Iowa Religious Right Leader Compares Marriage Equality Ruling To Overturning Gravity

Cary Gordon of Iowa’s Cornerstone World Outreach has continued to make waves with his anti-gay diatribes. Gordon was heavily involved with the successful effort to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009, and just last week he told a rally hosted by Bob Vander Plaats that like Rome, “we too will be extinguished from the earth” as a result of civil rights for gays and lesbians. While Gordon’s political maneuvers through his “Project Jeremiah” drove his church into bankruptcy. After failing to pay back the construction company that worked on Gordon’s church, the county sheriff is now putting the church on the auction block. But severe fiscal problems haven’t stopped Gordon from targeting gays and lesbians, and criticizing secular government. Tyler Kingkade of the Iowa Independent reports:

Gordon, pastor at the Sioux City-based Cornerstone World Outreach church, claimed secularists want to throw God out of our public policy decisions.

“The natural problem that causes is an overt immorality. The crime rates go up, people suffer, people are stealing and murdering and [doing] all the things morality tells you not to do,” Gordon said in an interview with The Iowa Independent, although he clarified that he did not mean same-sex marriage is the direct cause of all these things.

Gordon often referred to France’s government and society and noted an “objectum sexualist” who married the Eiffel Tower. Gordon said he believed the secular path he saw America’s society as being on would lead beyond legalizing same-sex marriages to polygamy, “whole villages getting married,” or grandparents marrying their own grandchildren. “There’s always been this fight of can you have a free country without God?” Gordon said.

“There has been a tendency leaning backwards towards secularism. And so what my point was that gay marriage or any other issues that are detached from the moral foundations of the teachings of Christianity are the result of a vacuum created by secularism.”

Gordon told The Iowa Independent his outspoken opposition to same-sex marriages is “not about hate, it’s about natural law.” Although he didn’t say how he felt about two men or two women being able to receive the same legal benefits if they were not legally married.

“I didn’t make gravity, no board of three against two on a board of five voted and said ‘let’s have gravity now,’” Gordon said. “And so there are natural laws that men did not make and we don’t have the power to overrule. One of those laws is it takes one man and one woman to make a baby. I didn’t make that law … and that is the logical definition of family.”

He then called children the innocent bystanders of the situation, and said a same-sex couple could never raise a child as well as a heterosexual couple.

“When two men say to the world we can raise a child just as good as any heterosexual couple, I think that’s offensive to women, because you’re saying that a woman, a female, does not bring a unique contribution,” Gordon said.