Logan Robertson, pastor at Westcity
Bible Baptist Church in New Zealand, has acknowledged sending an
abusive email in which he prayed for a gay author to commit suicide.
Jim Marjoram of Auckland shares his
story of attempting to “pray” the gay away in his just released
memoir It's
Life Jim...: A Journey and Spiritual Reconciliation via the Road of
Fundamentalist Religion. Proceeds from the book help fund
his project Silent
Gays, which aims to help gays “broken by guilt, shame, abuse
and fear that Christianity has mercilessly dealt out to God's
precious people for too long.”
Robertson prayed for Marjoram to commit
suicide and called him a “filthy child molesting fag” in
responding to an email promoting the book and project.
“We are not interested in your filthy
lifestyle or book,” Robertson wrote. “The Bible says you are
vile, strange (queer), reprobate, sodomite, natural brute beasts,
made to be taken and destroyed (2 Peter 2:12). I pray that you will
commit suicide, you filthy child molesting fag.”
Marjoram shared Robertson's email on
social media, where it sparked outraged.
“I didn't tell him to go and commit
suicide,” Robertson
told NZME News Service. “I said, I prayed that he would. All
I did was write what I wrote, and then I prayed about it that he
would, and that's it. There's nothing more to say.”
Marjoram told GayNZ.com
that he was a “worship leader” in Living Waters, an organization
that attempts to turn gay people straight.
“I was married for 22 years to a
wonderful woman. And we tried to work through it together and were
totally committed. But she died in 2011, after which I had a
meltdown and finally admitted I was gay and unable to change,”
Marjoram said.
Human Rights Commissioner Richard
Tankersley condemned the email.
“New Zealanders who preach hate and
violence are fundamentalists, they are extremists and they are the
problem,” he said. “[M]ost New Zealanders will find it offensive
and unacceptable.”