A Colorado pastor is defending running
a newpaper ad advocating against the “homosexual agenda.”
James Hagan, senior pastor at the
Friendship Assembly of God Church in Colorado Springs, paid for the
ad that ran in Sunday's Colorado Springs Gazette.
Above the headline “DON'T CATER TO
THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA,” Hagan quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who
resisted Nazism: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not
to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
“It's time for common sense Americans
to stand up and speak out against the Homosexual Agenda,” Hagan
wrote in the ad. “Their Agenda is not just to control the laws but
to control everyone's total acceptance, even into your personal and
religious objections.”
Speaking to Fox 21 News, Hagan defended
the ad and in the process suggested that gays had infiltrated his
church to corrupt young minds.
“If homosexuals say they never come
to my church, good, because for every homosexual who comes into my
church stealth-fully – and some of them do – they may corrupt a
dozen of my teenagers. And I would rather have one of them not come
than have a dozen of my teenagers corrupted,” he
said.
Hagan stated that being gay is a
choice, and when asked when he decided his sexuality, he answered: “I
was born normal. I wasn't born with an anomaly. And I will tell you
I believe I am authority on it. I have a stack of information on
it.”
Nori Rost, an openly gay minister at
All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, challenged Hagan's
statements.
“The Bible itself does not condemn
homosexuality, that's myth,” Rost said. “[It] condemns certain
kinds of sex acts that were prevalent in pagan worship practices that
the Jews were to be separate from. Never once does it ever condemn
homosexuality as an act of love or commitment of life, it never
does.”