Obama Selects Anti-Gay Pastor for Inaugural Benediction

Jim Burroway

January 9th, 2013

President Obama has named two individuals to offer the benediction at his January 21 swearing-in ceremony. The first is Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights worker Medgar Evers, who was shot in his driveway in 1963 by a white supremacist. She is believed to be the first woman and non-clergy member to be invited to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration.

Thats sounds to me like an excellent choice. It’s the second name which gives pause. The committee also announced that Pastor Louie Giglio, founder of the youth-oriented Passion Conferences, has been selected to offer the benediction. The Washington Post cites an unnamed inaugural official who said:

…Giglio was picked for the benediction in part because of his work raising awareness about modern-day slavery and human trafficking. Those were core issues at his most recent conference, Passion 2013, attended by more than 60,000 mostly young evangelicals in Atlanta.

But as ThinkProgress has discovered, Giglio has an anti-gay history:

In a mid-1990s sermon identified as Giglio’s, available online on a Christian training website, he preached rabidly anti-LGBT views. The 54-minute sermon, entitled “In Search of a Standard – Christian Response to Homosexuality,” advocates for dangerous “ex-gay” therapy for gay and lesbian people, references a biblical passage often interpreted to require gay people be executed, and impels Christians to “firmly respond to the aggressive agenda” and prevent the “homosexual lifestyle” from becoming accepted in society.

ThinkProgress has several choice excerpts from that sermon. This one is probably the worst:

[The homosexual] movement is not a benevolent movement, it is a movement to seize by any means necessary the feeling and the mood of the day, to the point where the homosexual lifestyle becomes accepted as a norm in our society and is given full standing as any other lifestyle, as it relates to family.

When I read that, I couldn’t help but recall that Scott Lively delivered almost those exact words at his infamous anti-gay conference in Uganda in 2009.

Giglio also compared being gay to alcoholism and drug addiction and eating disorders:

I would refer you maybe just to the article “Born gay?” by Joe Dallas, who is the president of a ministry that helps with homosexuals in “recovery.” … It really unfolds for us that the evidence that they say is there, that the media wants to tell us is there really isn’t there at all. But I want to tell you this tonight. How do you respond to the news reports that we’re hearing in the last few months that there is a genetic tendency to be an over-eater and it’s been supposedly proved by the scientists? That there is a genetic tendency to addictive behavior. Alcoholics by and large have a genetic tendency to addictive behavior. I predict in our lifetimes and not a very long period of time from now, scientists and geneticists will have found a way to prove a gene theory for every malfunction in sinful society. And do you know why? We talked about it the very first week—because we do not want responsibility for our choices.

(Joe Dallas at that time was president of Exodus International. More recenlty he has become involved with a more hardline breakaway group, the Restored Hope Network.)

That sermon was delivered in the 1990s. ThinkProgress says, “A spokesman for Giglio was not immediately available to respond to questions about whether this sermon represents Giglio’s current thinking.” If it doesn’t, then he really needs to speak up, loudly.

And if it does, then this is a reversion to the kinds actions which angered the LGBT community ahead of Obama’s first inaugural ceremony, when Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren was selected to deliver the invocation. The selection was announced just a day after comparing consensual, loving same-sex relationships to polygamy, incest and child rape. The inauguration committee tried to mollify the anger by asking openly gay Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson to give the invocation for a inauguration-eve concert at the Lincoln Memorial, only to have his prayers cut from the live broadcast.

Timothy Kincaid

January 9th, 2013

There are times that I think this administration doesn’t get it. They would never “balance” their officiants by proving one blatant racist and one non-racist.

I don’t know why they can’t connect the dots and recognize that it is unacceptable to have any anti-gay leaders, regardless of how many non-anti-gays are also allowed.

Raybob

January 9th, 2013

Wow. Obama’s two for two on this one.

Jay

January 9th, 2013

I just listened to the disgusting sermon. It is worse than you describe. I found the bigot’s quoting with approval the biblical injunction that homosexuals should be executed chilling. It literally turned my stomach. This bigot is simply not acceptable to be on the inaugural platform.

TampaZeke

January 9th, 2013

It’s becoming a tradition. A disgusting, shameful, offensive, insensitive, asinine tradition.

revchicoucc

January 9th, 2013

The Giglio selection is worse than Rick Warren. Giglio is more assertively hateful.

@raybob: Three for three — Timothy Dolan gave the closing benediction at the DNC.

Why do the pray-ers at public events have to be “celebrity” pray-ers?

Invite the head of chaplaincy for the Armed Services, for goodness sake.

robert

January 10th, 2013

When Obama’s black Harvard pal Henry Louis Gates Jr. felt disrespected by the police, Obama stopped the business of the entire country to intervene yet he has no qualms about disrespecting every gay person in the country with his embrace of yet another homophobic preacher at his Inauguration.

customartist

January 10th, 2013

Obama must hear from every possible person on this. Do it now.

Contact Whitehouse:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

customartist

January 10th, 2013

Here is the Official Whitehouse Petition:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/replace-anti-gay-pastor-louie-giglio-benediction-inauguration-pro-lgbt-member-clergy/xnN9Vw26

Stephen

January 10th, 2013

He’s been disinvited.

Robert

January 10th, 2013

Jim, one quick note. President Obama didn’t invite two people to give the Benediction. Myrlie Evers-Williams will be giving the INVOCATION, that’s the opening prayer. The Benediction is the closing prayer. Yeah, it’s a small note, but one worth noting.

And to the other robert, President Obama did not stop the business of the entire nation during the Gates incident, he was asked a question in regards to the issue and he answered it. After the flack he recieved he had a beer with two people, hardly the halt to the business of the nation that you imply.

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