Hundreds of people are calling on a controversial Baptist pastor to be removed from the church after saying Christians shouldn’t mourn the deaths of the 49 people killed during Sunday’s shooting at an Orlando gay bar.
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“People say, like: ‘Well, aren’t you sad that 50 sodomites died?’ Here’s the problem with that. It’s like the equivalent of asking me — what if you asked me: ‘Hey, are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today,'” said Pastor Roger Jimenez during a sermon at Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento Sunday.
“The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is — I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job.”
Footage of Jimenez’s sermon uploaded to YouTube quickly went viral and sparked outrage from religious leaders, gay rights activists and social media users.
“I condemn his entire presentation,” Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told The Sacramento Bee. “As Christians, we love everyone. We repudiate intolerance and hatred. I will not only respect my fellow man, I will love you. I will respect you. I will create space for you. If you come to our churches, you are not going to hear any message full of homophobia or animosity.”
Verity Baptist Church’s website’s reads, “We believe that sodomy (homosexuality) is a sin and an abomination before God which God punishes with the death penalty.”
The website also notes that gay people are not allowed to attend services at the Baptist Church.
The church’s YouTube page features dozens of Jimenez’s sermons and speeches. Two days after the Orlando shooting, a video titled “Statistics on Sodomites,” was uploaded, showing Jimenez rejecting the idea of gay marriage due, in part, to alleged statistics on how many sexual partners gay people have in their lifetime.
Another video titled “A Biblical View of Sodomites,” uploaded in January 2014, he discussed why he believes the Bible preaches against homosexuality and his views on the community.
“How does the Sodomite population grow? They don’t reproduce they recruit,” he said of the gay community. “Usually the people who grow up to be homosexual were abused by a homosexual. That is the truth our society doesn’t want you to know.”
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According to the The Sacramento Bee, the Verity Baptist Church does not appear to be affiliated with any order of the Baptist church.
In fact, the National Baptist Convention, which unites Baptist churches across the U.S., took a very different stance on the tragedy in Orlando.
“According to the Biblical mandate, every person is made in the image of God. As Christians, we condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the taking of a human life and we join in with millions across the world and of various faiths in condemning these senseless killings,” read a statement from the convention’s president Rev. Jerry Young.
“We further express care, concern, compassion and love for the victims’ families and friends.”
In an interview with NBC affiliate KCRA 3, Jimenez stood by his sermon and said that he believes there are passages in the Bible that teach that homosexuality is a sin punishable by death.
“The point that I was making is if God puts the death penalty on it, God says they deserve to die, and they die, this is not something that we, as Christians, need to be mourning,” he told KCRA 3.
Days after his sermon went viral, a Change.org petition was created calling on Jimenez to be removed from the church.
The petition, which will be handed over to California state senator Joel Anderson, has garnered over 1,700 signatures so far.