Harold Camping, who has predicted May
21 as Judgment Day or the Rapture, says increased acceptance of gay
rights, in particular marriage, is a sign of end times.
The 89-year-old president of the
California-based Family Radio, a network of Christian stations that
has grown from a single FM radio station in San Francisco in 1958 to
more than 150 across America today, previously incorrectly predicted
the return of Jesus Christ in 1994.
According to Camping, gay marriage was
planned by God as a sign of the end of the world.
“God has given us an enormous amount
of proof, like the gay pride movement and the extraordinary amount of
wickedness in the world,” Camping recently told San Francisco
alternative SF Weekly.
Camping has also authored an op-ed on
the subject, titled
Gay
Pride: Planned by God as a Sign of the End.
“No sign is as dramatic and clear as
the phenomenal world-wide success of the Gay Pride movement,”
Camping wrote. “Thus we learn that God has planned today's
situation of Gay Pride and same-sex marriages to show the world that
it is on the threshold of Judgment Day. He has shown us that an
obviously parallel situation exists between Sodom, when it was on the
threshold of destruction, and the world of our day, which is on the
threshold of destruction.”
(Theologians, however, are not
uniformly in agreement that the sin of Sodom was homosexuality,
saying instead that it was its neglect of needy travelers.)
In a separate press release located at
the group's website,
Camping suggests Jesus warned about the emergence of the gay rights
movement.
“Jesus warned of several spiritual
signs, such as the complete degradation of the Christian church, the
devastating moral breakdown of society, the re-establishment of
National Israel in 1948, the emergence of the 'Gay Pride Movement,'
and the complete disregard of the Bible in all of society today as
direct evidence of His return.”
Camping is not alone in suggesting that
gay rights are a sign of the end of civilization.
Earlier this month, Rev. Dr. Clenard H.
Childress, Jr., the senior pastor of The New Calvary Baptist Church
in Montclair, New Jersey, made
a similar claim in an op-ed published at RenewAmerica.com.