag” to pick out a “special gift,” has done his first interview with a gay publication.

Spencer MacNaughton of Uncloseted Media, to be specific. It’s a lot, but it’s worth your time to watch/read, to really understand what kind of guy this is.

The part of the interview that’s perhaps getting the most attention is where Wilson lays out specifically what he envisions when it comes to criminalizing homosexuality, and under what circumstances he’d like to see the death penalty for it in his perfect Christian theocracy. That’s what I’m going to focus on too, but I want to pick it apart in a slightly different, more Moral High Ground way.

Wilson has this rhetorical tic where he’s always careful to explain that he’s not saying he just wants to immediately kill gays. He references the “art of the possible,” and distinguishes between what’s possible now, or in the near future during the early stages of a white Christian fascist takeover vs. “an ideal Christian republic 250 years from now,” which is I imagine where the real hardcore Nazi wet dreams happen. I’m not sure why he thinks making that distinction makes it better, since it just lays bare that their endgame is a vile murderous white supremacist Christian nationalist theocracy, but OK.

Wilson makes clear that “[h]and jobs, oral sex and anal intercourse” between men (but not necessarily women, might address that in a follow-up post) would be illegal under the sodomy laws he envisions, but c’mon, he’s not just going to murder people for that!

“I would say that the main enforcement mechanism would be social expectations and a withholding of societal approval,” he explains. “It would be sort of ‘back in the closet, boys,’ not because of fear of legal retribution, but because this is simply not done.”

Which is funny because that’s how most of the gay sex occurs in the conservative Christian church now and since time immemorial. What happens on manly men’s Bible study camping retreats stays on manly men’s Bible study camping retreats, amirite, Doug? (SIDENOTE: Have you heard about these new man-only Christian gyms where the bros can go by themselves, no girls allowed? Wow.)

But because of his biblical “expertise” — this is a good time to note that Doug Wilson did not go to seminary, is not theologically educated, has a lot more in common with that Faithful Word Baptist Church guy (albeit in a Reformed Presbyterian way) than he does with John Calvin — Wilson believes he has the discernment to understand that “execution, although a lawful penalty for homosexual behavior, was not the minimum penalty; it was the maximum penalty.”

See? It’s only in certain, limited circumstances. He doesn’t want to execute Spencer MacNaughton for having sex with his boyfriend, so relax! (At least not anytime soon, we reckon. Remember that “art of the possible” thing.)

This is where the forked-tongued, demonic, “lying for Jesus” nature of white supremacist Christian nationalism shows up, in the rhetorical sleight of hand Doug Wilson is about to pull, as he explains which “gays” he wants to execute.

“I do want to create a society where the maximum penalty for a Roman Catholic priest molesting or raping an altar boy is solved and addressed with a tall tree and a short rope.”

Huh, OK. What about the conservative evangelical pastors/youth pastors/Christian school teachers/deacons/elders who rape little children and/or traffic in/create child pornography? Also, I thought we were talking about criminalizing gayness. Not the kind of child rape that flows like rivers through the conservative Christian world.

MacNaughton noticed. “Right, that’s pedophilia, though, which is of course different than homosexuality,” he said.

But no. Doug Wilson, who thinks he has the spiritual authority to adjudicate such things, declared that “it’s a species of homosexual behavior.” That such behavior is just part of what “the alphabet people” do. Suggests that’s part of the “+” in “LGBTQ+.”

MacNaughton was like the fuck?

“Absolutely,” said Wilson, taking the child rape that’s so prevalent in conservative Christian leadership, absolving his movement of it entirely, and declaring based on nothing but his own pigfuck bigotry that actually their problem is the gays’ fault.

Note how he launders it through Catholics too. Extremist Bill Donohue of the Catholic League does this too, blaming all the Catholic Church’s kid-raping problems on gays. He acknowledges that priests have raped a lot of kids, then blames the gays for it, as if it’s gayness, and not the Roman Catholic Church itself that creates the ideal conditions for child rape.

Doug Wilson is doing the same thing here, tossing it off on the Catholics before ultimately blaming gays.

Cute little fuckin’ game, isn’t it?

Wilson added, “I think the LGBTQ+ acronym, that whole chain, is sort of a sexual alliance of people who are defying traditional biblical norms. And pedophilia is one of those things that defies those norms.”

As if the LGBTQ+ movement gives a flying fuck about what Doug Wilson, who has earned zero respect on this planet as far as I can tell, considers “biblical sexual norms.” As if we’re not talking about actual people’s lives here, as if we’re all in cahoots to “defy traditional biblical norms.”

Sorry, but fuck you, you shitmouthed piece of detritus, that’s not how it works. No matter what these human fistulas try to assert, the “P” has never been an accepted part of the LGBTQ+ movement, and you know why? Because it breaks the laws of consent.

And you know who really seems to hate consent?

Shall we talk about Doug’s denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) and the little fiefdom he’s run for decades in Moscow, Idaho?

Welcome To Christ Church!

This is not the first time I have written about Doug Wilson or his CREC. As I once put it, the denomination is “kind of a less intellectual/brainy, more outwardly batshit version of the crop of conservative Presbyterian churches that have become so popular these days among white American fascists.”

The “Reformed” side of the evangelical church is the Calvinist, Presbyterian side of things, and people using that term are various levels of theocratic Christian nationalist/Christian fascist. They fancy themselves to be extremely well-read, but again, Doug is kind of the country church version of that, and there’s evidence that a number of the more buttoned-up Reformed theologians think he’s a clown. (Or used to anyway.)

SIDENOTE: You might be thinking, “Fancying themselves as intellectual while being extremely anti-gay/misogynistic? Wow, is this ever Pete Hegseth’s church!” Now get a load of this:

In his book Father Hunger, the pastor writes that a lack of fatherly authority and biblical masculinity (one that does not “simper and lisp”) is the root of various modern failings, including the “poison” of egalitarianism between genders.

Father Hunger? Sounds like fan fiction about the relationship between Pete Hegseth and all the conservative men whose knobs he thinks God hath ordainethed him to slob, starting with Donald Trump.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an earlier piece at TMHG:

Wilson has notoriously sick and perverted beliefs about women, having once written that submission from a woman is an “erotic necessity” for a man. He also wrote that the absence of that submission makes men “dream of being rapists.” (Hey, you know what we call men who can’t cum without feeling like they have power over the people they fuck? Rapists.) He and his wife, Nancy Wilson, believe that a husband, by definition, is never “trespassing in his own garden,” by which they mean his wife’s body, therefore marital rape doesn’t exist. […]

You will not be shocked to learn of the history of sexual assault and domestic violence accusations in Doug Wilson’s denomination. And the myriad allegations that he’s actively covered up for pedophiles and kid-touchers in his churches. Oh gosh, how similar he sounds to just every other conservative Christian leader and his president!

Let’s drill down on that a little bit.

Vice reported in 2021 on the sick culture of institutionalized abuse, including spousal rape, in Wilson’s home church in Moscow, Idaho, known as Christ Church, and in its associated organizations. (This is a directory of CREC churches, if you want to see if there’s one near you to warn people about.)

There is the story of Natalie Greenfield, who at age 14 was repeatedly sexually abused by a man in his mid-20s named Jamin Wight, a student at Greyfriars Hall, a pastoral training and mentoring program sponsored by Wilson’s outfit that promises to produce “Pastors with Backbone.”

Vice:

Wilson cast their sexual interactions as the result of a parent-arranged courtship—something Greenfield maintains is untrue—but, according to emails gathered in an extensive analysis of Wilson by researcher Rachel Shubin, the judge seemed to accept Wilson’s narrative and rejected a more stringent plea agreement under charges of sexual abuse of a child. After Wight’s conviction (on a lesser charge of “injury to a child”), Christ Church plant Trinity Reformed emailed congregants thanking those praying for Wight. Following his release, Trinity funded $3,000 toward sending Wight on a Haitian mission trip. In 2013, Wight was charged with attempted strangulation of his wife and later found guilty of domestic battery.

Then there is Steven Sitler, whose wedding Wilson performed. He was a student at New Saint Andrews, the wingnut clown college affiliated with Wilson’s outfit in Moscow.

Sitler [was] convicted of lewd contact with a child under 16, despite Sitler’s parole officer’s objections. (Sitler, on lifetime parole due to the number of victims he confessed abusing, could not be unsupervised with children.) Wilson maintains a unique role in the Sitler saga, saying he encouraged the father who discovered the abuse to report it to the police, but Wilson later welcomed Sitler back to Christ Church (with a chaperone). At Sitler’s wedding, according to one guest, Wilson explained that sometimes people need to get married so the flesh can be contained. Using a wife as a sexual decoy to distract Sitler from children didn’t work. Later, a judge ruled Sitler must be chaperoned around his infant son, due to admitted sexual stimulation resulting from contact with the baby.

Sounds like Doug Wilson had his own little Josh Duggar. Which is really not that uncommon of a thing for conservative churches to have, as we will discuss more below.

There’s so much in the Vice article. There’s Logos, the school affiliated with Christ Church, and the students who reported a male teacher perving all over girl children and touching them inappropriately. And then another teacher accused of sexual abuse. Many students have reported abuse.

There was a former student and Christ Church member called Kamilla Niska, who talked about how weird and gross it was the way Doug and Nancy Wilson (his wife) took an interest in hearing extremely detailed sexual confessions from teenagers she knew. “He just wants to sit there and listen to everything that transpired between these two teen lovers, like all the graphic detail,” she said.

Another former student called Helen Shores talked about a meeting she was pulled into by herself with Wilson, who she says absolutely needed to hear everything about her losing her virginity, in explicit detail. All by herself with pervert Doug? I guess your Covenant Eyes alarm doesn’t go off if you’re having teenagers describe all the sex to you like a dramatic monologue. (To be clear, that’s a mean Mike Johnson joke. We don’t know if Doug Wilson ever has used conservative Christian no-porning software.)

There’s lots of talk about the sort of in-house counseling Wilson’s organizations engage in. The story of Hilary Medina, whose father watched her as a child in the shower and also molested her, which he had confessed to the Wilsons. Doug Wilson’s response was, in part, to tell the father not to be alone with his daughter. Also, Medina “remembers Doug Wilson telling her something she’s never forgotten. If down the road, a bird or something hit the window when she was in the shower, she may think about her dad watching her, and that wouldn’t necessarily mean she was bitter, she was told, but she should confess bitterness right away.”

Gotta confess that lady sin of bitterness, at your father who molested you!

Medina also remembers Nancy Wilson telling her in their subsequent counseling sessions that her father hadn’t done anything illegal. When Medina would mention, for example, a hug where his hand strayed to her butt, Nancy Wilson suggested she give him the benefit of the doubt.

“That’s the Christian thing to do,” she was told.

Sensing a pattern here?

Now, as for Wilson’s denials, I should say, he has them, lots of them, lots of excuses, a whole section of excuses and denials on his website. Bless our hearts, we’ve all just got him all wrong.

Do we, though?

In the interview with Uncloseted Media, Wilson said he views two men having sex as “equally sinful as a man raping a girl” (phraseology from MacNaughton’s question). He said he doesn’t believe in women in combat because he served on a submarine, and if women are on a submarine, that’s a bad idea. “Why shouldn’t I throw catnip into the pack of cats?” (Conservative Christian men don’t like to be told that they have a responsibility not to rape.) He did say “marital rape is wrong” in this interview, but proceeded to explain what he sees as the difference between “violent [marital] rape” and the softer, gentler kinds, I guess, which he says don’t need to be reported to the cops, only to church authorities.

He admitted he’s had to call the cops maybe five times or so because of rapes that happened within his church/sphere of influence.

Then he proceeded to object to MacNaughton’s suggestion that this kind of thing “disproportionately happens in conservative Christian communities.” He thinks the statistics are “false.”

But let’s be honest here: It’s not fucking normal to have to call the cops five times because somebody else under your purview, spiritual or otherwise, has gone rapin’ again. And considering his self-described standards for what warrants reporting, imagine how many times he should have called and didn’t.

Moreover, what kind of normal man, in any profession, has to have an entire long section of his website where he denies having done anything wrong in the all the child rapes and other kinds of rapes that he’s been closely adjacent to? (And is that type of man usually the spiritual leader for a masculine-insecure Defense security who once had to pay off a woman who credibly accused him of violent rape?)

As I alluded to above, Doug Wilson loves to wink and play cute (see: that NPR interview) with the kind of Christian theocracy he wants, argues that it won’t be so bad after all, it’s just that Christianity will be the state religion, and only Christians (the fascist Doug Wilson kind) will be able to hold office, and most women won’t be allowed to vote. Also, if they get raped it’s probably because they “refuse[d] the protection of good men.” (Who are definitely not rapists themselves, you betcha!)

But hey, if it’s a gay person, we execute them, right? At least in certain cases!

Except that we’ve established that, even in Doug Wilson’s vile, two-faced, sonofoabitch example, the person he brings up as worthy of execution is a religious leader who hurts a child. He tries to fob it off on those Catholics and blames it on the gays, instead of owning up to the elephant in the room holding Occam’s Razor, which suggests that there is something about institutional conservative Christianity that is an absolute breeding ground for child rape and exploitation, and also all the other kinds of rape.

Speaking Of The Moral High Ground Pervert Pastor Project!

If you know about this, you know. If you’re new, catch up here.

But I’m making a list and checking it twice of alllllll the pastors and religious leaders who make the news for being accused/tried/convicted/sued/jailed/etc. for sexually abusing kids in any way, shape or form. The completed list for 2025 (above) featured 215 separate stories. Oh, but it’s not disproportionate in conservative Christian communities, Doug?

I’m not the only one doing this work, but one thing about my list that’s different is that I’m paying special attention to exactly what sects and denominations where this abuse crops up, so we can start to observe the correlations.

I wasn’t doing the list in 2022, but I should note that a former deacon from Christ Church named Alex Lloyd pleaded guilty on child pornography charges in 2022. CREC hasn’t shown up on my list yet, but that’s only because they haven’t had a specific scandal that made the news in 2025. (The mid-year update for 2026 will be out soon.)

The word “Reformed” comes up in shitloads of cases, though.

Tornado Watch

Again, Doug Wilson swears up and down that he never did anything inappropriate with the way he handled any of the 15 million times somebody in one of his congregations or schools or pastoral training programs or colleges started feeling rapey, despite accusations to the contrary.

But fuck that shit anyway, because that in and of itself is a distraction from the real issue, which is that patriarchal theocratic organizations like his — and the entire conservative Christian church, protestant and Catholic — are inherently danger zones for incidences of child rape and sexual abuse. It’s not simply disproportionately represented. As writer Cait West, herself a survivor of a family brainwashed by Doug Wilson’s teachings, argued in 2022, it’s “inevitable.”

Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s happening at every single conservative Christian organization, church, school, college, think tank, summer camp, or “holy yoga” studio right now, nor am I to be clear making any accusation that I have any knowledge of anything currently going on in Doug Wilson’s organizations or things affiliated with them.

But it will be the least shocking thing in the world if/when another story drops.

It’s like being in the South on late summer afternoons and evenings when there are storms nearby. There aren’t always tornadoes on the ground.

But there’s always a goddamned tornado watch, because the conditions are always fucking present.

But tell us more about the sinful gays, Doug Wilson, you motherfucker.

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Not that it’s surprising, but Fox News is letting its most Stranger Danger anchor giggle and laugh (fantasize?) about mass rape in the middle of the afternoon now.

“You know what’s going to happen?” Jesse Watters asked on The Five. “The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it — triple boost! And then they’re going to get out there, and women on base, you guys better be careful! Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful! Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out!”

Women in Asia and women in the military should be careful because Pete Hegseth’s military of high-T rapists is coming for them? That’s Jesse Watters’s “joke”?

It continues to shock me that Watters has never been accused of outright rape before. Of course, he did once brag that he tricked his now-wife into getting into his car by letting the air out of her tires, only trying to walk it back when he realized he had just admitted to being a predator.

Pete Hegseth, though? The sicko walking, talking, slurring, bad-at-lifting Christian extremist little weenus who needs you to to call him the secretary of WAR in order to make him feel like a real man? That guy’s been credibly accused of big rape and paid hush money to shut the accuser up.

There have been a number of Hegseth-related embarrassments in the last week, on top of his usual prissy tantrums as he continues to block promotions for women in the military, presumably, obviously, because strong women threaten his whiskey-dicked manhood the very most.

Watters above is talking about Hegseth’s latest move to turn the United States military into the laughingstock of the world, as if it needed any more help after Hegseth bumblefucked us into losing a war against Iran on the very first day, and has subsequently managed to somehow lose it once again every single day hence. He’s going to test the men, and maybe whatever women are left, for low testosterone, because this is something Cialis-needers in the right-wing man-o-sphere, and also Robert F. Kennedy Jr., think about and obsess over a whole lot.

Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico had perhaps the best snap reaction to that when he was asked on Morning Joe.

“When I first heard this low-T thing, I had to look it up. Guys my age aren’t really worried about that kind of thing …”

Uh, yeah. Also men who are older than James Talarico who don’t have conservative Christian MAGA daddy issues.

But Pete Hegseth thinks about it, a whole lot. Pete doesn’t have much advanced military experience or expertise, but he has a hell of a lot of obvious insecurity, so he probably thinks the reason he hasn’t won the Iran war yet is because of all the low testosterone that’s still raging through the military, threatening his manhood and threatening his authority.

Vermont Democratic Rep. Becca Balint made a hilarious and pointed reference in response to Hegseth and guys like him and their obsession with testosterone levels. and the homoeroticism that pervades all of their obsessions. (Which is different, to be clear, from automatically assuming any right-wing man is a closet case, which I think is lazy for reasons I explained on Substack this week.)

Listen:

BALINT: There are so many people in this administration that have some, like, intense homoerotic feelings towards men, while also being incredibly homophobic, and not just homophobic, but like, hatemongering, fearmongering about the LGBT community. So let me be clear, I don’t think the homoeroticism is the weird part, the weird part is that they pretend that that’s not what it’s about. And so Pete Hegseth is like the example of this, the manly, manly rugged macho man! And it’s like, I don’t know if you know who Tom of Finland is?

Yep!

BALINT: Tom of Finland, OK? This is gay male porn that was drawn by a man, and like Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of that. So I feel like they must be looking at that as their example of what men look like? And in terms of like not promoting women, we know what this is all about. The military, whether you support the military-industrial complex or not, it has always been merit-based. The people who are the best of the best rise to the top. And so the fact that he has systematically been keeping down women and people of color gives up the whole game. It’s actually not about a merit-based system anymore.

It’s a spot-on reference, for obvious reasons if you are familiar with the over-exaggerated masculinity of Tom of Finland — in every way, almost like they had been testosterone-maxxing to make all their parts as big and rugged and hard as possible! — but also because your average Borders and Barnes & Noble used to stock those books in the art and LGBT sections (ask me how I know) and I can imagine right-wing MAGA men like Pete Hegseth in the 1990s constantly secretly sneaking peeks of those books when they thought nobody was looking.

He certainly got his ideas about manhood from somewhere. (Most likely also from his sick church and probably really horrible male role models during adolescence and Christ knows where else. By the way, I still want to work my way through that NPR interview with his perv guru Doug Wilson if I have time this week.)

Other things threatening Pete’s fragile manhood? Whole ships full of guys who are absolutely ignoring his “no beards” policy, apparently because ship commanders know this little bitch is a mere blip in the history of the US military.

I have been laughing for a week about the CNN story that Hegseth boarded a Navy ship recently, immediately realized they had been literally ignoring all of his (racist) commands about shaving — he is the secretary of Hairstyles, after all! — and has been spitting little impotent nails about it ever since.

The image of him boarding that ship and looking around and realizing that he’s giving orders that entire ships are saying fuck you to? Is giving me LIFE.

So I talked to the first person I usually talk to about military stuff, who used to be in the Navy, not five minutes ago, but recently enough, and this is what he said:

“On navy deployments they raise money for the ship’s morale, welfare, and recreation fund by selling $10 no shave chits - those captains know hegseth is temporary.”

“On a carrier that can raise like $25-30 grand for the ship’s party fund. Piss off TV boy”

He continued:

“Yeah you might wanna mention its been a while since I was in. And I was estimating like if 2500-3000 guys on a carrier each paid $10 for a no shave chit”

“But I remember buying them and then people would grow mutton chops and fu manchus and porn staches and beards of all kinds”

“Because youre in the middle of the fucking ocean,” he added.

He also clarified the reason he wanted to make sure everybody knew he didn’t just get out of the Navy five seconds ago:

“Yeah I just don’t want some fact checking weirdo to be like ERM THE DEFENSE ENSHITTIFICATION ACT OF 2017 SPECIFICALLY FORBADE MORALE”

Pete Hegseth might understand some of this if he had more military experience or expertise.

As it is … those captains know he’s temporary.

Better start force-feeding everybody testosterone so everybody’s balls are as small as Pete’s! He’s gotta do something, as propping up that boy’s faltering manhood is quite the daily grind.

As I was saying.

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It’s always a running joke with fundamentalist Christian men — one among many — that the overlap between their severe masculine insecurity issues, their closet case-grade homophobia, and their religious beliefs is just three concentric circles in one big gay Venn diagram. Introduce yourself to Pastor Martin Sedra, who would like to introduce you to Jesus’s perfect abs.

SEDRA: America has created this gay, effeminate Christianity. They view God through a Western lens, they think Jesus was a weak figure, who was a tolerant guy.

See how he equates “tolerant” with “weak”? For conservative Christian men like Martin Sedra, the very idea of somebody embodying all the features Jesus was known for is a marker of weakness, because it brings a terrifying vulnerability into the equation that men like this have had beaten and scared out of them by their own unfit fathers and religious leaders, who had it beaten and scared out of them by their unfit fathers and religious leaders, etc. and so forth.

In this view, it sounds like you can’t be a real man unless you’re an abuser. (And we wonder why so many fundamentalist Christian religious leaders get caught raping and abusing children?)

SEDRA: We view Jesus carrying a nice little lamb, every picture you see him in, his hair is flowing, carrying a nice lamb.

Is it gay to be nice to animals now?

SEDRA: The Jesus I see was a bold and courageous man who, people wanted to kill him for what he said. America has created this gay version of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not effeminate. Jesus was a bold lion. I always tell people Jesus was not a soft guy. He had six packs. He was the most ripped guy you'll ever meet. He was a very bold and courageous man, he flipped tables in the temple, he got a whip out, he literally destroyed people.

Man creating God in his own image? This sounds more like “Creating God in the image of your own personal Pornhub search history.”

“The Jesus I see,” he says. Where, bud? In your fantasies? When you’re masturbating, or doing your holy strokes or whatever euphemism you call it?

Tell us more about Jesus’s whip, queen.

Who is Martin Sedra? I had never heard of him, but he appears to be one of those “zeal of a convert” Christian pastors who spends his life explaining how the form of conservative Islam in Egypt he was raised under was totally inferior and different from the white dork fundamentalist Christian nationalism he preaches now, and warning that the scary Muslims are going to conquer the USA just like they did to Egypt, Morocco, Turkey and elsewhere. (Yeah, he’s that much of a useful idiot for white supremacist Christian nationalists.)

Not clear if he was raised Muslim or just raised Christian in Egypt. His YouTube bio says he was “raised in the midst of Christian persecution under Islamic rule,” which is quite vague but full of scare words intended for white Christian conservative morons, who would be too busy shitting their pants to ask questions.

Like a true beta boy conservative Christian man who knows exactly which men he’s supposed to say “yes sir” and “no sir” to, he preaches in MAGA t-shirts, though his church appears to be based in Sydney, Australia. He’s obviously an extremist homophobic pig.

But if you peruse his Instagram page, what also comes through is what a clown he is, and how much his entire life and career appear to be a trauma response to his own insecurities. This is a guy who seems to have taken all his “unspoken” prayer requests and turned them into his entire personality. (IYKYK.)

This is not a serious man who would command your respect if you saw him on the street, shaking a Bible at you, in other words.

Which brings me to how one of the funniest quirks of repressed conservative Christian men, which Sedra demonstrates dramatically in that clip, is their desperate psychological need to equate “gay” with “weak.” The (actually extremely nelly) lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, did it yesterday, when he soothed himself and Republican male voters by saying Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico can’t lift a 10-pound weight. (As if Patrick looks like he’s benching anything besides the TV remote.) Now wait, but Talarico isn’t gay, you say. You are correct. But their entire campaign against him is that he’s gay and vegan and weak, whereas they are strong and virile. So it’s of the same genre.

It’s funny, because up there Sedra said Jesus had “six packs,” which was a very good Freudian slip. Many gay men are indeed known for being gym-obsessed bros who have a six pack (or eight), and they’re in miles better fightin’ shape than Pastor Dumpy up there. But if Sedra wanted to make Jesus sound more like the average straight Republican man, he’d indeed have “six packs.” Probably of Natural Light or some other shitty, cheap beer.

Anyway, what’s of course also revealing here is that in his atrophied, abused brain, this man can’t see how a man who is gentle toward animals and has good hair cannot also simultaneously be a man of courage and bravery and boldness. How the same man who preached the Beatitudes, the things the apostle Paul describes as the fruits of the spirit (a list of qualities of which Pastor Sedra exhibits zero) can also be a guy capable of kicking ass when the time calls for it.

Also Sedra seems to have missed entirely why Jesus was flipping over tables in the first fucking place. Maybe he was too busy rubbing it to Jesus’s perfect V-Line.

Can you imagine what kind of AI images this guy might ask Grok to create on his personal computer, were he ever to go down a rabbit hole doing that some day? Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

THE JESUS I SEE HAS A SIX PACK! AND HIS HAPPY TRAIL IS NOT TOO THIN, NOT TOO THICK, JUST REALLY NATURAL LIKE HE DOESN’T TRIM, IT JUST GROWS THAT WAY! IT’S FUCKIN’ HOT!

Well, I’m not sure how to get out of this blog post now, so I’ll just leave you with those thoughts about Martin Sedra’s gay Jesus, which is fully inferior to our gay Jesus, who beats ass when it’s called for, but does it on behalf of the “least of these,” and also He is nice to lambs, which seems to bother Martin Sedra for some reason, because there’s nothing about this weirdo pastor that isn’t a giant red flag, seems like.

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Should I do these more often? Yes or VERY yes?

We talked about the most recent installment of the Pervert Pastor Project, and all kinds of other news bits. Yes, we talked about Graham Platner.

I’m probably going to be doing stuff like this a lot more in the near future, so stay tuned. And to have the time and resources for that, I’m going to hit you up for money. In fact, now is an amazing time to become a full member of The Moral High Ground. We have lots of new readers joining, and I have lots of plans burbling up on the horizon for how to expand the reach and footprint of this place. But I need your help for that!

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I got accused of being “part of the problem” by a conservative man who was upset that I took the opportunity presented by the horrific story of what recently happened to Pete Buttigieg’s family to note — louder for those in the back — that yet again it’s not, as a rule, LGBTQ+ people or drag queens or people on the left in general who sexually abuse and exploit and rape kids. But it quite often is conservative Christian clergy and youth pastors and Christian school teachers. (Also cops and ICE agents, I added in a video version of the post.)

If you didn’t hear about the Pete story, it’s horrific. Somebody called in a bullshit anonymous tip to Child Protective Services, based on alleged hearsay that Pete had confessed horrible, abusive crimes to them, and CPS ended up coming to the Buttigieg household and forcing Pete to be apart from his children for 24 hours while they conducted their investigation, even as they eventually admitted that they were pretty sure the tip was politically motivated bullshit.

I was amused to hear which part of the problem I was, since the problem is people raping and abusing kids.

The answer that came was boring and predictable, if you know right-wing conservative Christian MAGA types. I’m part of the problem because I’m “politicizing” the issue by naming the places that serve as breeding grounds both for that kind of abuse, and in which people are most inclined to cover it up. Bad things can happen anywhere, to be sure, and nobody is denying that they do, but if you’re looking for patterns in these things, you can find them in authoritarian systems that attract and protect abusers, and if you’re looking for authoritarian systems, you tend to find them on the authoritarian side of the aisle.

It’s not that fuckin’ complicated.

But no, in the eyes of conservatives, to identify those structures, to actually name the issue out loud, is to politicize the issue. Conservative men in particular are so busy being deeply submissive to the conservative men they’ve been taught to obey, licking their various Daddies’ boots, that they’ll look the other way while their own kids are being abused rather than knock over the apple cart of everything they’ve ever been taught. To name it could force them to confront that their entire lives, the people they’ve been trained to respect, to honor and obey are actually the bad guys.

They have a psychological need to believe that it’s equally as likely to happen anywhere, “across the board issue from churches to mosques and synagogues and atheists and public schools,” as this person said. They desperately need to believe it’s more likely that a drag queen is abusing kids than a conservative youth group leader at a Southern Baptist or non-denominational megachurch. They think it’s “disgraceful and disgusting” to act like both sides don’t do it. To “ignore the many Dems/leftists abusing kids,” this person said, without citing anything beyond some unlinked story about two guys apparently adopting kids to abuse them that I’m sure he saw on Fox News or heard on right-wing talk radio. Awful, if true!

Show me the pattern, though. You show me your receipts and I’ll show you mine.

(Guessing the story he was referring to was this from 2024. Had to go back to 2024 to find one example, eh, mate?)

Today at long last comes out the long overdue wrap-up of the year 2025 in The Moral High Ground tracking Christian and other religious leaders who abuse kids. The project got away from me for a bit — there are just so many that I had to enlist help to track it, plus a bunch of other stuff has been going on in my life, blah blah, excuses. But it’s more than back on track now, and the mid-year 2026 update will be out sometime in July.

If you are not a new reader, you know how this works. If not, click here. But the short version is that I’m keeping a running list of each story I find that involves a Christian leader of any kind in a place of spiritual authority who’s been caught, accused, sued or convicted of abusing and/or exploiting kids. I don’t encourage you to read the entire list at this point — it’s getting long — but rather to use it as the resource it is. (Also, trigger warning for all the obvious reasons.)

Different people who do this tracking work are interested in specific aspects of it. Me, I’m particularly interested in tracking exactly which corners of Christendom these people are most likely to come out of, and translating for a wider audience what some of these discrete denominations and movements within the Christian church represent, what they believe, why they are the way they are. I also like to make note when it’s pertinent which famous Republicans come out of these movements, to help contextualize the strains of Christian nationalism trying to complete a hostile takeover of the United States government right now.

Like, for instance, at the mid-year tracking update that came out last summer, I was already able to see that an inordinate number of the stories were coming out of Southern Baptist congregations. You know, the same kinds of Southern Baptist congregations that produced vile creep Speaker Mike Johnson, among other Republican politicians.

Fully 39 out of the 125 stories I had tracked at that point in the year were some kind of Baptist perps. Out of those, 21 were Southern Baptist.

Again, today’s update wraps up 2025. In the end, I followed 215 separate stories — 215! — in 2025 that met the criteria. (You’ll be shocked to learn that for 2026, the numbers are basically the same.)

Out of 215, Baptists still easily took home the gold in the Pervert Pastor Olympics. Did anybody think they wouldn’t? Baptists of any kind accounted for 54 out of 215.

Of those, 33 were Southern Baptist, not the greatest single number, but a number of them were close together. Other kinds of Baptists, including creepyass independent fundamentalist Baptists and King-James-Only churches accounted for 21.

No, as you’ll see, the greatest single number is the catchall general conservative non-denominational evangelicals/Christian nationalists/megachurches, which shouldn’t be surprising, considering that as the American Christian church continues to get dumbed down, there is more and more movement away from books with big words and small print, which tends to translate to a movement away from historical denominations with actual theology.

Here are the final 2025 approximate counts when it comes to denominations and segments of the Christian world, though categorization is sometimes tough and not always exactly clean, which I explain in the bullet points:

• General non-denominational evangelical/Christian nationalist/megachurches (this is a big tent, but there’s a lot of “undefined” out there in the world of evangelicalism) — 38

• Assemblies of God/Holiness/Apostolic/generally otherwise pentecostal or charismatic (some of these might better belong in the regular nondenominational/megachurch category below or vice versa, or there might be overlap)— 28

• Catholic — 16

• Conservative Presbyterian (PCA, EPC, etc.) or anything calling itself “Reformed” (includes Pete Hegseth’s creep guru Doug Wilson’s outfit) — 10

• Seventh Day Adventist — 4

• Vineyard USA — 4

• Methodist (the conservative, backwards sects, NOT the nice United Methodists) — 4

• Nazarene — 3

• United Methodist — 3

• Lutheran (regular/Missouri Synod) — 3

• Mormon (LDS) — 3

• Evangelical Lutheran (these are the liberal Lutherans, despite what the name might sound like) — 2

• Church of Christ — 2

• Lutheran (other conservative sects) — 2

• Anglican (NOT Episcopalian, these tend to be the ones that left the Episcopalians in a huff for being insufficiently gay-hating) — 1

• Disciples of Christ — 1

• Episcopalian — 1

• Wesleyan — 1

• Messianic Judaism — 1

• Orthodox Judaism — 1

The link above is for last year’s mid-year update. The two links below cover the rest of the list. (I’m not reprinting all 215. Yes I know I’ve said I’m going to streamline it someday into one page/searchable database. It hasn’t happened yet. I still need more help with this project, DONATION LINK HERE.)

One final note. I mentioned above that in my video response to the Buttigieg story, I had mentioned that cops and ICE agents are also categories where you find kid abusers. (Again, authoritarian patriarchal systems!) Tracking the cops isn’t my focus here, but here’s a landmark investigation that found that at least 1,800 cops were criminally charged with child sex abuse between 2005 and 2022.

In case you’re curious.

Final update for 2025 starts here:

189. Chico, California. Roger Scalice, 75, pleaded guilty to molesting a child under 14. (He was subsequently sentenced to six years.) It appears Scalice was a pastor at Calvary Chapel Monterey at one point. Calvary Chapel is a conservative, charismatic denomination that’s shown up a few times on the list so far. More recently, he was the pastor of the Butte Bible Fellowship in Chico, a conservative nondenominational congregation.

190. Jackson, Tennessee. Andrew Ervin, 44, arrested for statutory rape of a minor by an authority figure. He was a pastor at Northside Church in Jackson, and according to BishopAccountability.org, has been affiliated with three other churches and served as a youth pastor. This line from their church website explains everything you need to know about their denomination: “For many years, Northside was part of the United Methodist Church. In 2020, after a season of prayerful discernment, the congregation voted overwhelmingly to become an independent, non-denominational church.” If you aren’t in the know, “season of prayer discernment” means they hate gays and the United Methodist Church doesn’t.

191. Bentonville, Arkansas. Daniel Williams Smathers, age 47, convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for trafficking minor children across state lines for sex. He was previously a pastor at the Diamond First Baptist Church in Diamond, Missouri, a Southern Baptist congregation.

192. Coarsegold, California. Joshua David Kemper, 47, a youth pastor, arrested for sexually abusing a minor girl aged 15. You’ll be shocked to learn that he had -posted things on the internet to suggest kids aren’t safe around LGBTQ+ people. Not pastors! He was the lead pastor at Foothill Church, an Assemblies of God congregation.

193. Fort Collins, Colorado. Matthew McGinley, 30, a former worship pastor at Ascent Project Church, where his brother is the lead pastor, and teacher at the Resurrection Christian School. Charged with sexual assault of a minor child. He allegedly groomed a minor child he met while a teacher at the Resurrection Christian School in Loveland, Colorado. Ascent Project is one of those totally cool conservative evangelical non-denominational outfits with a totally cool name. They’re located in a downtown, so they must be cool! And their website says they believe scripture is “infallible, without error,” which is a pretty good indicator somebody on the pastoral staff will get arrested for sexually assaulting a kid, according to all the research we’ve done. Resurrection describes itself as a “Covenantal school,” which means in order to attend, at least one of a child’s parents must be able to tell a convincingly melodramatic story about getting saved.

194. Compton, California. Quintilo Sagrero, 68, arrested for sexually assaulting a minor child. Pastor of Templo Pentecostal El Camino Church, so pentecostal, Spanish-speaking, etc. When the arrest happened, authorities said they had reason to believe there might be more victims.

195. Star, Idaho. Ryan Stephen Patania, sentenced to 40 years in prison on child porn possession charges, “primarily involving young boys aged five to 10,” according to the Boise CBS station. The police said Patania “has been closely involved with several churches throughout the valley, specifically volunteering and working with church youth” and “has also worked closely with foster youth within the community.” Also was charged with sexual abuse of a child. Nothing real specific on the kinds of churches he liked to volunteer at, sounds like his main criteria is unfettered access to children. And guess what’s a pretty good place for that!

196. Excelsior Springs, Missouri. Associate youth pastor Donald Axtell, arrested on multiple charges, including sexual assault of a minor, child porn possession, giving porn to minors. “Lake trips” are mentioned, which sounds like a church youth group thing! He was affiliated with the Excelsior Springs Baptist Church, another Southern Baptist congregation.

197. St. Joseph, Michigan. Glen Rosenbaum arrested on multiple child sexual assault charges, some counts involving a child under 13, others a child between 13 and 16. He was a pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is not the same thing as the more liberal/mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA). This is conservatives, surprise.

198. Casper, Wyoming. John Byrum Dierenfeldt, 60, sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison under a plea deal for sexually abusing two girls starting at age eight. Dierenfeldt was a pastor. The judge at the sentencing said he had damaged the reputation of the Christian faith. All by himself? Gotta bone to pick with the shitty local news on this one, because it talks all about how he was a pastor, how his defense counsel said he had the support of church members, and does not name the church. This is fucking malpractice. Reading through comments sections on Facebook, we saw people mention Liberty Baptist and Lighthouse Baptist in Casper, both of which appear to be of the independent fundamentalist Baptist/King James weirdo sicko tradition. If accurate, that tracks!

199. Houston, Texas. Carter Thomas, 27, arrested for possession of child porn. The cops got a tip from somebody who said Thomas confessed to “struggling with viewing child pornography online.” (Such fundamentalist Christian language.) He was a volunteer youth pastor at Second Baptist Church, which insisted that there is no such title, which sounds to me like some hairsplitting. Second Baptist is a Southern Baptist congregation, try to contain your shock.

200. Mattoon, Illinois. Douglas Overmyer, age 51. Charged with sharing of a video of a grown man abusing an underage girl. He was the pastor of Zion Hill Church, part of the Great Lakes Conference of the Global Methodist Church. Though the Global Methodist Church’s website goes to great pains to make them look like just some good old Christ-centered Methodists with a global, multicultural focus, some quick googling reveals that they were the destination for many of the churches that left the United Methodist Church because it doesn’t hate gays enough. Try to contain your shock.

201. Jacksonville, Florida. Jerome Teschendorf, 70, sentenced at last to 20 years in prison on a very old case, “a saga investigators say involved multiple victims alleging abuse as far back as 1970.” One of the victims was Teschendorf’s former stepdaughter, who testified that he abused her throughout her childhood. “"He would sit at the end of my bed and cry and ask me to forgive him, then repeat the acts again," she said. He was a church leader at the Jacksonville Assembly of the Body of Christ, which no longer exists. Two other men, including the pastor, were also charged and convicted in the investigation. The church sounds like one of those very culty, very conservative situations, AKA an obvious breeding ground for predators.

202. Chalmette, Louisiana. Milton Martin, found guilty on child sex crimes charges. “'[Accused] of having sex with juveniles on multiple occasions etween 1991 and 2013.” Lord. Not the first time he had been arrested, but oh boy, he just got to keep pastorin’, specifically at the First Pentecostal Church of Chalmette. “Old time religion for the modern man,” it says on their website. Uh huh.

203. Placentia, California. (Orange County.) Cameron Heath, 39, arrested for alleged sexual abuse of a young boy, when the boy was 12-13, and was the bible study group leader for the boy’s family. He also ran a youth fitness center called Action Kids, his Bible study was called The Branch, and he even had a “ministry” called Deed and Truth that worked with orphanages in Baja California, Mexico. His church: Generations Church in Costa Mesa, which appears to be one of those non-demoninational, multi-culti evangelical conservative outfits with flashy lights and other things that amuse idiots. Far from the only church calling itself “Generations,” must be some kind of evangelical thing.

204. Tiro, Ohio. Hunter Hickman, 33. Arrested for retaliation, after he had been arrested for felony voyeurism in 2024. The local news accounts about this were cagey, but as Beks/Antifa Operative, a masterful tracker of these things, pointed out at the time of the original arrest, the statement from the North Central Ohio District of the Church of the Nazarene released a statement saying he had been removed as a youth pastor at Galion Real Life Church, and that “the safety and care of youth is among [the church’s] most sacred responsibilities.” So Occam’s Razor would suggest …

205. Peoria, Illinois. Michael Ritchason, 48, charged with sending sexual pics to a minor child. He was the pastor of the Riverside Community Church, and also taught elementary school! Riverside’s website gives the feeling of a city church, but evangelical and conservative, but tries to look like it’s hip and part of the city, meeting the people where they are, for Jesus. (This is a whole genre, see: Redeemer Presbyterian.) This one, though? Fucking Assembly of God. Find that on their website, I dare you.

206. Tarrant County, Texas. Matthew Cretzman, 39. A missionary who had an outfit called Rooftop Missions, worked with an orphanage. Christian motivational speaker. Sounds like a whole lotta kinds of creep, but for our purposes, he was arrested for continuous sex abuse of a child under 14. That story broke on the Preacher Boys Substack, and the writer knew the guy personally. A report on the Twitter account of another tracker/watcher of these bastards suggests a connection to the Milestone Church in Keller, Texas, one of those conservative non-denominational outfits.

207. Vian, Oklahoma. Michael Martin, 74. Charged with “lewd molestation” of a child under 16. Pastor at the Vian Baptist Church, where the incident allegedly happened. A Southern Baptist congregation, try to contain your shock.

208. Southaven, Mississippi. The Memphis metropolitan area strikes again! Jonathan Colvin, 38, arrested for failing to report a child sex crime. He was/is the youth minister at the Goodman Oaks Church of Christ, which is Church of Christ, obviously. Know how we talk about how conservative churches encourage the kind of environment that protects this sort of abuse? Well.

209. Surrey, England. International! Anthony White, 67, at last sentenced over the sexual assault of a boy under 14 he committed in the 1980s. Former Catholic priest.

210. Baguio, Philippines. International! Fr. Mark Batolne, convicted and sentenced to 120 years for raping a 16-year-old. Catholic priest.

211. Brampton, Ontario. International! Father James Cherickal, 60, a former priest of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in Kerala, India, arrested in Canada for sex crimes against a child under 16. He was serving as the priest of St. Jerome Catholic Church at the time.

212. Duluth, Minnesota. Just a horrific story about institutional sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church (surprise, a super-conservative ultra creepy denomination that has nothing to do with the normal Lutherans). “Young girls were sexually abused by a church member. They were told to forgive and forget.” That’s the headline. The story starts with one of the victims praying with the pastor, her abuser, AND HER FATHER, and then being forced to HUG HER ABUSER.

213. Huntington, Indiana. Because sometimes the anti-LGBTQ+ writer bigots are also abusing kids, not just the youth pastors! Gerald Korson, a Catholic writer, charged with child porn possession and “enticing a minor to create such child sexual abuse material,” says the Catholic site OSV News. Multiple victims alleged. He worked as an editor for Legatus, a super-anti-gay Catholic group, because of course.

214. Tampa, Florida. Tyrone Lee Cliff, 38, taught middle school at the Bayshore Christian School. Arrested for possessing child sex abuse material. It calls itself the “premier private Christian school” in Greater Tampa, and drops lots of words like “Christ-centered” and “Biblical values.” You can buy a t-shirt in its “spirit store” that says “FAITH WARRIOR IN TRAINING.” Yeah, it’s that kind of place.

215. Columbus, Ohio. George Bell, 73. Sentenced to a couple decades in prison after pleading guilty to raping a young child for years. He was the pastor of the Anchor Baptist Church, which is an “independent, fundamental Baptist, soul-winning, Bible believing church that uses the KJV Bible as its only Scripture,” according to its website. So they’re that kind of freak.

And that, long overdue, is the end of the 2025 list. On our first full year of tracking this, we covered 215 separate Christian leaders and authority figures investigated, charged, accused, caught, sued, sentenced, and/or imprisoned for sexually abusing children in some way, shape or form.

That’s, um, a lot.

The great supermajority of them: men. Also a supermajority: conservative.

Don’t you think if there were 215 cases making the news last year of drag queens or trans people or LGBTQ+ folks or atheists or literally anybody on the Left accused of doing the same, we’d never hear the end of it? Hell, that’s part of how you know there aren’t, because instead of that, sick fucks are trying to create news by tricking Child Protective Services into going on a fishing expedition for secrets at Pete Buttigieg’s house, and of course coming up with nothing.

Again, I am already hard at work on the 2026 list, which will come out in a huge mid-year update in the next few weeks, but I have a spoiler alert for you, are you ready? Conservative Christian leaders haven’t stopped punching WAY above their weight when it comes to sexually abusing kids.

Sorry if you were hoping for a different outcome on that one.

Few quick updates on the list:

• Jacob Barnett, #140, pleaded guilty. update (#140)

• Elmer Baca-Flores, #62, more accusations of human trafficking and sexual abuse of underage church members accusations

• Andrew Apple, #42, sentenced to 32 years.

• Joe Campbell, #92, officially charged with child rape.

• Richard Adamsky, #119, found guilty and later sentenced to prison.

• David McKeown, #104, sentenced to 135 years in prison.

Additionally, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel released in December a report naming 51 priests in alleged sexual abuse of minors over the years in the Diocese of Grand Rapids, Catholic obviously.

And then there’s another thing related to #37, where a former leader in the uber-creepy Royal Rangers, the Pentecostals’ version of the Boy Scouts, had been sentenced for making and transporting child porn. Welllll, NBC News came out with a huge story in December that detailed how 29 Royal Rangers leaders have been accused of sexually abusing at least 83 young boys over the decades. So there’s that.

Finally, the Archdiocese of New York had to pay out a $300 million settlement, a day after a $230 million settlement from the New Orleans Archdiocese was approved. You can guess why.

Stay tuned for the 2026 mid-year report.

I’m so divisive, I just can’t stop myself.

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It’s summertime and conservative religious lunatics are bitching about people getting gay rainbows all over their sports. Just this week, FIFA had to inform Egypt and Iran that they cannot march into Seattle and ban rainbow flags from the World Cup match happening there. Ya know, sorry. (Not that the dirtbag head of FIFA exactly did it with open arms to the LGBTQ+ community or anything.)

Before that, conservative religious lunatics of the ‘Murican Christian variety who happen to pitch for the San Francisco Giants felt the need to scrawl Bible verses all over the Pride Night hats they were not actually required to wear, because being nice to LGBTQ+ people offended or oppressed their little snowflake asses, I guess.

Specifically, they wrote Genesis 9:12-16 on their hats. Which says (NIV):

¹² And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: ¹³ I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. ¹⁴ Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, ¹⁵ I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. ¹⁶ Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

Get it? It’s the Noah’s Ark Bible passage about rainbows. Because they believe the dirty homosexuals and transgenders stole the rainbow from good, God-fearing Christians, who invented rainbows, and who can always be identified by the rainbows they wear around their necks. (The Catholic version features Jesus riding the rainbow.)

Now, Donald Trump’s Department of Weaponization, Retaliation and Christian Fascism (DOJ) is opening an investigation into Major League Baseball, for feeding those poor pitchers to lions by saying defacing uniforms by chicken-scratching bullshit all over your hat is against league policy.

Anyway, there is this whole rigamarole with conservative Christians trying to “reclaim” the rainbow from LGBTQ+ people. They have always cherished it, they claim, they put it on their hats at baseball games, their favorite hymns are called “The Old Rugged Rainbow” and “When I Survey The Wondrous Rainbow” and probably the jingle from the Skittles commercials.

But yeah, no. That’s the cross (or the crucifix, for the Catholics). En realidad, the rainbow has never been a particularly important symbol in Christianity, or at least not top five, and these fascist motherfuckers only pretend it is when they’re clearing their throats to remind everyone that God Hates Fags.

But, y’all, can we discuss something real quick? Thanks.

I am not anti-religion, and anyone who’s been following this project/newsletter should have figured that out by now. Personally I am not sure where I fall on the religious spectrum, but I definitely came from the land of the evangelicals and I speak their language, and I think there’s lots of room for lots of people to experience spirituality in their own way, should they choose to do so, with whatever framework/architecture makes sense for them.

But I am going to introduce a concept here that, even for very liberal believers, might seem a little uncomfy.

And that concept is that the story of Noah’s Ark is not a beautiful Bible story, nor does it have valuable lessons for us beyond what now seems glaringly obvious to me, which is in part that the God of Abraham seen throughout the scriptures of three major religions is not only not all-knowing or perfect, sometimes He’s outright wrong, and usually is a complete dick about that.

I’ll let y’all back away real quick so the lightning is sure to hit only me.

My point in bringing this up is that I think it’s revelatory the way this story is taught as beautiful and bouncy and fun, how children in Sunday School do pageants re-enacting it, how there’s an entire fuckin’ Creation Museum in Kentucky focused on proving that according to science, Noah and his family DID TOO repopulate the earth all by themselves, plus two giraffes and two dachshunds and two ducks and and we don’t know who the fuck else got to go on the boat, but it was two of each kind, all of this is LITERALLY true.

I think it really says something that Christian fascist scumbags are mad at LGBTQ+ people for “stealing” their rainbow, because another one of the prime lessons of the Noah’s Ark story, if you actually read it, is that Daddy is allowed to fly off the handle and start beating, abusing and murdering everybody, but as long as Daddy says sorry and pinky swears he’ll never do it again, then you have to forgive Daddy and keep obeying him, because Daddy is boss.

What does that sound like? Not only does it sound like every patriarchal domestic abuser/spouse-beater/kid-molester who ever lived, but it starts to make more sense why so many conservative Christian men are patriarchal domestic abusers/spouse-beaters/kid-molesters, and how that behavior has been modeled for them by every father figure throughout their entire lives, all the way up to and including The Big One.

Oh yeah, for the loser men scrawling these Bible verses on their hats because they hate gays, this story is a story of why their God is awesome.

Let’s hit that scripture again:

¹² And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: ¹³ I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. ¹⁴ Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, ¹⁵ I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. ¹⁶ Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

Note that it says whenever God sees a rainbow, God will remember that time He pinky-swore never to destroy all of humanity ever again, at least not with water, wink wink, nudge nudge, loopholes are fun!

This isn’t a reassurance to the scant few survivors of God’s wrath. It’s God’s reminder to himself to put a lid on it whenever He feels like He’s about to kick over the Lego castle He just built because He’s mad at it.

And let’s be clear, this is after this little tantrum in Genesis 6, which put all these events into motion:

⁵ The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. ⁶ The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. ⁷ So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” ⁸ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

OK, drama queen.

The Lord regretted. So the Lord decided to MURDER EVERYONE BY HOLDING THEIR HEADS UNDER WATER AND ALSO THEIR PUPPIES.

Except for this one guy Noah. He’s cool.

BUT EVERYBODY ELSE.

There are Law & Order: SVU episodes and tons of true crime podcasts about people who behave like this. I am just saying.

Also, question: would an omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God not have the ability to see His little experiment with humans going wrong, or anticipate that six chapters into the whole Bible He would have a hissy fit and decide to kill everyone?

Was that part of the plan?

Now look. I make jokes.

But scripture gets fascinating if you’re willing to really read it as it is, and not what you want it to be. And a careful reading of Abrahamic scripture reveals a lot of things, and one of them — if you’re being honest, and if you’re willing to grapple with uncomfortable ideas that bring up questions you were raised not to ask — is that the God presented there is always saying He’s perfect and all-knowing and all-powerful, but when the receipts are examined? Not so much!

Look at the book of Job. (Which I was required to read as summer reading in AP English in my Christian high school, because they’re confident that fully indoctrinated Christian kids will never read something like that and come away like “What is WRONG with this creep?”)

Look at the fact that the big climax of Christian tradition is that God had to change everything up yet again by sending His only son to die on the cross for Him, which somehow reconciled Him to the humanity He created but couldn’t bear to look at because they were so totally depraved and in need of a savior, which is weird, because wouldn’t a perfect God by definition create perfect creations? But anyway, He had already destroyed them once, but that didn’t fix it, but He had promised he never would destroy them again with water, asterisk! And He was totally planning on destroying most of them again later on with fire (Revelation) but in the meantime, HERE’S JESUS!

Those gnostic texts where Yaldaboath (God) is claiming to be the one and only perfect God and Sophia (Wisdom) responds like Gurl that is not true, and you know it, they make more and more sense after you take a fresh look at passages like these.

So many of the Bible’s so-called mysteries start to fall away if one starts to accept the notion that perhaps the God of the Bible — whether He is literally real, or if He is not, and is rather a reflection of the cultures that created Him — is actually not a flawless figure, nor blameless, nor all-knowing or the epitome of wisdom.

But those are questions white supremacist Christian nationalist conservatives don’t have the mental capacity to grapple with, much less the courage. There is much in the Bible that its simplest idiot devotees are simply unwilling to look at any more closely than the dipshit songs they learned in Sunday School.

And again, their love for stories like this one says a lot about them that isn’t all that surprising when you think about it. What more conservative Christian message is there today than that God is allowed to have an abusive temper tantrum, murder everybody you’ve ever met, and then be like “BEHOLD FOR I SHALL NOW GIFT YOU WITH A COVENANT OF MY ENDURING LOVE”? (With His fingers crossed behind His back, of course.)

It’s also part of their revenge fantasies, by the way. Remember the thing about Disney Princess Theology, how white conservative Christians are fundamentally incapable of correctly finding themselves reflected in stories and scripture, always seeing themselves as the heroes or victims of every narrative, never the villain, which is weird since in real life they’re the villain of every story in which they are a character?

You know those scumbags imagine themselves as Noah or Noah’s wife, and they imagine their pets as the animals Noah brought on the ark. It would never occur to them that actually God might have decided to massacre the everloving shit out of them and their beloved puppies that day, had they been alive, or that a modern-day Noah’s Ark might be a ginormous Pride float.

Which is strange, because the story of Sodom is right there near the Noah’s Ark story in the same book of the Bible, the story that stupid MAGA bigots falsely teach is about gay people, even though the Bible explains clearly that the sin of Sodom was about overfed, arrogant, uncaring MAGA types who reject strangers. “[A]rrogant, overfed, and complacent; they did not help the poor and needy,” it reads in Ezekiel. (A theme that actually runs throughout scripture!)

“Therefore I removed them,” God added.

(With FIRE, not WATER. Not flooding, can’t get mad! Not flooding, can’t get mad!)

Even though Matthew 7:21-23 is clearly a letter to people like them, the one where Jesus says ²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. ²² Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” {NKJV}

Yeah, scripture sure is interesting when you read it with eyes and ears open.

But not for human butt itches trying to “reclaim” the rainbow from LGBTQ+ people. That rainbow taught them how to abuse people and never have to face accountability for it.

And now here come all these LGBTQ+ people perverting that message by making the rainbow about diversity, inclusivity, love, joy and hope and other woke shit like that.

What sickos.

Here’s a song about maybe God isn’t perfect. Oh boy, when this song came out when I was 14, I thought I was touching a hot stove connected to the very fires of hell to even listen to it. Now I know better.

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“Barack, you gotta look at me.”

“No I don’t,” said the former president, her husband, the man whose decency and brilliance, and of course, his Blackness, have so wounded the white supremacist current White House squatter that he decided to retaliate by inflicting as much ruination on the globe as he can before God spits his filthy ass into hell.

It was one of those absolutely adorable moments the Obamas are known for as, for not the first time in the past week, Michelle Obama was having a bit of good-natured fun trying to make Barack cry in public. And it was one of those moments, in a day full of them, that reminded us all of the infectious decency that was the hallmark of the Obama presidency, and could return to the White House, maybe someday, maybe. Nobody knows how long, though.

Michelle Obama did not go high in her speech at the opening of the magnificent new Obama center in Chicago, at least not in that way she had a reputation for 10 years ago. Her speech soared, of course, as she did what she said she knew her husband would not do that day, by unabashedly singing his praises. But to appropriately commemorate and contextualize such an event, you have to acknowledge the backdrop of the situation: the United States of America, once a beacon of hope for much of the world, especially during the presidency of the man they were celebrating, is in the throes of authoritarian capture and encroaching fascism, led by a Hitler wannabe whose only redeeming quality is that he’s too fucking stupid and venal to successfully inflict damage on the level he and his legion of racist, fascist imbeciles really wish for. Not that he, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and all the rest aren’t committing horrific, corrupt crimes against the American people and all humanity, crimes that will absolutely land them in hell if there is any justice in the universe.

But imagine if these mouthbreathers were actually good at their jobs.

Michelle Obama did not mention that smelly son of a bitch’s name in her speech, neither did her husband. But her entire speech was a subtweet of him. After all, it’s impossible to extol the goodness Barack Obama brought to the presidency without immediately comparing him to the thing that’s shitting its way around the White House residence these days, even if it’s only subtextual. That man’s revenge presidency is his desperate attempt, after all, to erase the Black man who is his superior to him in every way. But we all know, and the history books know, and we suspect the current occupant knows on some level, that it’s the other way around, that Barack Obama is his negation.

That history will view his two presidential terms as little more than pathetic skidmarks. Barack Obama, though? The world’s history books will be talking about him for centuries.

Watch here, and then we’ll look at some of the important moments below:

MICHELLE OBAMA: You told me all those years ago that you couldn’t promise me the world. But you could promise me an interesting life.And of course, you outdid yourself and managed to give me both.

I know it hasn’t always been easy, but there hasn’t been a single second through this experience that standing by your side hasn’t left me in awe.

Eight years in The Crucible and not once did you melt from the heat. Not once did you let it harden you. Instead, you used it to reveal your truest essence - your stubborn optimism and unflinching courage, your dazzling brilliance and unpretentious decency, your ferocious work ethic and absolutely unshakable moral fiber.

And to do it all as a first and the higher standard that comes with all that.

The claims that a US senator and constitutional law expert wasn’t qualified for the job, the lies about your birthright, your faith, your patriotism, the outrage when you stated the biological fact that if you’d had a son that he too would be Black.

Yet you were unflappable at every turn. Always focused, always calm, always looking at the long view to how absurd it is to even imagine that you might have buckled under the pressure, even once, lashed out in frustration, lost your temper. How absurd it is to imagine that you might have done anything but make our family and this entire country proud.

No, you were too busy.

I’m not done. Y’all. Not done. So much to say.

You were doing the people’s work, rescuing our economy, expanding health care, ending a war, ordering the Bin Laden raid, saving an auto industry, winning a peace prize.

Told you she fucked him up good.

America’s forever first lady was indeed not done, and I encourage you all to watch her full speech if you haven’t yet. While she was talking about the incredible legacy of her husband’s presidency, and the vision for the center they built not just to memorialize it but to expand its footprint on the South Side of Chicago for generations to come, she kept pulling back the lens, kept contextualizing, kept showing the contrast, with her message that more than ever, in times like these, hope is all that we have.

Here is another long excerpt of that, which contains some of the call to action that’s involved in what they’ve built there, and what will be built now from that place:

OBAMA: [D]eep down in our hearts and souls, we all know right from wrong. We know selflessness from greed, righteousness from injustice. We understand that we all rise and fall together, that every last one of us is an invaluable contributor to the greatness of America. […]

That's where the truth of this country lies. Not in grabbing as much as we can get for ourselves, or knocking folks down to prop ourselves up, but in the overwhelming goodness, the relentless striving, the quiet dignity that is inside all of us, our greatest hope is that this center can reflect back just a fraction of that light, that it can capture the beauty of who we all are, no matter what we look like or where we come from, or how much money we earn, or how we pray or vote or speak or love. […]

Failing to see the humanity in all people puts us all on a slippery slope. And once that slide starts, there’s no telling where it stops. A dangerous precedent that flies in the very face of our faith. And of the founding promise of this democracy that all of us, all of us are created equal, that each of us is a child of God with inherent value.

And no one, and I mean no one, has the right to sit in judgment of who’s American enough.

And that’s why, folks, we simply don’t have the luxury or time to be cynical or complacent, to wring our hands in despair, to wait for someone else to fix the problem.

Y’all, hope is all we have.

Because hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change. But hope is a choice. Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.

We guess she was going high after all. But then again, going high is, in and of itself, a direct kick in the dick of he who remained nameless in her speech.

Barack Obama gave a speech too. It was OK.

Just kidding, obviously he was amazing. He of course addressed how his mean wife keeps doing him dirty and making him cry:

BARACK OBAMA: She did me wrong. She wouldn’t let me see her speech. She knew she was going to mess me up. And she did it anyway.

And in his own Barack Obama fashion, everything he said stood in stark contrast to what’s happening now, and demanded of us to consider what’s possible, even from this dark place in our nation’s history. He hasn’t given up insisting that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, no matter what things may feel like now. (You should really watch his speech to see how he invoked and explained the history of those words.)

Here are some excerpts:

In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the declarations promised, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property.

But in drafting a constitution and a Bill of Rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect. And over more than two centuries, through petitions and protests, marches and strikes, moral appeals from the pulpit and conversations at the family dinner table, men and women from all walks of life, of every color, every faith, every region took up the cause of democracy and made it their own. Until we the people came to include not just some of us, but all of us.

And that’s why the story we tell in this building begins not with Michelle’s origins or my origins, but with our nation’s. With the founding of our print of the Declaration of Independence, and a pen and ink stand used by Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s Bible and a pamphlet by Ida B Wells, suffragist buttons and a hard hat worn by FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins.

And it’s why the exhibits here focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible. A belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people, and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection. A belief in checks and balances in our government, and an accountability that comes with it, an independent judiciary and a robust free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution. A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100% of the time. And a belief that qualities of character - honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor - those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.

These are the values and traditions I believe in.

And they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share, regardless of party. Values every president here today, as different as we are, has tried our best to uphold. Values that John McCain and Mitt Romney believed in no less than I did.

OK yeah, I guess he fucked President Little Hands up pretty hard too. Not least because look who ain’t here, bitch.

In a way, yesterday felt like a reminder that this too shall pass, but it’s upon all of us to put in the work to make sure that when it does pass, it passes so fucking hard it makes MAGA Nazis’ heads spin forevermore in the impotence that comes from being the least valuable players this nation has ever or will ever produce.

We got shit to do.

[Michelle transcript / Barack transcript]

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With all the atrocious national humiliations of the past few days, from Donald Trump’s bouncy house wrasslin’ birthday party to his complete and total surrender to Iran in the war he started, which somehow makes him look even smaller and more impotent next to Barack Obama than he did before — which is literally all he cares about — it’s easy to forgot that we’re in the middle of the midterms, and that Texas Republicans are terrified as ever of James Talarico.

They can’t decide whether to call him gay or try to turn his relationships with women into some kind of disqualifier. (They’ve been trying that one for a minute.) Not sure what they’re going for there, but the biggest thing they’ve discovered is that, well, he has had relationships with women. We understand that relationships with women that involve consent or adulthood might be confusing for the average Republican man.

Of course, that’s when they’re not pathetically trying to paint a box shaped like their own desperate masculine insecurities and explain why Talarico doesn’t fit into it. (More on that in a second.)

Texas Christian fascist weenus Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick demonstrated his fear of James Talarico this weekend when he, rocking a leather jacket it looks like he found at the back of his wife’s closet, in the “sassy” section, said Talarico would “go to hell” for the things he believe about the Bible. (As if it isn’t abundantly obvious that Matthew 7:21-23 is literally about white conservative Christian men like Patrick, as if Jesus isn’t literally calling them out by their names there.)

Speaking at the Texas Republican Party convention in Houston — imagine what a sea of faceless Grindr torsos that was! — Patrick said:

“It’s James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election. And let me tell you, that’s not a Bible I’ve ever read.

Not the flex Patrick thinks it is.

“I’ve never seen so much blasphemy from anyone running for office,” Patrick said to an uproar of applause.

Yes, well, Christian Nazis do tend to cheer for other Christian Nazis, usually it’s a sort of rhythmic uproar. They have hand motions and everything.

“Let me tell you what, I’m going to pray for that guy, because when he loses the Senate race, if he campaigns against God as he’s been doing, he’s going to Hell, for sure. That’s what we’re up against. That’s the darkness. That’s the light. That’s why we must be one.”

LOL, OK, pal. Pray to the little loser weakling god you’ve invented, the one who just happens to share all your fears, hatred and insecurities, who’s somehow as small of a man as you are, and we’ll see who actually gets to Heaven in the end.

On that glorious day, will God also be wearing his wife’s sassy leather jacket?

Talarico responded:

“Love feels like blasphemy when you worship power.”

You know how we’ve been saying — how the entire premise of this newsletter — is that the white conservative Christian fascist temper tantrum these people are inflicting on the world without its consent, and just as importantly, our response to it, our reclamation of the moral high ground itself, is the single most important narrative element in the entire story of the fight we’re in?

Saying it again.

“Love feels like blasphemy when you worship power.”

That’s a Moral High Ground Moment if there ever was one.

We mentioned Republican men’s noodle-flaccid attempts to portray themselves as paragons of masculinity compared to weakling little James. Again, we understand that Republican men are likely confused about expressions of masculinity that involve consenting adults, or people who use their words instead of their fists through drywall. In other words, they’re confused by men who actually act like real men who aren’t always trying to prove something, men who are distinguishable from common animals.

Talarico has an answer for that too:

Talarico told his campaign story about his stepdad, the man who raised him, and how every weekend he’d mow their grass, and then without needing praise or attention for it, he’d mow the neighbor’s yard, because she was a widow, and old, and he knew she couldn’t do it for herself. He continued:

“A man takes responsibility, a man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, a man does what’s right, even when no one is watching.

“And here’s what real men don’t do: They don’t lie and cheat their way through life. They don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. They don’t steal from other people in order to enrich themselves. And so I’ve said before and I will keep saying that

“Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

And so I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don’t think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.”

Or Donald Trump.

Or Dan Patrick.

Or Dan Patrick’s wife’s sassy leather jacket.

(Seriously, man looks like the second runner-up at the first inaugural Virginia Foxx/Kay Ivey lookalike contest and drag show.)

By the way, in case you haven’t seen what the polls look like lately:

Yeah, that’s why they’re terrified.

More than any Texas Senate election in the history of Texas Senate elections, we think they have a real fuckin’ good reason to be this time.

[Texas Tribune]

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Something very stupid happened within the MAGA Christian nationalist movement this week, one of those leopards-eating-faces moments that is kind of delicious to watch from the sidelines, if I’m being honest.

It started when MAGA white Christian nationalist Secretary Shitfaced Pete Hegseth tried to make a move in his white Christian nationalist enshittifying of the Pentagon, part of their efforts to exert greater control over the military’s chaplain corps and get all the woke gayness out of it. Defense Department spokesfluffer Sean Parnell announced that they would be greatly simplifying the categories of religious affiliation the Pentagon recognizes “from over 200 unmanageable categories to 31,” in order to blah blah blah whatever. It’s information they collect on servicemembers and WARFIGHTERS! Read Parnell’s full announcement and watch Shitfaced’s video about it from March if you give a damn.

This is the important part, the part that sent a handful of Republican lawmakers to their fainting couch, this picture that accompanied Parnell’s announcement:

Do you see it? Utah Senator Mike Lee, a devout Mormon, saw it. So did Utah Senator John Curtis. The Mormons are listed, certainly. But not as Christians.

Uh oh.

Curtis tweeted:

“Look at who is in the name of the Church,” he cried.

Mike Lee birthed an entire cow out of the bottom flaps of his magic underpants about it on Twitter:

“I think it’s very unfortunate that the Pentagon has chosen to identify basically every faith group in America that professes faith in Jesus Christ as Christian, with one exception: that is those belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”

Y’all, he was stung. He said it was “repugnant” and violates “any sense of decency,” and complained that the government needs to stay out of “doctrinal disputes.” Getting mad like he was about to cry, Lee demanded, “Secretary Hegseth, tear down that wall! This is not cool! Get rid of it! Get rid of it now! Thank you!”

We guess Mike Lee doesn’t think it’s OK when they do it to his magic underpants religion where if you covenant-marry your wife in the temple you win a free trip to rule over your own planet when you die. He’s only cool with them deleting all those other woke belief systems and non-belief systems, like atheists and Wiccans.

As the Bulwark notes, after this happened, Mike Lee started fighting with half of MAGA Twitter, which was calmly explaining to him that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion and that he was going to hell. He tried to fight back with the same smug attitude he uses about everything else, but even the “bless your heart” responses made him look wounded and defeated. We would pity him if he wasn’t such a carbuncle and a piece of shit.

But a couple days later, he declared victory! Or he tried to convince himself he was declaring victory. Or maybe he really thought he had won?

So what the Pentagon did was it re-released the list, but without all the “Christian” prefixes. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks,” the statement said.

If Mormons can’t be called Christian, then nobody can!

Now, as Andrew Egger correctly notes at The Bulwark, if it was the aforementioned atheists or Wiccans complaining, the Pentagon wouldn’t have changed shit, as triggering those kinds of people was their whole point.

But Mike Lee and the Mormons are a currently useful part of the MAGA Christian nationalist coalition, so Mike Lee had to do something to save face, and so did the Trump regime and super self-righteous evangelical Christian nationalist Pete Hegseth.

But note that what Hegseth did was not to call Mormons Christians, which is what makes Mike Lee’s declaration of victory so sad. And rest assured that no matter what this list looks like right now, Pete Hegseth and the other white Christian nationalists in charge at the Trump Pedo Protector White Nationalist Christian Regime absolutely still think Mormonism is a cult.

How do I know this?

Story time!

When I was in high school, my family went to a severely frozen chosen-branded, extremely wealthy conservative evangelical Presbyterian church. To understand the flavor of this place, envision a church in the leafy, established part of a large southern city, within a 10-minute drive from the country club that bears the very name of the city. You know the one. The oldest club, where the most society people are members. This is not a fun country club. It’s an expensive, invite-only, family lineage country club that may even now not allow Black people or Jews as members, at least not in practice. (If you ever read that Vanity Fair article about the rich white people who took a private jet from Memphis to January 6, you know who exactly the fuck I am putting on blast here.)

The Country Club is an extension of this church and a couple other very similar churches. Or is it the other way around? Regardless, none of these are places Jesus of Nazareth spends a whole fuckton of time.

So, high school! Sunday school, to be exact. Now, you have to understand that when I was a closeted teenager, denying myself even to myself, part of my defensive armor was that I was all in on the conservative faith. When we began going to this church with its Calvinist beliefs, I devoured books on the theology, underlined verses in my Bible that totally proved it was true, and became quite pompous in my confidence that you can’t argue with THIS, you dirty liberals. I was into it. I loved books about prophecy, as so many who have the zeal of converts do.

And I certainly enjoyed a good book about cults. (Here is one that I specifically remember reading.)

Which is why I was totally interested when the dad of one of my fellow youth group members taught a weeks-long series in our senior high Sunday school class about cults. This would be far from the only seminar I ever attended on cults. Beach trip paid for by the rich white people of the church? Cult seminar. Youth group event at friends’ Southern Baptist or nondenominational evangelical church? Cult seminar.

This was the 1990s, the Satanic panic still had gas in the tank, and a favorite conservative Christian pastime was putting on the full armor of God to steel oneself against the imaginary yet somehow ever-present threat of falling into a cult and becoming one of those victim stories you would see on Sally Jessy or whatever.

Yes, there was much education about obscure cults our Boomer parents were still convinced were around every corner, all the things that terrified them about the 1960s and the latter half of the Beatles catalogue.

But one constant, defining feature of these seminars and classes in conservative evangelical churches was that they also spent a lot of time explaining why certain sects with “Christian” in their name are actually anything but Christian, are in fact anti-Christian. Chief among these, as I remember — I hate that I didn’t keep my notes — were Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists and Mormons. (Funny that the Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses were listed as Christians in the Pentagon’s list, by the way.)

This is one of those things that’s absolutely common knowledge among people who grew up in the conservative evangelical church, but maybe people on the outside do not realize. Mormons = not in the club. Mormons = can be convenient political allies, just like they pretend for political purposes to love Jews, haha, as long as they’re the right kind of Jew, AKA the Orthodox kind that eagerly serves as their useful idiots for fulfilling the Biblical prophecy they believe will bring Jesus back. (Jews are also helpful for them to point to when they use terms like “Judeo-Christian” to pretend they aren’t gunning for an absolute Handmaids’ Tale-grade Christian fascist theocracy.)

Not in the club.

For some evidence, go to any Christian bookstore, especially the kind that’s contained within a megachurch. Browse around! Leave with 45 books about cults, all of which will feature Mormons. Google “are Mormons Christian” and click on all links written by conservative Christians who are not Mormons. Write a summary of what you learn, just kidding I already did it for you, and all it says is “LOL.”

I spent approximately 1.4 seconds googling this to show you what I mean. Here’s a whole bunch of reasons written by a fundamentalist Christian that Mormons are Satan’s own devil cult, no matter how much they protest that they have “Christian” right there in their name:

Beliefs: By and large, Mormons deny the doctrine of the Trinity, instead holding to a form of polytheism (belief in multiple gods/goddesses). They teach that the chief God, Elohim, evolved from a man and went on to spawn other divine children — including Jesus and his brother Lucifer (I can’t help but chuckle as I type that!), along with the pre-existent souls of all humans. In the words of one of their “prophets,” Lorenzo Snow, “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

It should be pointed out that because Mormon doctrine holds that everyone’s soul existed in heaven before earth was created, they teach that a person’s soul can be born with spiritual merit or demerit based on its past actions before birth.

Strikingly, this led to a long history of white supremacy in the Mormon church, as they believed dark skin was an indicator that one’s soul had disobeyed God in its pre-existent state. (They’ve since tried to distance themselves from this doctrine, for obvious reasons.) It also led to the practice of polygamy among fundamentalist Mormons, since having more wives meant having more children — aka more bodies for these pre-existent souls to inhabit.

Not only is their doctrine of God radically unbiblical; Mormons have a different understanding of “salvation,” as well. In the Mormon belief system, people gain greater levels of eternal reward (even up to becoming a god yourself and inheriting your own planet) by performing enough good works and participating in specific Mormon rituals.

One such ritual is “baptism on behalf of the dead,” in which a Mormon member may act as a stand-in for the spirits of their deceased friends and relatives, receive those spirits into themselves (!), and earn saving merit on their behalf. Non-Mormons are strictly forbidden to enter the Mormon temples where these rituals take place (not that I’d want to be around for that).

Although Mormons claim to be a “restored” version of Christ’s true church, hopefully this brief glance makes it clear that they are far from anything that could be considered true, biblical Christianity.

He can’t help but chuckle as he types that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers! OMG who slept on the top bunk???

I should mention that the Mormons are literally the first entry on that page of “unorthodox ‘Christian’ sects.” Others featured are (surprise!) Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unitarians. In the book I referenced, Mormons are chapter six.

Are dipshits like Mike Lee laboring under the delusion that any of their evangelical colleagues don’t make magic underpants jokes behind their backs, and/or also think they’re hopelessly deceived cult members? (They also believe this about Roman Catholics, but it’s harder to use the “cult” term for a religion with 1.4 billion adherents.)

Pete Hegseth, as a dedicated follower of an extra-creepy wang of the same Reformed tradition that produced the conservative Presbyterians, almost certainly believes this, and the pathetic thing Mike Lee is taking as a “win” did not change anything about that. I am pretty confident in my assumption that Pete Hegseth firmly believes Mormons will be dropkicked into hell just like any any other cult member or heathen.

This is really so humiliating for Mike Lee, as he is such a true believing, piss-dribbling, lipstick-exposing footsoldier for MAGA. There is no idiot Trump conspiracy theory he won’t latch onto, just look at his Twitter feed, he’s a total dumbass. He’s a poster boy conservative Christian beta male who unquestioningly serves whatever white conservative Christian master he’s told to.

And now he’s spent a week being confronted with what they really think of him.

As Egger basically says, this episode exposes how the MAGA coalition — and the Christian nationalists who make up such a large part of its driving force — can only ever be united “as a force against the established liberal order,” and adds that “If it were ever to come close to achieving actual hegemonic cultural or political power, it would immediately collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.”

Under that government, the Mormons and Mike Lee wouldn’t control or win shit, and neither would the Orthodox Jews, for that matter. They’d all end up in the gulag sooner or later. (And if this happened in the US of A, it’s likely so would the Catholics, if the Christian nationalists attained that kind of power. They’d get to be part of the charade for a while, though.)

Look, I guess I could be wrong, and Pete Hegseth could be woke about the Mormons’ salvation in a way literally none of his co-religionists are. But if so, he’d be the first one!

But yeah, Mike Lee just declared a flawless victory after huffing and puffing and demanding to be called Christian by Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, which responded by calling nobody Christian.

Trust me: the Christian nationalist Trump regime’s opinion of who is and is not a Christian hasn’t moved one millimeter. And it does not include people who believe ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America and that God has a plan for all of us and that plan involves them getting their own planet and that God changed His mind about Black people in 1978.

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Andy Ogles, he is this Tennessee Republican congressman who is dumb as a bag of hammers, and also just a complete sack of shit. (Yes, he’s the one who raised $23,000 to build a burial garden for stillborn infants, which was subsequently never built.)

Ogles thought he had a good tweet to commemorate Nuclear Family Month, the thing conservative Christian white nationalists and kid-touchers are doing as counterprogramming to Pride Month this June. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is calling it “Fidelity Month.” Kay Ivey in Alabama is calling it “Strong Families Month.” And in Ogles’s Tennessee it’s Nuclear Family Month.

It’s all euphemisms, what they mean is that God hates fags. They’re vile, irredeemable, bigoted human execrement, and that’s what they’re doing to oppose Pride month.

But Republicans didn’t like Ogles’s tweet, we guess because it was a little bit too honest about their intentions:

Hasn’t Ogles heard? We’re only saying “nuclear family month.” We’re not saying the first part about God hating fags right now. That completely defeats the purpose of creating a euphemism like “nuclear family month”!

Dumbass!

Immediately came the condemnations, rushing down like waters, from Democrats of course (like Katherine Clark above), but also from Republicans who were appalled, appalled at this bald-faced show of bigotry by one of their own. A Republican acting like an anti-gay lunatic bigot? No they never!

There was New York Rep. Mike Lawler (R-swing district), who came out, well, swinging:

After Ogles deleted the tweet, Lawler added to CNN:

“I’m not going to dispute his statement, but the fact is that tweet was offensive. I know it was offensive to many colleagues and staff members here, and you know it was pretty clear that it was f**ing stupid so,” Lawler said.

Lawler continued “everybody has family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, staff that are in fact homosexual, and to somehow insinuate that they are less than or not Americans, or should not be Americans, is idiotic and offensive. And I was clear about that yesterday. I’m glad he deleted the post, but do better.”

“Do better,” said the white Republican. LOL.

Rep. Nick Lalota, also a Republican from a swing district, told CNN, “Gross, disgusting tweet, inappropriate. All Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation, should enjoy the protections of America, our Constitution, and all of our blessings.”

But it wasn’t just Republicans from swing districts who are already worried they’re going to lose big in November.

Ted Cruz got in on the woke “let’s not kill gays” bandwagon:

Asked by TMZ whether he agreed with the post, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said, “For all of recorded history, homosexuals have been part of humanity.”

“I’m quite libertarian by nature,” he continued. “I think the behavior of consenting adults is their business.”

Thanks, Ted.

Even Tennessee bonkers yokel Rep. Tim Burchett said, “I thought it was wrong. You know what people do in their own dadgum bedrooms, is their business.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson, a bigot’s bigot, one of the most disturbed Christian nationalists in the whole country, started talking about what the Bible is unequivocal about:

“The Bible is unequivocal, We’re supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Everybody is supposed to treat every single person with dignity and respect whether we agree with them or not. That’s a Christian virtue, that’s a biblical virtue, it’s an American virtue. It’s part of we are,” Johnson said. “Andy took it down and did it publicly. He should have done that. It was the right response.”

Hahahaha, fuck off.

All of these people are cross-burning trash, albeit perhaps on different levels. Pardon us, though, if we’re not real concerned with differentiating who votes for the Nazis because Hitler makes the trains run on time vs. the ones who are truly in it for the Jew hate. They’re all voting for, and representing, the Nazis.

This is, of course, Andy Ogles’s brand, the thing he does, in the absence of an ability to add anything of value to anyone’s life. He tweeted in March about Muslims:

He also demanded an investigation into the NFL and NBC for airing the Bad Bunny halftime show, due to all the perverted and untranslatable Spanish-ness that happened there. He’s just a subhuman pig, that’s all.

Ogles, as we said, deleted the tweet, blamed it on a staffer and apologized:

Ooh, they got reprimanded! What a naughty, naughty employee! (If we even believe Ogles didn’t tweet it personally, and we do not.)

In response, he got replies from bluechecked Republicans that said things like “You were looking good but you crossed the LGBTQ mafia and folded like a lawn chair. Deeply disappointing. These people will hate you anyway but you apologized and blame your staff to lick the boot.” Another: “You really bent the knee to the left and are apologizing for this? THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT YOU TO BE SAYING. You are a weak pathetic disgrace for a man, you stand for absolutely nothing.”

And how about:

Because this is who these people really are.

Lots of people are pointing out that there truly is a very gay side of the DC MAGA coalition, lots of self-loathing white Republicans like those we discussed in this article at our side gig The Moral High Ground. But those token Marys are fuckin’ stupid if they think they’re the ones in the coalition who are going to win out, that white supremacist Christian nationalists will settle for anything other than one day sending them to the gulag along with all the other wokes.

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New York Times Idiot Thinks These Trump Losers Are The 'A-Gays'

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This is who they are.

Homocon Dave Rubin found this out — yet still won’t admit it — when he and his husband announced they were going to be dads, and in response garden-variety Republicans on Twitter showered them with virulently homophobic hate and condemnation, and suggestions that their children should be taken away. Men like Rubin have so little self-esteem, value themselves so little that they’re willing to “agree to disagree” about their very lives and dignity. (Which is how Rubin is able to justify his friendship with the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a man who fundamentally believes exactly the same things Andy Ogles tweeted.)

It’s worth noting that this is happening against the backdrop of a year, administration, and era where American society is actively moving backward on equal rights for all people, obviously egged on by the fact that Republicans are letting their Nazi flags fly proudly these days. Support for marriage equality is actually slipping in the United States, and the movement is among Republicans. NBC News cites Gallup, which found in 2021 that 55 percent of Republicans supported marriage equality, but now it’s only 37.

You one of those ignoramuses who thinks Obergefell is settled law, that this illegitimate partisan hack Supreme Court won’t start abusing gay people the second it feels like it has the right case?

Andy Ogles had to take that tweet down because he said the quiet part loud, no more, no less. And yet all those governors’ “Nuclear Family Month” declarations remain.

They mean the same thing, dumbasses.

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Depending on your menu of daily reading sources, you might have read about this story several times already this week. But not from me! So let’s fix that.

Back in the day, Alan Chambers was one of the two or three best-known leaders in the so-called “ex-gay” fraud/torture movement, which is still around and adapting and changing forms to keep up with the times, like kudzu or COVID. Chambers led Exodus International, which was definitely the flagship model of pray-away-the-gay “ministries,” the one the others aspired to emulate, in their quest to shame children and adults alike into trying to change their sexuality through religious abuse. (Exodus always had a weird focus on the kids.)

There was a time 10 to 15 years ago when it really looked like the “ex-gay” movement was dying a pathetic death. The leaders of these organizations and their most celebrated success stories kept getting caught with dicks in their mouths. (At least the male leaders did!) The movement’s biggest cheerleaders, who preached with smug self-assurance that God was really totally for real removing same-sex attractions from people and magically converting them into the penis-in-vagina/traditional marriage Americans of His godliest dreams just looked sillier and sillier, every time they said it.

Also, as this was before the onset of MAGA white supremacist Christian fascism, there was momentum for eradicating the practice entirely, with a number of states outright banning it, at least for minors, recognizing it as the torture and child abuse it was.

Obviously the subtext here is that it’s all making a comeback now — this time with more than a soupçon of anti-trans hate mixed into the Christian child predators’ regularly abhorrent anti-gay ratatouille — but it really did seem there for a minute like the fight had been won, or at least that these bastards had been pushed way back, to a point that their ability to hurt children, to make children hate themselves to the point of suicide, would be severely curtailed for the foreseeable future.

There were a lot of prongs in that fight against the “ex-gay” scourge back then. There was a documentary called This Is What Love In Action Looks Like, by director Morgan Jon Fox, which followed another large, now-defunct “ex-gay” organization called Love In Action, which was based in Memphis. Before I landed at Wonkette, I worked with Wayne Besen’s Truth Wins Out organization, which has existed for many years now with a laser focus toward exposing the snake oil salesmen and quacks of the “ex-gay” world. Medical professionals were speaking out against the practice, as they are unfortunately still having to today. Movies like But I’m A Cheerleader helped show the wider world just how clownfucking absurd the movement was.

Back in those days, it seemed like every four seconds an “ex-gay” leader was coming (back) out of the closet, with a number of them beginning the long process of apologizing and trying to make right what they had done, atone for the innocent lives they had harmed and ruined. It was and is heady stuff.

Many of those leaders made real apologies, the kinds that fully grappled with what they had done, and also with who they themselves were. It does seem that to truly embark on the the work of healing the harm one has done as an “ex-gay” leader would necessarily involve battling one’s own inner demons, making peace with one’s own self.

Many of the leaders from that time are now in long-term relationships and marriages of the very decidedly gay variety. (I am friendly with several of them now! We who used to be their adversaries. Life is funny like that.)

And then there was Alan Chambers. His apology always hit me different, and I think that matters for our purposes today, which are that Alan Chambers just got arrested in Florida for allegedly soliciting someone he believed to be a 14-year-old boy, a child, for sex. (Alan is 54.)

Here is a local news report on the arrest:

According to the arrest report, Alan met the child on Snapchat in a To Catch A Predator-type situation. Except the child was not a child. It was a cop. Alan allegedly told the cop he thought was a child that he wanted to “make love.” He talked about “forbidden love.” And he just kept reaching out to the cop/child, and tried to meet up with them. Instead he got arrested.

So here’s what I think is important here, because remember two seconds ago I said Alan’s apology felt different to me? Wayne Besen put out a press release from Truth Wins Out reacting to this, which alludes to that difference:

Although Chambers eventually rejected the term “ex-gay” and acknowledged ongoing same-sex attraction, he did not become a representative of the LGBTQ community after coming out of the closet about his sexuality. He remained married to his wife Leslie, remained active in church, and continued to present himself primarily through a conservative Christian framework.

“Alan Chambers should not be portrayed as an LGBTQ leader,” said Besen. “He was a former leader of a movement that harmed LGBTQ people. His later apology mattered, but it did not make him a community spokesperson or erase the suffering caused by Exodus International.”

In other words, it doesn’t seem like Alan actually did the work.

When Exodus was forced to shut down, Alan didn’t get the fuck out of the movement that created the conditions to foster the sorts of child abuse the “ex-gay” world supports and protects. And to be clear, I am talking about both the institutional abuse of the self-hatred-based prayer therapy they offer — which often gets weirder than that, see video below — as well as the weird predatory setup of these joints, where mommies and daddies are supposed to trust strange men and women who say they’ve “prayed away the gay” to be alone with their kids.

You will not be shocked to learn that sexual abuse has always been rampant in the “ex-gay” industry. As Besen explained in the press release about Chambers, “[ex-gay outfits] isolate vulnerable LGBTQ youth, tell them their natural identity is shameful, and then hand power to religious leaders who claim they can ‘heal’ them. That is a dangerous formula, and history has shown again and again that predators can exploit it.”

Oh sure, Alan Chambers demonstrated contriteness, or at the very least he read his lines. But there was always something lacking about it. Here’s a video from Truth Wins Out in 2019, several years after Exodus shut down in 2013, which features Chambers heavily. If you have time to watch it, please do, but I will highlight the parts I think are important below.

What we hear in that video is Alan Chambers acknowledging that “ex-gay therapy” and “ministry” are bullshit, and harmful, and creepy, and abusive, and that he deeply regrets being a part of it. Alan even says the word “bullshit” in the video, and admits that he never lost a scintilla of same-sex attraction, nor had he ever met anyone who had. He seems genuinely sorry.

What we don’t hear, though, is Alan saying yes, fully, LGBTQ+ people are perfect children of God just the way they are, no asterisks, not if they do this, or if they refrain from doing that, or as long as they agree to deny themselves the experience of the fullness of who they are. He offhandedly refers to people still being attracted to the same sex as a “temptation” that doesn’t go away. (Chambers did allow at the time that even sexually active people could go to heaven, which is less than a full-throated endorsement.)

At one point, in a clip from a Lisa Ling special Alan did before Exodus’s dissolution, where he was confronted by “ex-gay” survivors, one of those survivors suggests that Exodus had merely morphed into a “recloseting” ministry. That they were admitting you couldn’t change, so instead they’d just help you self-hate yourself back into the closet.

Seems interesting to go back and listen now, the week after Alan, a gay man to this day married to a woman and cosplaying a traditional Christian heterosexual lifestyle, was arrested for trying to meet a 14-year-old boy child for sex.

In case you are wondering, this story is very much a part of The Moral High Ground’s Pervert Pastor Project*, not only because Alan Chambers placed himself on a pedestal of religious authority over vulnerable youths — Exodus really had a weird thing with kids — but because he once served as an associate pastor in what is or was his church, Calvary Assembly of God in Orlando. (How often do extremely conservative Assembly of God/pentecostal types come up on our longrunning list of religious leaders who sexually abuse, rape, or otherwise try to sexually prey on children? A LOT.)

I don’t know if Alan Chambers and his heterosexual marriage still go to that church. I know he wrote a book a decade ago with his wife called My Exodus: From Fear to Grace, the blurb of which says it’s “a book for everyone who wants to be welcoming and loving to all people without compromising their faith or their biblical theology.” Uh huh. Would hate for people to fall down the slippery slope of loving people in a way that compromises their “biblical theology.”

If I sound skeptical of Alan Chambers, it is because I have always been, in a way that I quite frankly don’t feel about some others who used to have powerful positions in the “ex-gay” world and then came out the other side, literally. A couple of them might end up reading this. Hello!

Speaking of, Randy Scobey, who also worked at Exodus, has written on his Substack reacting to Alan Chambers’s arrest, which is worth reading for a perspective from somebody with decades of history with the man. He also has a post about how Peter LaBarbera, the marginal anti-gay creep everybody used to call “Porno Pete,” back when people knew who he was, has of course been using this to spread his bile about how Alan Chambers’s arrest says something about gay men, and not about, you know, everything I just discussed, including what I see as the remaining deceit in Alan’s apology story. I was quite frankly surprised to find out Porno Pete was still around.

As Randy writes:

Alan Chambers is not an advertisement for gay identity. Alan Chambers is an advertisement for what happens when you spend decades inside the evangelical ex-gay industrial complex and stay firmly entrenched in modern cultural conservatism — a movement Peter LaBarbera championed, promoted, and defended. Alan didn’t come out as a proud gay man and then allegedly do this. Alan spent years as the president of Exodus International, the flagship organization of a movement that told gay people God could make them straight if they just tried hard enough, prayed hard enough, suppressed hard enough.

Uh yeah.

As I said, this story is very much headline news for The Moral High Ground’s Pervert Pastor Project. Porno Pete — enough alliteration in this graf for you? — might be interested in checking out that project, where I have been following the literally hundreds of conservative Christian pastors, youth group leaders, priests, Christian school teachers and coaches who are arrested, tried, sentenced and imprisoned every single year for raping and molesting children, trading kiddie porn, and all manner of other abuse you can think of. As Dan Savage once memorably said, “If Kids Got Raped At Denny’s As Often As They Get Raped At Church, it would be against the law to take your kid to Denny’s.”

But sure, Porno Pete, keep fucking that chicken, if your dick even works.

And oh boy, was Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta correct in his post about this, when he said that “Chambers was a useful tool for the right in the past and some things never change.”

This has been your Moral High Ground post about the arrest of Alan Chambers. I never liked that guy.

Tip your bartenders.

*Oh and yes, there will FINALLY be large updates on the Pervert Pastor Project soon! I had to come to a place where I admitted I needed help compiling the list — you know, because every week you don’t update there’s a whole new list of conservative Christian religious leaders who have raped kids. Anyway, I found the help. Stay tuned for that and more. In the meantime, subscribe to help support that work and all the rest of the work!

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There was this thing that happened in Exodus 32 that really pissed God off. Among the early Bible sins, it was way up there.

“Don’t look back or I will turn you into a pillar of salt!” She looked back. “Eat all the fruit except this one!” She ate that one. (God’s early habit of testing people by giving them one thing not to do and then waiting for them to roll their eyes and do exactly that thing is a whole other subject.)

And then there was Exodus 32. The Golden Calf.

So the story, if you remember, is like this:

Back in Exodus 20 the Ten Commandments had been laid down, and the first of them were “You shall have no other gods before me,” and then “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Right there at the beginning, it’s “Don’t worship other gods” — which seems to suggest that there were other gods and Yahweh knew it, an interesting thing to explore in Gnostic tradition — AND THEN it’s “don’t make graven images and worship them, I will fuck your grandchildren’s grandchildren up, for I am very sensitive and fly off the handle easily.”

Point is, it’s really really really clear what God thinks about idolatry, especially really extremely on-the-nose idolatry.

So in Exodus 32, Moses is up on the mountaintop with God getting the law written down in tablet form, and all the people were like WHERE IS HE? So they went to Aaron, Moses’s brother, the high priest, and said “We need some weird statue gods to worship. Can you make that happen?” And Aaron was like “OK sure, everybody in the whole town, take off your jewels!” and they did, and he melted them down and turned them into a golden cow so they could all worship it, like totally normal people.

And they made a festival for the very next day, with food and drink and metallic cow worships. Like totally normal people.

And God saw it and looked at Moses like OMG what the fuck are they doing? And Moses really had to talk God off the ledge, because God was talking shit like “Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.” (He still ended up striking them with a plague.)

There’s more to it than that, but point is, making golden calves and other similar idols is kiiiiiiiind of a “Did I stutter?” situation in the Bible.

So of course here is super-Trumpy MAGA pastor Mark Burns this weekend consecrating a golden calf of Donald Trump at Trump’s Doral resort in South Florida, so that Trump’s followers can worship it.

Burns tweeted that picture, accompanied by a long, defensive explanation that can be boiled simply down to “Shut up, stop saying it’s a golden calf of Trump!”

(It is a golden calf.)

Some text from that tweet:

One of the greatest honors of my life was leading the dedication of President Donald J. Trump’s statue to the world.

Aim higher in life?

What amazes me is how quickly some people have compared this beautiful statue, created and made possible by more than 6,000 patriots, to a golden calf or idol worship.

Well, if it moos like a golden calf …

Let me be very clear.

We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.

Objection, facts not in evidence that you hateful perverts and creeps have ever so much as met Jesus Christ, give the Lord’s people a fucking break.

The Word of God says, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3.

It does say that.

It also says, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.” Matthew 4:10.

Does he know that he should be arguing his side, not ours?

That is the line.

Honor is not worship.

Respect is not idolatry.

Celebration is not bowing down to a false god.

Ohhhhhh, so that’s how we’re gonna split hairs. “I was only HONORING and RESPECTING Trump with my tongue up his ass. Honest, Jesus!”

Romans 13:7 says, “Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.”

Lord, Lord, I swear, I was just rendering!

Giving honor where honor is due is biblical.

Bowing down and worshipping an idol is sinful.

There is a major difference.

And Trump-fellating MAGA cultists are the only ones who can see it.

This statue was not created for worship. It was created as a symbol of resilience, patriotism, courage, and gratitude. It was created to honor a man whom many may disagree with, but millions of Americans believe has done extraordinary things to make this nation stronger.

If he renders Trump any harder Trump’s dick is gonna fall off.

People celebrate athletes, musicians, entertainers, and cultural icons while they are still alive. Michael Jordan has a statue in Chicago. Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, Shakira, Ed Sheeran, and many others have been honored publicly in different ways. Yet Christians were not screaming “golden calf” over those moments.

It is true, nobody has ever accused anyone of golden calfing Ed Sheeran.

Of course, nobody much believes Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift, Shakira, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Michael Jordan is a pagan king being guided by the hand of God for the glory of His kingdom, to take dominion over the Earth.

Which is a common strain of belief about Trump in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, with which holy nutfuck Pastor Mark Burns is affiliated. As is the belief that Trump has been “saved” from one or more assassination attempts, by God, for special God-ordained purposes. (Which Burns alluded to in his first tweet about the golden calf, where he also felt the need in the fifth sentence to protest that it’s not a golden calf.)

It feels like those details matter.

You may dislike President Trump. That is your choice.

But you are in gross error if you think for one second that I worship this magnificent statue or anything made by human hands.

Oh no, he worships Donald Trump, and fuck off if he says differently. He might not literally pray to Trump, but Burns’s subservience fetish for Trump is absolutely a form of particularly pathetic worship.

(Fun fact: I met this dude on the street in Cleveland at Trump’s first convention, watched him arguing with people on behalf of his conman lord and savior. He’s a weapons-grade loser of a MAGA cultist, it’s really sad to watch up close.)

Anyway, the rest of that tweet is just babbling about how he worships Jesus not Trump, not sure who he’s really trying to convince. He comically suggests, as if he’s earned our respect, that we should use spiritual discernment. As if Matthew 7:21-23 — really the entire book of Matthew, and the rest of the Gospels — isn’t quite clear about how we should go about discerning actions like those of Pastor Burns.

And he’s been babbling about it ever since. It’s not a golden calf! It’s not a golden calf! It’s not a golden calf! (It’s a golden calf.)

And now here come more Trump-worshipping cultists to babble about if you refuse to suck their golden calf’s weird Mario-Kart-mushroom-shaped dickhead, you must have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Say it some more!

As the Christian Post explains, the golden calf is 22 feet tall, including its platform, it’s called “Don Colossus” (LOL), and it is supposed to look like Trump when he got shot, shoving his fist in the air, we guess before his ear miraculously closed back up. It doesn’t really look like Trump, but don’t assume it’s because the sculptor sucks or is too blinded by their own Trump worship to provide an accurate rendering.

It’s stupider and Trumpier than that.

The sculptor, Alan Cottrill of Ohio, tells the Miami New Times that this crypto-bro-funded golden calf was a “clusterfuck” to create. It doesn’t look like Trump because Cottrill was asked to remove Trump’s signature ugly gross turkey vagina neck, and to shave off a few (bunch) of pounds. Also it was reportedly a gigantic pain in the ass to get the weirdos who commissioned the statue to actually pay the final payment for the statue. Just a great experience all around.

When asked if Cottrill would ever work with the crypto bros or Trump’s team again, specifically for the upcoming Trump Presidential Tower in Miami, which, according to renderings, will include a large, gold-leaf Trump statue, he didn’t need to hear the full question before responding, “Fuck no.”

“Once somebody has shown that they can’t be trusted to do what they say,” he adds, “you don’t work with them anymore.”

Trump, bless his heart, appears to think the statue is solid gold.

Trump also thinks all the tacky dementia decorations he’s put all over the White House are solid gold.

So that’s sad.

In conclusion, what have we learned today? We have learned that the new golden calf statue of Donald Trump at Doral is actually not a golden calf, but a gold-leafed calf.

We have learned that his pathetic worshippers — especially the ones who are such losers that they think the God of the entire universe would choose somebody as inferior and worthless to the human race as Donald Trump as his emissary on Earth — are going to split hairs over whether they are literally worshipping Trump or whether waking up with his ass hairs between their teeth is just something that happens after a hot hard night of rendering unto Caesar.

And finally, we learned that if you think any of this is weird, you are the one with something called Trump Derangement Syndrome, which sure does sound like an accurate description of whatever is afflicting Mark Burns.

Now hit that collection plate for more spiritually nourishing lessons!

Here’s a fucking Veggie Tales episode about idolatry.

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Swear to God, I am not trying to make this a Bible study newsletter every time I hit “publish,” but these motherfuckers are giving me little choice.

I don’t want to talk about whatever happened at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner this weekend, except to note that whatever happened, we can be sure it’s just going to enhance Donald Trump’s asinine messianic delusions.

Yes, here we are, continuing the theme of Trump thinking he’s Jesus, or indeed Jesus’s own savior, as each assassination attempt, alleged or otherwise, confirms for him and for his most brainwashed followers that he is special and chosen, biblically. Meanwhile others just keep wondering if he might be the biblical Antichrist. (I think we determined last week that he’s definitely an antichrist, little “a.” And we can come to that conclusion no matter what we believe, or don’t believe!)

It just so happens that just before whatever happened this weekend, and after Trump posted a picture depicting himself as literally Jesus — and while he continues trying to explain Catholicism to the pope — Trump released a video of himself reading a passage of the Bible out loud, poorly because’s not good at reading, and unconvincingly, because the man has never touched a Bible in his life unless he was using it as a Christian fascist prop. (That would include his autographed Bibles, which is definitely one of the top five most blasphemous things he’s ever done. Also that time in Alabama when he just started autographing the Bibles of tornado victims. Because that happened.)

As part of a “marathon Bible reading” put on by some evangelical assholes, Two Corinthians Trump didn’t read from Two Corinthians, despite how much he loves it, and we imagine he probably didn’t read his favorite Bible passage, because as he famously explained in 2016, favorite Bible verses are supposed to be a secret. In that way, they’re like the full truth about Trump in the Epstein Files, I guess.

But no matter!

Trump instead read 1 Chronicles 7:11-22. Try not to laugh as he sounds out “Bible.”

Pros-pair-ously.

So that went well. It’s so abundantly obvious that he is not absorbing a word of what he’s saying. But whatever, man! Best words, etc.

If you’re not familiar with the passage, it’s oft-cited by the types of conservative Christians who have replaced Jesus with Trump, not that those sorts really ever had much Jesus to begin with. The central nugget of it is “Heal their land.” What God’s faithful must do to please Him so that He will in turn bless them and bring about the magical white Christian wonderland prophecied about in that Lee Greenwood song.

Christian Nationalists love this passage, oh my God they fuckin’ love it so much. If you Google around in their hinterlands, you will find it easily in the wild. For example, back in 2024, the MAGA Christian wingnut band Newsboys posted 2 Chronicles 7:14 (NIV) on their Facebook: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (That was before the very MAGA now-former lead singer of Newsboys, Michael Tait, previously of DC Talk, got caught in the middle of a massive scandal involving his grooming of young men for sexual favors.)

It is no accident, therefore, that they had Trump read that passage, as many of Trump’s most fervently Christian nationalist supporters, particularly those involved in the influential New Apostolic Reformation, believe he is their modern-day King Cyrus, a pagan emperor being used by God to bring forth His kingdom on earth.

Christian nationalist fingerpaint all over this passage like zoo elephants, adding “ABOLISH ABORTION!” and “GOD HATES QUEERS!” and every other thing they think needs to be eradicated in order to “heal their land.” The passage was literally prayed through a bullhorn during the January 6 terrorist attack on the US Capitol that Trump incited.

So that’s what Trump read. Sounds a bit like Hitler when he reads it, except for how Hitler actually spoke his first language fluently, unlike Trump.

As the BBC notes, Marco Rubio is participating in the Bible Circle Jerk Across America, as are Secretary Shitfaced Hegseth and his white supremacist Christian crusader tattoos, unless the dumb bitch fucks up again and starts reading Pulp Fiction quotes and thinking they’re the Bible.

The Moral High Ground

Pete Hegseth's God Is Not An Awesome God

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2 years ago · 276 likes · 44 comments · Evan Hurst

Sean Duffy’s part of it. Susie Wiles is part of it. Ted Cruz. Joni Ernst. Michele Bachmann. Most pathetic Superman ever Dean Cain. Fuckin’ DJ from Full House.

Just absolute lunatics. (Here is the whole list. Take a look and see how deeply the Christian nationalist tentacles have infiltrated the halls of power of a once-great nation.)

The organizers of the spectacle, the BBC explains, say this performative bullshit will help the US “return to the spiritual foundation that has shaped our country.” (And again, we see why they had Trump read the “Heal our land” passage.) Here’s more:

“We’re making a statement during this week as America reads the Bible, that there is so much in the Bible that we can gain wisdom and discernment from, there is so much that can heal our families, that can rescue us from depression and anxiety and can heal our inner cities and heal our land ... I believe the president’s saying that by reading this scripture specifically,” Bunni Pounds, founder of Christians Engaged, told Fox News Digital last week.

Of course Betty Bible Beater’s name is “Bunni.”

It must be noted that this is exactly the kind of asshol-ish behavior Jesus Christ very specifically and frequently railed against. Open up your Bible to the Gospels and see what Jesus says about this kind of performative bullshit. He hated it. He liked action. He liked flipping tables. He likes it when people actually, you know, feed the hungry and clothe the poor and care for the sick. All that woke-ass gay liberal shit.

We quoted the pertinent passage when that smarmy, forked-tongued daughter of deception Karoline Leavitt posted a video of herself last year cheerfully and publicly praying to Jesus that she would have “fun,” right before she went out and told a bunch of sick, evil, Nazi lies to the American people during her press briefing, like she does every day, often while wearing her great big huge cross around her neck.

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Karoline Leavitt Defiles Prayer Itself

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a year ago · 250 likes · 66 comments · Evan Hurst

Yes, what does Jesus think about shit like that? He says in Matthew 6:5-7 (KJV):

5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

He also said in Matthew 15:18-20 (ESV) that “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person,” and yes, that would include when fascists like Donald Trump and his babbling minions read the Bible aloud on street corners, into bullhorns, in order to “heal our land.”

Because how do we know them? By their fruits we know them. Does the MAGA Christian nationalist white supremacist Trump regime bring forth good fruit?

As Rev. Benjamin Cremer posted on Instagram in response to Trump reading the Bible aloud and making it great again, and indeed about the entire disgusting charade:

I’ve said it a thousand times, and I’ll say it again. There is nothing MAGA Christians hate more than Jesus.

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There Is Nothing Trump And MAGA Hate More Than Jesus

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2 years ago · 258 likes · 82 comments · Evan Hurst

Want to actually heal this land? Call these motherfuckers out at every opportunity, and never let them claim the moral high ground again.

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Well, the question is coming up again, and this time some of the conservative Christian “faithful” are starting to ask it. (I recognize that the word “faithful” is doing a lot of work when we’re talking about vile conservative Christians whose only faith is in a hateful white supremacist bigot God they created in their own image.)

But here’s the question: Is Donald Trump the Antichrist? Like, the literal one?

Uh oh! Is it dawning on (some of) these folks that maybe this great deceiver, this false christ, this boogeyman they’ve been training their whole lives to spot — especially if they’re a certain kind of evangelical — might have ALREADY DECEIVED THEM AND NOW THEY ARE GOING TO HELL WHEN THEY DIE BECAUSE THE TRUE MARK OF THE BEAST IS A RED MAGA HAT?

Important questions, especially if you’re one of the perhaps deceived!

It’s been coming up enough that Wired has a full piece covering who’s asking and why. It really got started when Trump posted that picture of himself as literally Jesus healing the sick, then lied though his viciously stupid teeth and said he thought it was depicting him as a doctor. This piece, which originally appeared at Wonkette, and which I excerpted here, is about that:

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Jesus Trump Deletes Pic Of Himself Healing Sick Because MAGA Is No Fun Anymore

Hello, Moral High Grounders! Never done this before, but when it serves the content, I think we ought to. I have some more thoughts on the ongoing war between the Trump Regime and the pope that I think I’ll write about here later this week/this weekend, but the last couple days also saw Donald Trump post, and then delete, a picture depicting him as lite…

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5 months ago · 146 likes · 13 comments · Evan Hurst

We saw in that post that Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “more than blasphemy,” adding that “It’s an antichrist spirit.”

Also in that post we had creeper Theobro white nationalist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ+ neckbeard Joel Webbon — these are the “Theobros,” if you don’t recall — hilariously freaked out that he thinks Trump is “demon possessed,” as if Trump hasn’t been like this his entire life. Refresh yourself on Joel in these earlier Moral High Ground posts:

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2 years ago · 253 likes · 56 comments · Evan Hurst

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The 565,384 Stupidest, Funniest Temper Tantrums America's Bigots Had During Pride Month!

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2 years ago · 149 likes · 54 comments · Evan Hurst

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MAGA Men VERY MAD At Wives Secretly Voting For Kamala. Stop Laughing, It's Not Funny!

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2 years ago · 397 likes · 85 comments · Evan Hurst

To those examples, Wired adds this reaction:

“In 18 months I went from hesitantly voting for Trump to thinking there’s a decent chance he’s the antichrist,” added Clint Russell, host of the right-wing Liberty Lockdown podcast.

Plus, there was that whole long monologue Tucker Carlson did last week in response to Trump using Easter morning to threaten to massacre innocent Iranian people, indeed, the entire civilization. As Wired points out, Tucker didn’t say “antichrist” in that monologue, but he didn’t need to for “figures like Alex Jones [and] users of the DonaldTrump666 subreddit” to hear it.

Oh shitfuck, y’all! Has MAGA been worshiping Satan this whole time, just to stick it to the libs?

Well let’s see, what DOES the Bible say about the antichrist? Let us put on our biblical discernment hats and find out!

We shall begin with 2 Thessalonians, which says, um, a lot. (I’m using the English Standard Version, should you care.) Verses three and four, regarding when Jesus Christ will return:

³ Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness^[b] is revealed, the son of destruction,^{[c] 4} who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

Verse eight:

⁸ And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.

GO JESUS! GIT IT!

Ahem, excuse us, had a random PRAISE HIM moment.

Verses nine through 12:

⁹ The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, ¹⁰ and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. ¹¹ Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, ¹² in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Well if that isn’t MAGA …

You know how we always talk about how Matthew 7:21-23 is basically Jesus’s love letter to the white conservative Christians, where He explains to them, lovingly, in sort of an “I’m going to flood you all to fucking death like My dad did a few hundred years ago” sort of way, that so many multitudes of people who have worn His name on their sleeves, who prophesied in His name, who did everything in His name, who BLAH BLAH BLAH-ed and couldn’t shut their mouths in His name, actually never knew him, and never He them?

How the passage doesn’t even make sense unless it’s directed at those who are possessed by the most pompous ass certainty that it could never be about them?

Because why else would those people be bitching and moaning and demanding to speak to The Manager at the the pearly gates? "‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’”

(Another verse we should spend more time looking at in this context is Matthew 19:24: That’s the one about ^“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”)

Now, the Bible mentions that there will be more than one antichrist, numerous antichrists, little “a.” Back in Matthew 24:5-7, Jesus said, “[M]any will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray.” Then: “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.” Verses 11 and 12: “And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.”

And then verse 24 hits, with Jesus making abundantly fuckin’ clear to His disciples that He is saying that these false prophets are going to deceive people who call themselves believers: “For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”

It helps to think of this not in some kind of woo-woo 1970s cult panic way, like literal gurus claiming they are the risen Jesus. But more like, you know, false teachers replacing the entire message of the faith with, I dunno, an explicitly religious version of Make America Great Again or something? Just a suggestion.

The Apostle Paul writing in 2 Corinthians 11: “¹³ For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. ¹⁴ And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. ¹⁵ So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.”

Hmmmm! By the way, I’m cheating off a conservative evangelical website that cobbled together all of these verses and as usual missed the entire point. These dumbasses probably think the mark of the Beast is “wokeness.”

The author at that website literally wrote:

What is amazing is that people’s political freedom will be taken away, and they will be deceived into thinking they are worshipping Christ! People will think what they are doing is normal and good (after all, the economy will prosper)! But such is the nature of deception. People who are deceived don’t know they are deceived.

Well, I guess that settles that, Donald Trump isn’t the antichrist, because his economy fuckin’ sucks. Also one would think God would give Satan a boy wonder who wasn’t so goddamned stupid, to at least make it seem like a fair fight. But maybe not?

Finally, there’s that whole thing in Daniel and Revelation about how the beast will allegedly have a head wound that miraculously disappears and the whole world will be full of wonder, which … doesn’t quite seem like a description of what happened when Trump was allegedly shot in Pennsylvania. UNLESS what the Bible meant when it said the world would “marvel” is that they would immediately start calling horseshit on the very legitimacy of the so-called “head wound,” and that idiots at the Republican convention would put maxi pads on their ears in solidarity, and everybody would point and laugh at them.

Anyway, let’s spoiler our way to the end with Revelation 19:20:

And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence^[a] had done the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur.

GO JESUS, HE’S OUR MAN, IF HE CAN’T THROW THEM ALIVE INTO THE LAKE OF FIRE THAT BURNS WITH SULFUR, NO ONE CAN!

Golly, we are just feeling so praise-and-worshippy this morning!

What’s fun is that Trump’s suckling fluffers with daddy issues like Pete Hegseth who are so sure they’re worshiping the real God — you know how the Bible mentions the antichrist will have minions aplenty! —well, if Trump is the antichrist, they will get thrown into hell with Trump, so hahaha, have fun with that, Mister Secretary WARFIGHTER of WAR!

Fuckin’ loser.

In conclusion, Trump is the Antichrist, or he’s an antichrist, or maybe he’s just a vile, fascist piece of wannabe Hitler shit with a messiah complex who’s nonetheless definitely going to hell when he dies.

Biblical analysis all finished.

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-Evan