He’s a right-wing pastor and radio show host, and as such, E.W. Jackson has used his status to fear-monger against LGBTQ people and has lately resorted to saying that gay people can’t be parents, according to Right Wing Watch.
As the host of The Awakening radio show, he seems to make absurdity into an art form. In past years he has declared that if he ever saw an LGBTQ activist handing pro-gay literature to one of his kids he “would really need the grace of God not to jump on that person and try to beat them into the ground.”
Jackson has defended this comment over the years but has recently taken another tack by saying that LGBTQ activists aren’t able to understand his point of view because “they can’t really be parents.”
This must be news to the 200,000 kids in the U.S. who are being raised by same-sex parents and the 2 million to 3.7 million kids who are being raised by an LGBTQ parent (as of 2015.)
But facts like these are lost on Jackson.
“Any normal parent would be very, very angry,” Jackson said on his radio show. “And I think part of the reason why the homosexual community can’t relate is that they really can’t be parents, not in the normal sense. They can manipulate, do some kind of weird gyrations of science and so forth to try to manufacture some children for their own entertainment I suppose, for their own self-aggrandizement, but they cannot procreate.”
And he tried to hammer his point home, apparently thinking that since he said it once he may as well say it again.
“By definition, they cannot procreate, and so I think perhaps they don’t understand what a normal parent’s response is to somebody trying to, in effect, manipulate, use, inculcate, indoctrinate your child with things that you find objectionable.”
In one of his really bizarre radio segments in 2017, Jackson claimed that people who prefer gender-neutral pronouns like they/them are possessed by “multiple demons,” Right Wing Watch reports.
“This whole thing of going to a plural pronoun,” he said, “to me is a subconscious spiritual admission of demon possession by multiple demons.”
Jackson has also gone out of his way to attack transgendered people and “transgender toolkits” which teachers use to help children who don’t identify with the gender binary. Instead, he says, schools “don’t need a transgender toolkit.” No, he says, what they really need is “a whole army of exorcists to cast all these demons out of people who are pushing this mess.”
Jackson is spreading a message of hate and misunderstanding. He’s telling LGBTQ people there’s something wrong with them because they don’t fit in his narrow-minded view of the world. His message is simply untrue — because he’s the one who can’t relate to reality.
Featured image by Jamelle Bouie license CC 2.0 via Flickr
