South Africa Sentences Christian Pastor To Jail For Saying What The Bible Says About Homosexuals

The Bible says that homosexuals are ‘worthy of death,’ and homosexuality is only one of four sins in the Old Testament which explicitly ‘cries out to Heaven for vengeance.’ Homosexuals also disproportionately abuse children at a higher rate than the rest of any population.

A Christian pastor preached this in his church, and the government of South Africa in response arrested, tried, and convicted him of “hate speech” and sentenced him to 30 days in prison:

A South African Pentecostal pastor was handed a 30-day suspended jail term on Friday for repeatedly making homophobic comments, including a suggestion that gays be locked in cages like animals.

Oscar Bougardt was found guilty by a Cape Town court of making statements that discriminate and incite hatred against homosexuals.

He was also ruled in breach of an earlier court order that barred him in 2014 from verbally attacking homosexuals.

Judge Lee Bozalek sentenced Bougardt to a 30-day jail term, suspended for five years provided he makes no further anti-gay comments.

Bougardt is a pastor at Calvary H.O.P.E Ministries in Cape Town.

In 2016 he described homosexuals as “criminal” and said, “99 percent of paedophiles have (a) homosexual background”.

In 2015, he said, “To hell with homosexuals, …their lifestyle is an abomination to God, but Christians in South Africa are too scared to speak out against (it)”.

“If I was the president of my country I would lock them in cages where they belong. They don’t even deserve a prison cell,” according to a transcript of his remarks, read out in court.

The judge said the pastor’s statement “advocates the criminalisation of gay sex, including by implication punishment by death through stoning”.

“Not only do such statements dehumanise gays and lesbian people, they advocate hatred towards them,” Bozalek said.

South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that recognises gay rights and the only one that allows same-sex marriages.

In September 2016, South Africa banned an anti-gay American pastor Steven Anderson from entering the country, after an outcry from rights groups over his characterisation of gays as “sodomites” and “paedophiles”. (source)

When people speak of South Africa and conflict, so much of that conflict is tainted over the issue of “black” vs. “white”.

The Bible never says that being of a difference race is a sin. It simply means that one has different graces to offer the human race, as all the sons of Ham, Shem, and Japheth are sons of Noah.

Sin is colorblind as is the grace of God. Better time would be spent not on differences of the skin, but of the soul, because it is out of the goodness or malice of the soul by which a man is both deemed righteous or unrighteous in the eyes of God, whose view is the only view that ever did, does, or will matter.