Tony Perkins, president of the
Christian conservative Family Research Council (FRC), said Thursday
that he prays for gay people who share their photos on Facebook,
equating it to Christian persecution.
On his Washington Watch radio
show, Perkins applauded defeat of an LGBT protections bill in Idaho.
(Related: FRC's
Tony Perkins cheers death of Idaho LGBT protections bill.)
FRC's Peter Sprigg, who earlier
testified against the bill, called on the government to remain
“morally neutral” on the subject and not make “a legal
statement that it is morally wrong to disapprove of homosexual
conduct and morally wrong to disapprove of people presenting
themselves as the opposite of their biological sex.”
Elsewhere on the program, a caller
complained that he had seen a picture on Facebook of “two naked
guys sitting on each other” and was treated like “the biggest
bigot out there” when he complained about it to Facebook “in a
nice, respectful, Christian way.”
He called for prayer in hopes “they'll
turn their lives around.”
“Jesus said that we are to pray for
our enemies,” Perkins
responded, “for those who persecute us, that would be those who
mock and ridicule us. Absolutely we should pray for them.”
“We harbor no bitterness in our
hearts toward them, which is something they can't understand. They
want to project and that's why they like to call us haters and so on
and so forth, but they're projecting.”
“I think more and more Americans are
waking up, because they're seeing it,” he added. “This is being
shoved into people's faces, and if, like you, they say, 'I don't want
this on my Facebook page, I don't want this, I don't want to see
this, look, do whatever you want to do but don't involve me in that'
– that's not enough. There's this effort of forced acceptance and
affirmation. And we just can't do that.”
(Picture: Perkins and Sprigg during a
2012 radio appearance.)