Samaritan’s Purse is a Christian aid organization which selflessly serves the sick and hurting worldwide. They set up a hospital camp in Italy and New York City to help CV19 patients recover from the virus quicker.
On April 15th, they were vigorously protested by a LGBTQ group, for being Christian.
While Samaritan's Purse has treated hundreds of COVID-19 patients at its field hospital in Central Park, New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson demanded that the Christian charity leave the city over its biblical views on homosexuality. On Saturday, the offended gay Democrat tweeted his opinion of Samaritan’s Purse.
“It is time for Samaritan's Purse to leave NYC. This group, led by the notoriously bigoted, hate-spewing Franklin Graham, came at a time when our city couldn't in good conscience turn away any offer of help. That time has passed,” Johnson wrote on Twitter Saturday. “Their continued presence here is an affront to our values of inclusion, and is painful for all New Yorkers who care deeply about the LGBTQ community."
New York is an inclusive city, he says: Get out.
The openly gay speaker said while he's aware that the coronavirus battle is far from over and that the healthcare system needs ongoing support, "we can’t continue allowing a group with their track record to remain here when we're past the point they're needed … Mount Sinai must sever its relationship with Samaritan’s Purse. Its leader calls the LGBTQ community ‘detestable’ and ‘immoral.’ He says being gay is ‘an affront to God.” It’s true. Graham has said that, because the Bible does.
The Samaritan’s Purse 68-bed field hospital has treated 315 patients since opening on April.
Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College, the undergraduate arm of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, responded to Johnson’s tweets and argued that Christians are the ones being discriminated against.
“This open hostility to Christianity is breathtaking. Christians have always believed that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and that all sexual relations outside marriage are by definition immoral,” he tweeted. “It’s not a particularly popular point of view in the secular West, but it is what all faithful Christians everywhere throughout the 2,000-year history of the church have always believed. This is nothing new.”
It would be one thing if Samaritan’s Purse refused to treat a homosexual, or mocked a trans-identified individual. Or discriminated against a lesbian needing medical care. But none of that has happened.
Instead, this massive, Christian humanitarian organization which serves each person alike is getting blasted by the left for one reason only. Samaritan’s Purse is a Christian organization which employs Christian workers and which believes in the teachings of the Bible. That alone is their crime. That alone is their fault. And for that unthinkable transgression, for that monstrous evil, for the crime of being Christian, they are getting protested by the left.
In February of this year, Franklin Graham’s ministry in the UK was opposed because of his biblical convictions regarding sexuality and marriage. That is the price for taking a stand for biblical truth and for opposing radical LGBTQ revisionism.
And Jesus said it would be that way (1 John 3:12—13; John 15:18—21).
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“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you” (John 15:18).