When the National Association of Christian Lawmakers held its annual conference at Liberty University last week, one of the featured speakers was Jameson Taylor, the Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs for the American Family Association.
Speaking to a gathering of right-wing Christian nationalists, Taylor used the opportunity to chastise Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for denouncing a recently enacted law in Uganda that imposes prison or the death penalty for “the offense of homosexuality.”
In response to Cruz’s criticism that Uganda’s law is “grotesque and an abomination,” Taylor cited “divine law” in defense of such draconian laws.
“Sen. Cruz seems to have forgotten that following British law, the American colonies imposed the death penalty for sodomy,” Taylor smugly proclaimed. “Thomas Jefferson, among others, sought to change these laws, calling instead for castration and that was because he wanted to reserve the death penalty only for murder and treason. Likewise, the very lenient Quakers in Pennsylvania preferred to punish sodomy with whipping, forfeiture of one-third of one’s property, and six months hard labor for a first offense. I would thus refer Senator Cruz to hashtag ‘American founding’ and hashtag ‘divine law and natural law.'”
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