Glenn Beck kicked off his radio program today by calling on Christians to denounce Pastor Roger Jimenez, who gained notoriety this week by preaching that the real tragedy of the Orlando massacre was that more gay people weren’t killed.
Beck said that this pastor is preaching “evil” and that Christians cannot remain silent about it and must repudiate such views:
During the course of the discussion, Beck mentioned that there was conference last year, possibly in Ohio, put on by some pastor who also called for gay people to be put to death at which several of the Republican presidential hopefuls spoke.
Beck was oddly vague and unsure of the exact details surrounding this conference, which is convenient considering that the man Beck believed to be God’s chosen candidate, Ted Cruz, was among the featured speakers at that conference:
Beck is undoubtedly aware that Cruz spoke at Kevin Swanson’s National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa last fall, considering that Beck’s daughter asked Cruz about it directly and Cruz lied to her face.
But when Beck brought up the issue today, he never once mentioned that Cruz was in attendance and falsely claimed that Swanson made his comments about putting gay people to death before any of the GOP candidates arrived, so there was no way for them to know about his views or what he said from the stage before they spoke.
Cruz, of course, was directly confronted by CNN’s Jake Tapper on national television about appearing with Swanson the day before he attended his conference. Cruz dismissed any concerns and continued to do so for weeks afterwards. Then, at the conference itself, Swanson repeated his view about the death penalty for gay people both before and after he interviewed Cruz from the event’s stage.
It’s easy to see why Beck might be so conveniently confused about the details of this event, given that it must be hard to for him to square his image of Cruz as America’s divinely anointed savior with the reality that Cruz was more than willing to appear onstage with Swanson, despite his repeated proclamations that gay people should be put to death by the government, for the sake of helping his campaign during the Iowa Republican caucus.
