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DES MOINES — Pastor Cary Gordon was sure many of the people who heard him speak last week at the west steps of the Capitol for the “Let Us Vote” rally thought the main reason they were there was to protest same-sex marriage. Gordon disagrees. To him, the larger issue is secularism, which he said is the “root” of all of society’s problems.
Gordon, pastor at the Sioux City-based Cornerstone World Outreach church, claimed secularists want to throw God out of our public policy decisions.
“The natural problem that causes is an overt immorality. The crime rates go up, people suffer, people are stealing and murdering and [doing] all the things morality tells you not to do,” Gordon said in an interview with The Iowa Independent, although he clarified that he did not mean same-sex marriage is the direct cause of all these things.
But other speakers at last week’s rally, organized by the politically influential organization The Family Leader, were willing to make the connection between gay marriage and societal ills.
“No society is prepared to deal with the problems arising out of same-sex marriages — child abuse, adoption, divorce, foster care, alimony, and the list goes on and on,” said former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.
Moore once wrote in a high court opinion homosexuality was a “detestable and an abominable sin.” He was forced off the bench in 2003 for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments in the judicial building.
“We have an adultery problem, we have an infidelity problem, we have a premarital sex problem — we don’t need to add another problem to a pile of problems,” Gordon said, referring to same-sex marriage.
It comes from the secularism of the French enlightenment, Gordon claimed.
Gordon often referred to France’s government and society and noted an “objectum sexualist” who married the Eiffel Tower. Gordon said he believed the secular path he saw America’s society as being on would lead beyond legalizing same-sex marriages to polygamy, “whole villages getting married,” or grandparents marrying their own grandchildren.
“There’s always been this fight of can you have a free country without God?” Gordon said. “There has been a tendency leaning backwards towards secularism. And so what my point was that gay marriage or any other issues that are detached from the moral foundations of the teachings of Christianity are the result of a vaccum created by secularism.”
Gordon has drawn controversy since he began to actively campaign to oust the three Iowa Supreme Court justices in 2010. In a letter to pastors encouraging to violate federal tax law by using the pulpit to advocate for the removal of the three judges for their participation in the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa, Gordon called gay marriage an “injustice” and “ungodly.”
He said at the time he hoped the Internal Revenue Service would come after him for violating his church’s tax exempt status. The church also participated in last year’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday, a national effort organized by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund aimed at convincing pastors to endorse political candidates from the pulpit in violation of tax code.
However, it appears “Project Jeremiah,” the 2010 effort by Gordon to get pastors around the state to campaign against the justices, jeopardized the church’s ability to secure a loan to pay more than $3 million to contractors for a newly built worship center. Cornerstone’s worship center is scheduled to go on the auction block in May, but the church is reportedly considering filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Gordon seemed unfazed by his church’s financial troubles as he took the podium at the state Capitol on March 15 and mocked the IRS, saying they didn’t hire him and wouldn’t be the ones to fire him.
Gordon told The Iowa Independent his outspoken opposition to same-sex marriages is “not about hate, it’s about natural law.” Although he didn’t say how he felt about two men or two women being able to receive the same legal benefits if they were not legally married.
“I didn’t make gravity, no board of three against two on a board of five voted and said ‘let’s have gravity now,’” Gordon said. “And so there are natural laws that men did not make and we don’t have the power to overrule. One of those laws is it takes one man and one woman to make a baby. I didn’t make that law … and that is the logical definition of family.”
He then called children the innocent bystanders of the situation, and said a same-sex couple could never raise a child as well as a heterosexual couple.
“When two men say to the world we can raise a child just as good as any heterosexual couple, I think that’s offensive to women, because you’re saying that a woman, a female, does not bring a unique contribution,” Gordon said.
Gordon added he felt the same way about two women trying to claim they could raise a family without a male presence.
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