Anti-Abortion Extremist Now Attacking Gay-Friendly Churches

The Rev. Donald Spitz has a message for gay-friendly churches, and the murder-endorsing anti-abortion crusader is not mincing words.

In E-mails sent in recent days to an unknown number of churches listed on GayChurch.org, he wrote: “To accept sexual deviancy as normal is a sin. You put your soul in danger of eternal damnation for welcoming unrepentant homosexuals into God’s house. You blaspheme the Name of God. Homosexuality should be criminalized. Homosexuals commit crimes against God, against nature, against the Holy Bible and against the human race.

“Because of your church, I now know why God wrote [in] Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

There’s good reason to think that Spitz, who routinely describes gay people as child molesters, “sex perverts” and “sodomites,” takes this verse literally. The Chesapeake, Va.-based minister is best known as the man behind the Army of God (AOG) website, which applauds the murderers of physicians, reproductive clinic workers, secretaries and escorts and lashes out against other perceived “enemies” such as the LGBT community.

Spitz is a signatory to the so-called “Defensive Action Statement,” which describes the murder of doctors who provide abortion as “justifiable,” a “godly action.” The AOG site celebrates as “heroes of the faith” the violent criminals who, saying they were called to their work directly by God, have carried out such actions. (There is no evidence to suggest that AOG is a formally structured group, rather than simply a concept, though many such criminals describe themselves as “members.”)

There is no such official statement regarding LGBT people, but in a 2002 essay featured on Spitz’s AOG site, “Chaplain-in-Chief” Michael Bray – a co-signatory to the Defensive Action Statement who spent nearly four years in prison for his role in bombing women’s health clinics around Washington, D.C., in the 1980s — greeted with enthusiasm reports that three gay men had been beheaded in Saudi Arabia. “While the Christians among us westerners would decline to emulate our Muslim friends in many ways … we can appreciate the justice they advocate regarding sodomy.”

In the same spirit, Spitz last year posted a photo of Neal Horsley, a radical Christian theocrat and anti-abortion extremist who once proposed the use of nuclear weapons in a bid for Southern secession, standing outside of openly gay entertainer Elton John’s home with a sign that read, “Elton John Must Die.”

While he didn’t go so far as to explicitly join in Horsley’s call for the musician’s death, Spitz reprised the Leviticus quote about putting gays to death and wrote that John — who had recently told Parade magazine that he envisioned Jesus as a “compassionate, super-intelligent gay man” — “should be immediately be charged with a hate crime against Christianity and confined to the deepest dungeon to pay for his crime against God and man.”