Source: The Guardian
Sam Levin in Sacramento, California
Adele Sakler has struggled with feelings of intense depression in the days since a gunman killed 49 people in an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida. “I’ve been crying a lot. I’m just so saddened,” said the 47-year-old queer woman, who lives in Sacramento in northern California.
But when Sakler heard that Roger Jimenez, a Christian pastor in her community, had given a sermon praising the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history – stating that Orlando is “a little safer tonight” and “the tragedy is that more of them didn’t die” – she felt physically ill.
Sakler was one of about a hundred protesters who gathered on Wednesday night outside Jimenez’s Verity Baptist church, located in a nondescript office park just off the freeway, two hours north of San Francisco.
Wearing a small LGBT pride heart on her T-shirt, Sakler watched as congregants filed past the crowd of activists and a line of police officers. They were men and women in church outfits, couples holding hands, parents with crying babies, small children giggling – all of them hurrying inside, ignoring the cries of “We are Orlando!” from the protesters.
For some queer protesters, seeing the families in attendance was a painful reminder that people in suburban California share the hateful and violent beliefs of Jimenez – and that the pastor is not just a fringe extremist preaching to anonymous bigots in the dark corners of YouTube.
“We have so far to go,” said Sakler, wiping tears from her eyes while clutching a rainbow candle.
The tense scene that unfolded outside the church – where protesters screamed “Would you kill me?” as the silent parishioners passed by – offered a window into the anguish of LGBT people across the country, who are coming to terms with the unprecedented attack on the queer community less than one year after same-sex marriage became the law of the land in the US.
On Sunday, while Florida investigators were still trying to identify the dozens of bodies lying inside Pulse nightclub as families begged for information, Jimenez delivered a 45-minute sermon applauding the shooting.
“There’s no tragedy,” Jimenez said in his speech, which was posted on YouTube and quickly went viral, before the site removed it for violating its policy on hate speech.
“I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.”
Categories: America, Bigotry, Church, The Muslim Times, USA