Rick Scarborough, a Texas pastor who is close with GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz, said on a recent conference call with Religious Right activists that he is prepared to go to prison and even die to fight gay marriage.
Echoing James Dobson, who said on the same call that a Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality could usher in a second civil war, Scarborough insisted that anti-gay activists must “fight until we die” to stop gay marriage, just as Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in his struggle against the Nazis.
“We don’t capitulate, we fight until we die, we push back with all our might,” Scarborough said. “This is a Dietrich Bonhoeffer moment for every preacher in America. This is a moment where we find whether the Christians who claim to know Jesus really confess Christ, that is what we’re attempting to find out.”
“There’s going to have to be a massive response to this if we get the adverse ruling that from all predictions will come apart from God’s intervention,” he continued.
Scarborough, who once floated the idea of filing a class action lawsuit against homosexuality, said that he is willing to go to prison in order to block gay marriage.
“Are we going to sit back and let the country be destroyed? Or as believers, are we going to stand up and be counted?” he asked. “As for me and my house, we’re going to serve the Lord for this, we’re going to go to jail if necessary, we are not going to take this just sitting back and watching it.”
Acknowledging that the Religious Right is now acting out of “desperation” to “oppose the destruction of marriage and the endowment of a wicked behavior,” Scarborough called on state judges to follow the example of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore and refuse to recognize federal court rulings in favor of marriage equality.
He added the National Organization for Marriage is “trying to get one million people on the streets of D.C.” for its March for Marriage later this month — a tall order, given the size of last year’s crowd .
