Right-wing pastor Robert Jeffress called into Todd Starnes’ radio program today to discuss the tweet that Mitt Romney sent out last night saying that Jeffress is a “religious bigot” who should not have been invited to deliver a prayer at the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem today, citing the fact that Jeffress regularly attacks Islam and has said that “you can’t be saved by being a Jew” and that “Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell.”
After Starnes opened by saying that he couldn’t believe that Romney, a “failed presidential candidate [and] about to be a failed senatorial candidate,” would release such “a vicious” statement attacking Jeffress in this manner, Jeffress predictably responded by falsely claiming that his comments had been “twisted” and taken “out of context.”
“Those comments Mitt used were out of context, they were twisted, some were not accurate at all,” Jeffress said, insisting that the fact that he and millions of other evangelicals believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven is “really not newsworthy and it certainly doesn’t qualify me as a bigot.”
“You don’t have the right to call someone else a bigot for believing the words of Jesus Christ,” Jeffress added, as Starnes asserted that Romney has just “smeared” millions of Christians “as religious bigots” with his attack on Jeffress.
“It’s really an unfair attack that you have to be bigoted to believe what I believe,” Jeffress said. “These are twisted quotations from seven or eight years ago and to do this on the day we’re opening our embassy in Jerusalem, I think it’s just sad that he is that bitter, I guess, over the 2012 election. Maybe he’s bitter as he thinks to himself, he could have been president and done what President Trump is doing. Well, the fact is he couldn’t have, which is why he’s not president.”
For the record, we were the ones to first report Jeffress’ comments back in 2011 and they have not been “twisted” or “taken out of context,” as the original video proves:
