In an interview yesterday, Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver said that a potential fix to Indiana’s new “religious freedom” law ensuring that it would not effectively legalize discrimination would be “devastating,” comparing such a move to negotiating with terrorists.
“There is nothing to clarify and there is nothing to fix,” Staver told Jim Schneider on VCY America’s “Crosstalk.”
“This is what the homosexual lobby wants to do: they want to intimidate [Indiana Gov. Mike Pence] so much, they want to try to embarrass him into doing something that is absolutely foolish, that will promote their agenda,” Staver added.
“It’s kind of like with these terrorists, it’s hard to negotiate with terrorists because they have a zero-sum game. It’s hard to negotiate with these people who simply are irrational and are inventing things that just simply don’t exist. You’re not going to placate them by trying to come back and pass a clarification to a law that doesn’t need any clarification at all.”
Staver told host Jim Schneider that gay rights advocates are promoting “anti-Christian hatred,” warning that the gay rights movement has “given a tolerance message, and what is behind that is, frankly, demonic. It wants to literally overpower, it has no interest in protecting religious freedom, it wants to crush it.”
“This is the wakeup call for the church,” he said.
Staver said that conservative Christians in America are in the same place as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor in Germany who died as a result of his opposition to Nazi rule.
The gay rights movement, Staver said, is all about “absolute intolerant bigotry, hatred towards Christians and people of faith,” and even the “criminalization of Christianity.”
“They want to literally crush religion, the free exercise of religion, and freedom,” Staver said. “That’s what this agenda is about. So I say stand your ground. This is a Bonhoeffer moment and Gov. Mike Pence better not back up on this issue.”
