Christian Preachers Brutally Beaten at Gay Pride Festival
2:00PM EDT 6/30/2015 Todd Starnes
18.1K Shares


Pastors holding signs like these were brutally attacked at a Seattle pride event.
Pastors holding signs like these were brutally attacked at a Seattle pride event. (Flickr/Creative Commons)

Two street preachers were brutally beaten—punched and kicked—by a crowd at a gay pride festival in Seattle and the entire melee was captured on video.

The preachers were holding signs reading "Repent or Else" and "Jesus Saves From Sin." The video shows a group of people initially screaming and threatening the men during Pridefest at the Seattle Space Needle.

Television station KOMO reported that some of the attackers belonged to a group called NOH8.

A group of women tried to steal their signs but were unsuccessful. The video then shows a group of men grabbing onto one of the preacher's signs and dragging him to the ground. At some point he was punched in the back of the head a number of times while others can be seen kicking the man.

Another preacher was sucker punched in the back of the head.

Police arrested two suspects—one of whom has a long rap sheet.

It's not the first time Christians have been attacked by pro-gay activists.

Last August a gunman opened fire inside the headquarters of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. Floyd Lee Corkins, Jr. pled guilty to committing an act of terrorism on the pro-family organization.

Corkins shot FRC security guard Leo Johnson—and intended to shoot others—but Johnson was able to disarm the man.

Last year, one pro-gay group caused thousands of dollars in damage to the Portland, Ore. campus of Mars Hill Church. The vandals hurled stones through stain glass windows, LifeSiteNews reported.

The vandals sent an email to local television station KOIN-TV stating they took the action, because "Mars Hill is notoriously anti-gay and anti-woman."

And when the new campus of the church opened gay rights protestors shouted profanities at children calling them "homophobes" and telling the boys and girls they were "going to burn ..."

Todd Starnes is host of "Fox News & Commentary," heard on hundreds of radio stations

Whether or not you agree with the preachers is not the point. What is important is that they were assaulted and beaten for carrying signs onpublic property. LGBTQ activists protest bakeries, florists, pizza places and churches, trespassing in the process. they do NOT get beaten for doing so. Preachers who protest on public streets should have the same rights, but apparently they are an above the law group of people. Personally I think they should have protested away from the LGBQ parade, but near enough so that people coming and going would see their signs, but what they did should not be considered illegal because it hurts the "feelings" of some people. Unfortunately, it has become a crime punishable by beatings to say anything against this particular BEHAVIOR, that of homosexual acts, particularly being proud of those acts.

Christian Preachers Brutally Beaten at Gay Pride Festival
2:00PM EDT 6/30/2015 Todd Starnes
18.1K Shares


Pastors holding signs like these were brutally attacked at a Seattle pride event.
Pastors holding signs like these were brutally attacked at a Seattle pride event. (Flickr/Creative Commons)

Two street preachers were brutally beaten—punched and kicked—by a crowd at a gay pride festival in Seattle and the entire melee was captured on video.

The preachers were holding signs reading "Repent or Else" and "Jesus Saves From Sin." The video shows a group of people initially screaming and threatening the men during Pridefest at the Seattle Space Needle.

Television station KOMO reported that some of the attackers belonged to a group called NOH8.

A group of women tried to steal their signs but were unsuccessful. The video then shows a group of men grabbing onto one of the preacher's signs and dragging him to the ground. At some point he was punched in the back of the head a number of times while others can be seen kicking the man.

Another preacher was sucker punched in the back of the head.

Police arrested two suspects—one of whom has a long rap sheet.

It's not the first time Christians have been attacked by pro-gay activists.

Last August a gunman opened fire inside the headquarters of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. Floyd Lee Corkins, Jr. pled guilty to committing an act of terrorism on the pro-family organization.

Corkins shot FRC security guard Leo Johnson—and intended to shoot others—but Johnson was able to disarm the man.

Last year, one pro-gay group caused thousands of dollars in damage to the Portland, Ore. campus of Mars Hill Church. The vandals hurled stones through stain glass windows, LifeSiteNews reported.

The vandals sent an email to local television station KOIN-TV stating they took the action, because "Mars Hill is notoriously anti-gay and anti-woman."

And when the new campus of the church opened gay rights protestors shouted profanities at children calling them "homophobes" and telling the boys and girls they were "going to burn ..."

Todd Starnes is host of "Fox News & Commentary," heard on hundreds of radio stations

Whether or not you agree with the preachers is not the point. What is important is that they were assaulted and beaten for carrying signs onpublic property. LGBTQ activists protest bakeries, florists, pizza places and churches, trespassing in the process. they do NOT get beaten for doing so. Preachers who protest on public streets should have the same rights, but apparently they are an above the law group of people. Personally I think they should have protested away from the LGBQ parade, but near enough so that people coming and going would see their signs, but what they did should not be considered illegal because it hurts the "feelings" of some people. Unfortunately, it has become a crime punishable by beatings to say anything against this particular BEHAVIOR, that of homosexual acts, particularly being proud of those acts.

Gay Totalitarianism and the Coming Persecution of Christians

Hatred of the Gospel is boiling over into the vilification of Christians. State violence won't be far behind, history teaches.

By John Zmirak Published on April 1, 2015

The full force of the federal, state and local governments will soon be turned against defenders of biblical Christianity. Will we resist or collaborate?
John Zmirak

If you have been following mass media over the past few days, you will have learned from an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor that defenders of religious freedom are “Nazis.” Take a moment to ponder that assertion. Roll it around in your head for a while. You’ll be hearing a lot more fighting words as we enter the next phase of Christian life in America.

Sample the hate that has been spewed at the state of Indiana in the past week, and faithful Christians in recent years, by gay activists and their allies. We are “bigots,” “Neanderthals” and “haters,” whose views must be ritually rejected by anyone hoping to keep a job in today’s America — even in a Catholic high school. Where will this end? Is there a logical stopping point for this aggression, where Christians are left in peace?

History teaches that mass vilification rarely stops short of spilling blood. The French Jacobins who spent the 1780s slandering the clergy in pornographic pamphlets went on in the 1790s to slaughter Christians by the hundreds of thousands. The Turks paved the way for killing a million Armenian Christians with a wave of propaganda. The Bolsheviks followed their “anti-God” crusade of the 1920s with starvation camps and firing squads. The Communist governments of Eastern Europe obeyed the same script, as scholar Anne Applebaum documents in her sobering study The Iron Curtain. The Hutu government of Rwanda prepared for its assault on the once-powerful Tutsis by incessantly describing them as “cockroaches” on radio broadcasts, which triggered a genocide.

If the media, the law and our elite institutions succeed in lumping Christian sexual morals in with white racism, how long will it be before believing Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox (and many religious minorities) find themselves labelled as members of “extremist sects,” no more to be trusted with the care of their own children than the Branch Davidians were?

Does that sound crazy to you? Then ask yourself why the German government, and the European Court of Human Rights, felt justified in seizing a Christian home-schooled student — with the apparent approval of the Obama administration. Think about the moral views you teach your own kids. Would your local education bureaucrats approve?

Perhaps Chicago’s cardinal, Francis George, wasn’t guilty of hyperbole when he said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

Joining him would be many Christians who affirm the Gospel in its integrity — instead of the neutered version that’s now sweeping the denominations to swell the ranks of the persecutors. See the Episcopalians and Presbyterians who are now blessing same-sex marriages; see “Catholic” universities such as Marquette, which fired a professor for defending the Catholic Catechism on this subject, and bishops such as Paul Bootkowski of Metuchen, N.J., who backed up a Catholic school that suspended a Catholic teacher for her Facebook comments critical of gay activism. With shepherds like these, who really needs wolves?
From Libertarian to Totalitarian in Twenty Years

It’s stunning how quickly the demands of gay activists went from libertarian (“Don’t arrest us for sodomy”) to totalitarian (“Take part in our weddings or we’ll destroy your livelihoods.”)

But I am not surprised. I was in New York City when the radical gay activists of ACT UP targeted John Cardinal O’Connor for upholding biblical teaching on sexuality — even as he spent millions offering free care for indigent victims of AIDS. The “Stop the Church” demonstrations featured images of O’Connor in Nazi uniform, and culminated on Dec. 10, 1989, in an orchestrated attack on St. Patrick’s Cathedral during a Mass, where gay militants shouted down the celebrant, and demanded Holy Communion — only to throw it down and stomp on the body of Christ.

This bigoted attack on a religious service did not discredit ACT UP; indeed, you can now read an article celebrating it courtesy of the U.S. government-sponsored Radio Free Europe. Here’s a triumphalist video of the event, which includes appalling footage inside the cathedral:

If Indiana caves and guts its religious freedom law — as Gov. Mike Pence has already promised — it will prove an equal triumph for those who are so enraged at Christian teaching that they are willing to persecute Christians.

If these zealots succeed, they will tear up the civil peace in this country, forcing millions of Americans to choose between church and state. If laws or government policies beggar Christian businesses, close Christian colleges and schools and force faithful Christians into third-class citizenship — making us virtual dhimmis, like the Christian Copts in Egypt — what should we do? What should be our response now that we know what they want to do, and are overplaying their hand, but before they complete their coup d’etat?

We need to ask ourselves some brutal questions: How should the faithful in the U.S. military respond? What about those in the state and local police? City, state and federal employees? What about religious shareholders in corporations led by anti-Christians, such as Apple?

Should we engage in large-scale, non-violent civil disobedience, as black Americans once did in the face of Jim Crow laws? We have the numbers to bring this country to a sudden screeching halt, if we can stand up to the media’s blows and spitting. Those who resist these unjust laws will be treated with all the violence and contempt that was poured out on the pro-life Operation Rescue in the 1980s and ’90s. Local cops from West Hartford, Connecticut, to Los Angeles, California, brutalized teenagers, old women, even nuns and pregnant mothers.

But we need not act alone, like these isolated bakers and florists. The marriage deconstructionists can only succeed by dividing us, vilifying us and picking us off one at a time. This is the essence of their strategy — they’re now trying it with an entire state. Tim Cook (or Apple’s shareholders) would backpedal in an instant if he learned the hard way that he was insulting and infuriating 2/3rds of American states, and half the population.

The frog must jump out of the pan, before it boils.

We should not let the possibility or even the likelihood of “failure” make us timid. Witness is utterly different from propaganda, more fragile but far more enduring.

For centuries, the early Christians endured far worse than we might face, dying in the Colosseum to the taunts of jeering crowds — whose grandchildren would flee the moral chaos of collapsing Rome and flock to the underground churches. All the persecution that a government like China can deal its native Christians has not stopped the church from exploding there, and striking fear at the highest levels of a totalitarian government. The battered church in Poland led the movement that brought down the Iron Curtain, through sober, persistent resistance.

Perhaps the future we face is the one that Cardinal George envisioned. Speaking of a future bishop who would someday die a martyr, George predicted, “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” If we stand for eternity, then history is on our side.