Preacher Asks God to Kill Gay People In “Slow, Painful Death”
In a hate-drenched sermon, Pastor Duncan Urbanek compares gay people to pedophiles and wishes intense harm on them.
A fundamentalist pastor gave a sermon in which he prayed for “every homo that exists” to suffer “a slow, painful death” — continuing a trend in which he and other right-wing pastors fixate on gay people when ranting about sin and redemption.
Duncan Urbanek, of Pure Words Baptist Church in southwest Houston, made the comments in a recent sermon.
A video clip of part of the speech was reposted online by Hemant Mehta, an activist and citizen journalist who runs the Friendly Atheist substack, which exposes hypocrisy by the religious Right.
In the video, Urbanek utilizes the well-worn trope of comparing gay people to pedophiles. “Hey, I’m going to pray for every pedophile,” he says. “Every homo that exists, you know what my prayer for them is? They go straight to hell right now.
“I have no sympathy for them. I have no love for them. They hate God! They’ve already rejected God! And if God rejected them, why would I accept them?”
Urbanek adds, “That’s why I just pray that they just go to hell! And that’s a good imprecatory prayer to have: Hey Lord, let him drop straight into hell right now.
“I mean, if that’s not gonna happen, you know, let him get run over by a bus! A huge semi-truck! A Mack truck! I mean, let him get struck by lightning. I mean, give him cancer. Let the AIDS just infest their whole body and just die right now. Just destroy them. I mean, I don’t care which way you do it, Lord. Just kill them right now. Break their teeth in their mouth. Let them have a slow, painful death.”
He then mocks Christians who argue that they should “love the sinner but hate the sin,” a common theological tenant of Christianity.
“‘Oh, you’re not loving,'” he says. “Not towards them! Not towards freaks and perverts who hate God! There is no love. Yeah, you’re right. But that doesn’t make you more loving of a Christian than me. That actually makes you a hateful person. Because if you’re gonna love the pedophile, then you hate all the children that they’re abusing.”
This isn’t Urbanek’s first dive into the world of homophobic rants. He’s previously used anti-gay slurs to refer to gay people in his sermons. He’s also accused women who wear pants of being “cross-dressers” and being an “abomination,” urging their husbands to burn their wives’ clothing if they have pants in their wardrobes, and telling women to delete or destroy any pictures or evidence of them having ever worn pants.
The video of Urbanek’s sermon was streamed on the YouTube channel for Pastor Jonathan Shelley, a fellow New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preacher with his own long record of anti-LGBTQ remarks who was previously affiliated with Pure Words Baptist Church.
Shelley now heads Stedfast Baptist Church, which was most recently located in Watauga, Texas before being evicted by its landlord earlier this year after months of negative press and a series of protests held outside the church over the content of some of Shelley’s sermons.
He has flouted the use of anti-gay slurs in his sermons, links the LGBTQ Pride movement with pedophilia, and frequently calls for gay people to be executed by the state (with the United States becoming a theocracy dedicated to carrying out those executions).
Another New IFB preacher, Jason Graber, of Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Spokane, Washington, recently came under fire for calling gays “AIDS dispensers.” As Mehta, the Friendly Atheist author, notes, several New IFB pastors have gotten in the habit of posting their sermons to YouTube and various social media platforms, “which allows them to spread their hate-filled, faith-based messages to a much wider audience than they could ever get otherwise.”
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