Anti-LGBTQ activist and author Michael Brown isn’t saying that Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale is Jezebel, just that she is “the personification of the spirit of Jezebel.” Ragsdale is a prominent Episcopal priest who was recently named president of the National Abortion Federation. Brown doesn’t like that one bit.
Brown seems especially outraged that Ragsdale has called women’s access to abortion “a blessing.” In a column published Monday in The Stream, Brown wrote:
How does Jesus feel when an Episcopalian priest, someone ordained to represent His name, is a well-known champion of abortion? How does He feel if that same priest is an outspoken lesbian, “married” to her partner? And how does He feel if she says, “Abortion providers are some of my personal heroes and modern-day saints”?
Brown recently published a whole book about the “demonic spirit” of Jezebel that he claims is attacking America. In that book, he described the biblical character of Jezebel as “the most wicked woman in the Bible” and “the first radical feminist.” He wrote that “the same demonic forces that worked through her are still being felt today in twenty-first-century America.” In his book, Brown was quite upset about Jezebel’s power to “emasculate men” and turn them into “emotionally castrated males.”
“To be clear, I am not calling Rev. Ragsdale ‘Jezebel,’” he wrote in this week’s column. “But I am saying that the same demonic forces that were also at work through Queen Jezebel 3,000 years ago are at work through this false priest today.”
Ragsdale is a former president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School and a longtime pro-choice activist and advocate for LGBTQ equality. She served for 17 years on the board of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
