Ky. preacher wages anti-gay crusade
Pentecostal preacher James Gilles stood outside the State House for most of the day yesterday, holding a yellow sign that read, "Homo Sex Is Sin," collecting both thumbs-up and middle fingers from passing motorists.
"Homo lovers are everywhere in this city!" he yelled, in his booming basso. And: "Impeach your Supreme Court!" And: "How is it that homosexuals cannot reproduce? If it's so natural and so normal, how come they cannot reproduce?"
It was just another day for Gilles, a tall, sandy-haired man of 41, who says he found God amid what he saw as the godlessness at a Van Halen concert in 1980. Gilles has spent the last 21 years sharing the lessons of his religion at Pentecostal churches and college campuses across 49 states, relying on his audiences for donations to support his travel, his wife, and his three children back home in Florence, Ky.
But for a state like Massachusetts, unused to public fire-and-brimstone speechifying, Gilles and four of his fellow Bible-toting, traveling preachers cut unusual figures on Beacon Street yesterday, testifying to the fact that the debate over gay marriage in Massachusetts has truly gone national.
"Pentecostals are a rare breed up in the New England area," Gilles allowed, as his colleagues stood near him, holding up signs that read: "Got AIDS Yet?" and "Sodomy is a Sin."
The group flew up from Georgia, where some members live, and where others, like Gilles, had been preaching. A Pentecostal church in Everett (Gilles declined to say which one) is putting them up, and the group is traveling in a rented gray Ford Expedition.
Today, Gilles said, they will be joined on Beacon Hill by 25 more traveling preachers, most of them from the South. The preachers were not at the last constitutional convention to debate an amendment to ban gay marriage. But since then, with mayors marrying gay and lesbian couples in other cities, the stakes have been raised, Gilles said.
"The effect I'm hoping to have is to rally support for God and morality and right, and encourage the people passing by to vote the homosexual sympathizers out of office," he said.
But other religious people at the State House said Gilles is having another effect: convincing young people that the church is uniformly hateful and intolerant towards homosexuality.
"It both saddens and frustrates me, because that is not the God that I know," said the Rev. Mike Schuenemeyer, a minister in the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, who was lobbying legislators on Beacon Hill yesterday. "Those messages are harmful to the community, especially to young people, who think these people speak for the whole church, which they do not. God is love. All are welcome. "
Gilles and his fellow preachers try to get to all the big media events around the country, Gilles said. They hold up signs that read "John 3:16," a reference to a Bible passage, at the Indianapolis 500, and at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. And they go to "homosexual events in major cities," Gilles said.
"They're emotional events," Gilles said. "The homosexuals, we've had a few of them today get quite animated and violent, and it shows we're striking a nerve. It means we're getting to them."
Some of the motorists passing by yesterday afternoon honked and gave Gilles thumbs-up. Others were not so supportive. A young man in a white car slowed down and honked his horn to make sure Gilles and the others could see him, then held up his middle finger. "He's showing you his IQ level!" Gilles yelled over to Matt Bourgault, a fellow preacher.
"They keep doing that," said Bourgeault, laughing. "It's one. It's always one."
A few minutes later, a small, middle-aged woman in a business suit yelled "bigot" as she passed Gilles. Earlier, state troopers had been called after a passer-by got into a scuffle with one of the preachers.
Despite the mixed reception, Gilles said he prefers preaching in New England "because there are more hypocrites down there. Up here, there are just plain old infidels."
