SENECA, Kan. (CNN) – When a Christian pastor in North Carolina told his congregation on Mother’s Day that the way “to get rid of all the lesbians and queers” was to put them behind an electric fence and wait for them to die out because they couldn’t reproduce, hundreds of people demonstrated against him.
But the protests are not silencing other preachers who believe homosexuality is a sin condemned by the Bible.
Kansas pastor Curtis Knapp went even further last week, preaching that the government should kill homosexuals.
“They won’t, but they should,” he said, according to a recording of his sermon posted online.
Like the sermon from Charles Worley at Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina, earlier this month, Knapp’s sermon drew an angry response.
His voice mail filled up with messages saying “things you don’t want your kids to hear,” he told CNN affiliate KTKA.
But he is not backing away from his comments.
“We punish pedophilia. We punish incest. We punish polygamy and various things. It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption,” he said.
He cited the biblical verse Leviticus 20:13: “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act. They shall surely be put to death.”
But he said gay people had nothing to worry about from the government or from him.
“I don’t believe I should lay a finger against them,” said Knapp, of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kan. “My hope is for their salvation, not for their death.”
It was not immediately clear if Knapp’s church is part of a broader denomination.
The Southern Baptist Convention distanced itself from Worley’s remarks.
The nation’s largest Baptist group said Providence Road Baptist in Maiden is not affiliated with its 16 million-member denomination and condemned the comments.
But the influential head of the giant movement’s seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr., does argue that homosexuality “is the most pressing moral question of our times.”
