Christian conservative E.W. Jackson has
criticized Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg's ideas
about Christianity, calling them “more perverse than his
lifestyle.”
Jackson, the Republican Party nominee
for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 2013 who also unsuccessfully
ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2018, told his The Awakening
radio listeners on Monday that he finds Buttigieg “the most
loathsome” of all the Democratic presidential candidates.
“Of all the candidates, the one that
I find the most loathsome, frankly, is Pete Buttigieg,” Jackson
said, before criticizing the candidate for kissing his husband during
a campaign rally.
“I do find that thoroughly
disgusting,” he
said. “Homosexuality is not normal and normal people find it
disgusting.”
“Here’s what disgusts me about Pete
Buttigieg. Unlike the other candidates who are openly and blatantly
godless … Pete Buttigieg tries to couch his policy positions and
his ideas and his persona as, somehow, this evangelical born-again
Christian, but he has these bizarre ideas about what Christianity
stands for and what it means. And I find that not only hypocritical,
I find it – folks, if I may say it this way – I find it more
perverse than his lifestyle.”
“When you start invoking God, you
have gone beyond your sin, you are into blasphemous sin,” he
continued. “You know what I liken this to? I liken this to, folks,
to a pastor or a priest utilizing, exploiting a vulnerable member of
his or her parish or church and telling them that this is what God
wants them to do. They are sexually abusing someone in their parish
and then using God as an excuse, ‘Well, God wants you to do this.’
Folks, to me, that’s more perverse than the sin itself … How can
you invoke God’s name as justification for your sin? I find that so
appallingly depraved that I can’t even find the words to express
it, and that’s what Pete Buttigieg is doing.”
On the campaign trail, Buttigieg, an
Episcopalian, often talks about his faith. During a recent appearance
on NBC's Today Show, Buttigieg said that he can't imagine God
belongs to the Republican Party.
“It's important to me,” Buttigieg
said about his religion. “And I think it's also important that we
stop seeing religion used as a kind of cudgel as if God belonged to a
political party. And if he did, I can't imagine it would be the one
that sent the current president into the White House.”