Take off that mask, I want to see what’s underneath their performance
Why believe you? You never gave us anything to believe in
Because you lied about religious beliefs, you lied about your surgery
You lied about your accent and your past tense: it’s all perjury.
Shoutout to Kendrick Lamar for giving us all some Pulitzer-worthy words we can use to condemn blatant hypocrisy. I thought about these bars this weekend when I read about MAGA megachurch pastor Robert Morris’ sex abuse scandal.
Morris, who has served as a religious advisor Donald Trump, is the founding pastor of Gateway Church in the Dallas area. And as a true acolyte of the MAGA movement, he has used his platform to support the right-wing attack on school curriculums that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people and classroom discussions of social inequality.
Morris has spoken out against “what Satan is trying to do even in our school systems,” and the NBC News podcast Grapevine has detailed how his church aligns itself with the bigoted view of LGBTQ people as part of societal decay.
On Saturday, The Christian Post reported that Morris had to plead guilty. According to the outlet:
According to the report, Gateway Church elders agreed that Morris is now on the right path, citing a “two-year recovery process” he underwent after “a moral failure.”
The elders said in a statement:
I’m not so sure a two year break will solve the problem.
Morris is far from the only church leader exposed to such predation. In 2022, it was revealed that the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Conference maintained a secret list of hundreds of church figures accused of sexual abuse. A similar report from Illinois details rampant child sex abuse within the conservative-leaning Catholic Church.
I’m including the Morris story in my ongoing series on “MAGA masculinity” because he — and other faith leaders like him — are a prime example of the fraud I see in the conservative movement’s hypermasculine projections. (Read my previous posts on “This Week in MAGA Masculinity” here and here.)
Despite the lack of evidence, Trump and his followers would have you believe that perhaps the greatest threat to human decency – and the innocence of children in particular – is transvestites or LGBTQ people as a whole.
Too often, it is right-wing Christian men who are exposed as a real danger.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
