Bob Vander Plaats, the influential Iowa Religious Right activist who spearheaded the effort in 2010 to unseat three state supreme court justices who voted for marriage equality, warned last week that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down state gay marriage bans will help to pave the way for the legalization of pedophilia and the criminalization of certain Bible verses.
Saying that the Supreme Court “undefined the institution of marriage,” Vander Plaats told the “View From a Pew” radio program that as a result “now polygamy can come back” and pedophilia will gain legal protections.
Claiming that “the University of Colorado now is saying they want to reclassify that as a sexual orientation and decriminalize it,” Vander Plaats said, “All of the sudden, when you get outside of God’s design for human sexuality inside of the bonds of one man, one woman marriage, it will be an absolute trainwreck.”
When the program’s cohost, Frank Thomas, asked Vander Plaats about the right-wing myth that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wants to lower the age of consent to 12, Vander Plaats repeated that pedophiles are now “going to follow the same route that homosexulatiy did about it’s a sexual orientation.”
He also brought up the specter of transgender people assaulting young girls in restrooms: “Here’s the thing about the identity of restrooms, male-female restrooms, you get to use whichever one you want. That’s a trainwreck waiting to happen, because there’s going to be a 21-year-old guy who says ‘I feel like a girl,’ he goes into a girls’ restroom, there’s going to be a 12-year-old girl who says ‘I feel like a boy,’ and something bad’s going to happen.”
Later in the program, Vander Plaats told American Christians that it’s “time to gird your loins” for persecution.
“We see Christians overseas getting beheaded, but it’s now coming right here to roost in our own country,” he said.
In response to a question about a for-profit business in Iowa that is being sued for refusing to host a gay couple’s wedding, Vander Plaats claimed that churches will soon also be forced to perform same-sex weddings and implied that certain Bible verses will soon be criminalized as “hate speech.”
“For the people to believe that the churches are off ground, there’s no way they’ll get touched, that’s absolute nonsense,” he said, “and Romans 1, Matthew 19, Mark 9, all that is going to be hate speech.”
