"We similarly prayed for President Obama but it's different with President Trump," Moore said. "When we are praying for President Trump, we are praying within the context of a real relationship, of true friendship."
-former Liberty University chaplain Johnnie Moore, describing a gathering of evangelical ministers who laid hands on the President in the Oval Office on July 12.
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Well Donald Trump honestly, is like the only Republican candidate to ever invite the gay group to be in the DNC. I mean the RNC. You know, his way to do that to extend that, he's not against the gays in anyway. He's said I’m nowhere, I’m not. But you claim I am. He said what the Supreme Court decision was asked if he was going to try to overturn the gay marriage. He said no. The Supreme Court ruled on that. It is over, it is the law of the land. And he supports it fully. His administration will not touch that that law. But yet everyone on the gay side, or the left side seem to say that we're all going to still go to concentration camps and everything. It's ridiculous. I believe that not only will he save my country, he will save my gay community. The man is a unifier in my opinion.
-Brian Talbert, former co-founder, now just Founder, of Albemarle, NC's Deplorable Pride, on Canadian Broadcasting Company's As It Happens, June 9, 2017.
An all-white delegation of right-wing evangelicals- including four past Republican presidential candidates- celebrated their new "open door" to the West Wing of The White House as they spent a day with the President, the Vice President, and senior staff members July 12.
The event has not been acknowledged by The White House website, nor has the President tweeted about it.
The President, who was not busy preparing for his second trip to Europe in a week, let the group surround him at his desk, lay hands on him, and pray for him to keep rubber-stamping things they want.
It was a striking event, as Rev. Johnnie Moore's comment makes clear. Evangelicals have moved from pretend-prayer for an actual practicing Christian to real prayer for a fake one, and consider the latter effort the more true expression of God's will.
According to CBN- the broadcast network of 1988 Republican presidential candidate and evangelical leader Pat Robertson- the group was a who's who of the most keenly anti-LGBT Christianists in America:
Other leaders in the room included Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council (FRC); Pastor John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio; Paula White, senior pastor of New Destiny Christian Center in Apopka, Florida; former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann; Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition; Gary Bauer, president of American Values; Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas; Jim Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in La Mesa, California; Rodney Howard-Browne, senior pastor at the River at Tampa Bay Church, Mike Evans, the founder of Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, and Richard Land, president of the Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte and others.Hagee, 77, who has said "Christians don't lie or steal. They don't get divorced or have abortions", founded his Cornerstone megachurch in 1975, after divorcing his first wife. In 2003 he preached that the Antichrist would be a fierce partly-Jewish gay man who would make Adolph Hitler look like a schoolboy. In 2006 he said God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina for allowing a gay pride parade to be planned that didn't actually happen.
Perkins, 54, heads a James Dobson spinoff, the Family Research Council, whose homophobia is legendary. FRC vice president Peter Sprigg called for the "export" of gay Americans in 2008. In 2014, Perkins said gay rights activists were ready to start "rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians".
His main schtick is that all gays are pedophiles. That claim was put to rest by one of his former employees, Josh Duggar. Married with four children and a fifth en route, Duggar- who had a GED and acted in a reality TV show about his parents and 18 siblings- became executive vice president of FRC Action, Perkins' lobbying arm, at 25. There he took selfies with all the 2016 GOP presidential candidates, watched online pay-for-porn, and trawled the now-bankrupt Ashley Madison adultery website for women into rough sex. He resigned his post in 2015 after it emerged he also had a predilection for sexual activity with some of his younger sisters. After a time-out in Christian sex rehab, Duggar took up selling used cars in Arkansas.
Paula White- who got to attend despite the vice president's presence without his wife- is a squish on the gays, but the President uses her as a conduit to the Christianists and loves her prosperity gospel reassurance that God made his wealthy because he is good. Michelle Bachmann, a Tea Party founder who got caught obtaining Swiss citizenship while seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, is married to an LGBT conversion therapy quack. She says the gays want to unleash "sexual anarchy."
Ralph Reed saw God in a DC pub called Bullfeathers, and went to work for Jesse Helms, then Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. He later ran for lieutenant governor of Georgia but lost after his entanglements with the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling and Indian casino scandals became public. In 2014 he gave a speech declaring that fighting gays rights is the moral equivalent of opposing slavery.
Gary Bauer, 71, ran Tony Perkins' Family Research Council until he resigned to seek the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, and sits on an Israel lobbying board with John Hagee. Bauer is a signer of the Manhattan Declaration, a bit of conservative scripture that calls on conservatives to simply disobey gay rights laws. Robert Jeffress, 61, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, believes abortion caused 9/11 and that the worst Supreme Court decision in history was the one establishing marriage equality. He agrees with Tony Perkins that gays are all pedophiles, and says that 50 Shades of Grey is ushering the End Times.
Jack Graham claims 40,000 members in his suburban Dallas Baptist church and urges all of them to ignore civil rights laws that include the gays. Jim Garlow has said that
“All the people who advocate for so-called same-sex marriage ought to have to live in homes in which the plumbers who built them, or the electricians who built them, didn’t understand the difference between the male and female end of piping or plumbing or of electrical as well, and see how that works for them."Garlow has also predicted abortion clinics will one day become tourist attractions like the Nazi death camps, and that Joan Rivers is in Hell because she had a "potty mouth."
Rodney Howard-Browne is a South African is popular with the President because he can preach in Twitter-sized bites:
Perverts have used bathrooms for years, abortion legal since 73, they are selling baby parts, gay marriage legal - when will people wake up!— Rodney Howard-Browne (@rhowardbrowne) April 30, 2016
Mike Evans, 70, is a Christian Zionist covfefe of John Hagee' who believes former President Jimmy Carter is at the heart of all non-conservative evil, and that God wants you to buy his books. He also says getting him on the major TV networks will "save lives." His God doesn't like the gays, either.
And Richard Land, 70, is a former head of the Southern Baptists' Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He was forced to retire after accusing President Obama and others of using the Trayvon Martin murder to "gin up" racial unrest and being exposed as a serial plagiarist. He now runs a very conservative seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Land was another signer of the anti-LGBT Manhattan Declaration.
The President ended his day by granting an exclusive television interview to 87-year-old Pat Robertson, who has never repented his September 13, 2001 TV chat with Jerry Falwell in which they agreed 9/11 was caused by women, abortionists, and the gays:
Robertson has also said a 2015 stock market drop was mandated by God because Planned Parenthood; that a spate of 2012 tornados was the result of insufficient prayer; that a disastrous Haitian earthquake was caused by that nation's "pact with the devil," that the 1998 Gay Days at Disney would bring terrorist bombs, hurricanes, tornados "and possibly a meteor"; and that "the gays want to control everything."
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