https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/gop-candidate-said-totally-just-stone-gay-people-death/
Understand these people put their religion first and they are running for elected office that will allow them to craft laws based on their religious views that the rest of us must follow. He is a republican candidate that thinks being gay is an “insidious addiction” and that homosexuals are such an affront to his god they need to be put to death. What kind of laws do you think he will champion? Do you think he could fairly judge anti-discrimination laws? How about the don’t say gay bills for schools, will he agree with science or his bible? These hyper religious people are not running for office because they have nothing else to do, they are trying to get into positions to enforce their church doctrines and make the rest of the nation follow their religion. They are trying to make a theocracy, trying to reduce the rights for women and minorities. Here in Florida they are trying to take over school boards as they did in Texas. You know the kinds of things that they tried to insist kids be taught there, things like the constitution was written by god and Moses, that slaves were unpaid workers or simply forced to relocation, that science / biology are suspect but intelligent design is possible. They snuck as much disinformation and American exceptionalism along with teaching the nation was founded on the Christian religion as possible. If we don’t stop them now, we won’t have a democracy. Hugs
Scott EskPhoto: Campaign Facebook pageA GOP candidate in Oklahoma is getting attention for comments he made several years ago when he justified the death penalty by stoning for gay people. When asked recently about it, he didn’t disavow his previous comments.
Scott Esk, 56, is running in the Republican primary runoff election tomorrow for a seat in the state house, and local media is bringing up some extreme comments he made in the past. He’s not handling them well.
In 2013, Esk was commenting in a Facebook conversation about the Pope saying that he couldn’t judge gay people. Esk posted some Bible quotations, including the part of Romans 1 where the Bible says that a long list of people who sinned is “worthy of death.”
Another person asked him: “So, just to be clear, you think we should execute homosexuals (presumably by stoning)?”
Esk responded: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it… Ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”
A year later, a journalist asked him about those comments. He said it was “totally just” to kill gay people.
“What I will tell you right now is that that was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God,” he said at the time. “And in that time, there was, it was, totally just came directly from God.”
After those comments, he put out a long video where he claimed he “sets the record straight.” In those videos, he claimed he has “compassion on anybody in the grips of an insidious addiction, such as homosexuality.”
“Any Christian should be in the position to say that this is sin or this is good. If we don’t make that distinction, we’re not going to help people,” he said in the first video published in 2015.
In the another video, which was from earlier this year, Esk called a local TV news report on his comments a “hit piece on the fact that I had an opinion against homosexuality.”
“Well, does that make me a homophobe? Maybe some people think it does,” he said. “But as far as I and many of the people, the voters of House District A7 are concerned, it simply makes me a Christian. Christians believe in biblical morality, kind of by definition, or they should.”
He said that he is not in favor of “expanding the death penalty in Oklahoma for homosexuality,” he just wants everyone to know that gay people are so offensive to his god that his religion wants them dead.
“The fact is, that it’s much more offensive knowing what obscene things homosexuals do with each other than it is for somebody to hold the view that it is indecent,” he said in the second video.
Now that the runoff election is tomorrow, The Oklahoman asked Esk about those comments to see if his opinion has changed at all.
He refused to do an interview and pointed The Oklahoman to the two videos.
“I’ve stood up for what is right in the past, and I intend to in the future and I am right now,” he stated. “That’s got me in trouble. The media are not my friends, as far as I’m concerned.”
Earlier today, Esk posted a video to his YouTube channel entitled “Scott Esk sets the record straight for the 3rd time,” in which he calls The Oklahoman piece and a piece by News 4 “hit pieces” and says that the media is against him because they want his opponent Gloria Banister to win.
He also responded to being fired from his job as a data manager in 2011 because he was arrested after he allegedly threatened and harassed the leadership of his church. In the video, he calls those church leaders “snakes” and makes some opaque references to the divorce and custody battle he was going through at the time.
Whoever wins the primary tomorrow will run against the Democratic winner in November. The seat is currently held by state Rep. Collin Walke (D), who is retiring.
Scottie's Playtime 
1) Errggg. They take those verses out of context, which totally distorts the actuality.
2) They will skip over entirely anything about intelligent design, and go right to the beginning of that one Book they worship.
3) Speaking of that Book, I wonder why we never hear them applying anything from Matthew, like: “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” (Matt. 26.) Or that bit in Matt. 18: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”
I hope no one feels harassed or proselytized by this; I’m merely pointing a few things out from the same perspective they claim to observe. I promise I won’t Bible very often.
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I’d like to add that I don’t consider children who have been abused in the name of God or whatever to have sinned.
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Hello Ali. I agree. Not sure why you added this, but I agree it is never the victim’s fault what the abuser does. Been there, experienced the abuse often enough to know there was nothing I could have done to prevent it nor nothing I did to cause it. Those that hurt and used me have that on themselves only. Hugs
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I wanted to make sure there was no ambivalence on my part about the “sin” in the verse. 🙂
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Hello Ali. I understand. And you are correct. I thought about it and often the churches blame the victims for enticing or somehow luring the religious leader into doing the sexual abuse. Do you remember Cardinal Pell whose lawyer claimed he shouldn’t be held accountable because it was “plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating.” In that case where Pell was found guilty of orally raping a 13-year-old boy in front of another 13-year-old boy the lawyer described it as “This is no more than a plain, vanilla sexual penetration case where a child is not volunteering or actively participating,” he said. See no problem, the kids don’t matter do they. That is how some church leaders feel about sex abuse of kids. Recently I posted about a Southern Baptist Pastor who was stepping down telling the church he had had an affair with a woman. Sorry for breaking my wedding vows he said, claiming he had been tempted. The congregation was ready to forgive him until the woman stood up and informed them she was 14 when the affair started. So yes it is needed to say the kids have committed no sin, because kids raised in that environment believe that they did something wrong, and their god / congregation will be mad at them. Hugs
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Understood; I always want to err on the side of love and caution for people.
Then I gotta wonder what their lawyers’s hourly rate must be to even spit those words out, much less to use them to try to cajole a court into mercy for a rapist.
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Hello Ali. I am always grateful for that you found and comment on my little blog. You have experiences and a genuine kindness that enlightens me as well as those reading. I enjoy your experiences when you write of them and the links you send. You are a wonderful caring person. I never want you to feel when I respond to you I don’t understand that. It is just sometimes I am really tired and / or my strong pain medications make it hard for me to understand what a person is saying. In the case above I did not understand the comment but when I read it in the next morning I clearly could see what you meant. And you were correct. Thank you for both being the person you are who cares for others and for gracing my little blog. Hugs
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Aw, Scottie, no worries! If I didn’t feel at home here, I wouldn’t say as much as I do. Sometimes my fingers get ahead of my sensibilities, so I like to clarify! 🙂
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Hello Ali. No problem. If you can show how these people misuse the bible please feel free to do so. I am all about sharing information. It is not like you were proselytizing, you were pointing out falsehoods and where these people were using them only wanted to use those making their point.
I find that is the thing about some people who use the bible, you can make the bible say anything you want by skipping around the verses. One of the most religious people I ever met was an old man that when asked about some verses would go back to the chapters before and then forward chapters before saying, I just don’t know what it means. He admitted the way the bible was written he did not understand it. But he never used the bible to bash anyone that I knew of. But he was a real believer in what he felt was the message from god. When I met him, he seemed a good person that never used the bible to attack anyone. He seemed to have what I would call personal faith, which means he used his faith personally, not trying to force it on others. Hugs
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Agreed. Any of us can find whatever we want in the Bible to make whatever point we with to. I absolutely agree!
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Hello Ali. You are correct. These people pick and choose what verses they want to follow and they discount the verses before or after. But I am a bad one to talk about the bible because I think it is a geo-political book about a time in history. It really is not a holy book, and it has been edited and wrongly interrupted so many well recorded times that to use it as anything more than that makes no sense. Now does it have nuggets of things that suggest ways to have a better society like caring for the poor and being hospitable to strangers. Yes it does. There are a few pearls amongst the swine in the book. But as it was written by men of the time we should take the few bits of good and ignore the silly or bad parts. IMO. Loves and hugs
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You know, that’s interesting you say you consider it a geo-political book of history. (Long history comment upcoming:) I was raised MO Synod Lutheran as a child/young person. There is (or was; I’m no longer Lutheran) intensive learning of the Bible and Luther’s catechisms on Wednesdays from 3d grade through 8th grade, when most young people are then examined and confirmed as adults in the church. My pat. grandfather was a teacher and principal in MO Synod Luth. schools, then was a Sunday School and education teacher for the classes kids took each Wed. until confirmation. We Lutheran kids learned, back then, that the Bible was inspired by God, actually spoken by HIm in only some cases (10 Comm. and such,) and that the OT is the history we needed to learn in order to understand the ramifications of the 4 Gospels and why things had to happen with Jesus the way they did. We also were taught that the 4 Gospels were of primary importance as to our spiritual health and well-being. A few SS teachers (women) also said we could learn how not to behave from the OT, so there’s that; some younger teachers also explained that many of the laws in the OT go back to people traversing deserts for 40 days and 40 nights, and needing to know what and how to eat without getting food poisoning, and how to generally be healthy and spawn big families. So, your impression is correct, IMO, and I’m a religious person. 🌞
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