Today, Donald Trump’s campaign announced the formation of his Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, which includes right-wing figures ranging from ex-Rep. Michele Bachmann to Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.
After retiring from Congress on the heels of a campaign scandal, Bachmann has not let up in her radical preaching.
According to Bachmann, the September 11 attacks represented God’s judgment on America; President Obama and gay rights advocates are bringing about the End Times; homosexuality is “personal enslavement” and “part of Satan”; gay people want to change laws “so that adults will be able to freely prey on little children sexually”; and Obamacare death panels will literally kill people any day now.
Texas-based televangelist Kenneth Copeland is also on the advisory board even though God told him that Ted Cruz would be the next president. Like Trump, Copeland has been implicated in financial scandals and preaches against vaccines, which may have been a reason that one of his churches suffered a measles outbreak.
Copeland also claims the ability to cure PTSD and Ebola.
Dobson, who once said that he could not support Trump, has a long history with the anti-LGBT Right, warning that gay marriage will lead to a second civil war and pastors going to prison, as well as ushering in the destruction of religious freedom, God’s judgment on America and the transformation of the U.S. into Nazi Germany. He even linked same-sex marriage to the Sandy Hook shooting.
Other board members include Richard Land, who claims gay people are satanic and once lost a radio show after making racist, plagiarized statements, and Harry Jackson, a Maryland pastor who preaches about gay people trying to recruit children and prays against the demons behind same-sex marriage:
The group also include Southern Baptist pastor Ronnie Floyd, who has written about how “Satan has taken his tool of homosexuality, a gross and evil sin, and done a con job on the American culture.”
Also on the list is Robert Jeffress, who “believes that gays and lesbians are ‘perverse’ people who are either pedophiles or likely to abuse children in the future; has compared homosexuality to bestiality and called it ‘a miserable lifestyle’; accused gay people of using ‘brainwashing techniques’ to have homosexuality ‘crammed down our throats’; said that gay people ‘are engaged in the most detestable, unclean, abominable acts you can imagine’; predicted that the gay rights movement ‘will pave the way for that future world dictator, the Antichrist’; and labeled homosexuality a ‘filthy practice’ that will lead to the ‘implosion of our country.’”
Televangelist James Robison is another member:
And yet it was just the other day that Donald Trump was fashioning himself as a champion of the LGBT community.
