Metro Weekly

Right-wing, anti-LGBTQ pastor claims Kamala Harris is ‘trying to turn America into Sodom and Gomorrah’

North Carolina Rev. Patrick Wooden also claims Harris "took pride in locking up Black folk" as California attorney general

patrick wooden, kamala harris
Patrick Wooden, Sr. – Photo: Right Wing Watch

An anti-LGBTQ right-wing African-American pastor in North Carolina used a sermon earlier this month to attack Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) for officiating a same-sex marriage in 2013, when she was California’s Attorney General.

Bishop Patrick Wooden, Sr., the head of Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, N.C., used his sermon on Aug. 16 to rant against politicians who are pro-LGBTQ, with Joe Biden and Harris earning the bulk of his venom.

“These people have an agenda,” Wooden thunders in the video clip of his sermon, as obtained by Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way. “And one of the things is to get rid of the church, to have abortion on demand, the promotion of all things LGBTQ.”

Wooden attacked Harris’s record as attorney general, calling her “Ms. Lock-Up-A-Brother” and claiming that she “took pride in locking up Black folk,” as congregants in the church cheered.

He then played a clip of Harris officiating a same-sex wedding, saying that Harris “boasted” of being “one of the first” to officiate a same-sex marriage in the state following the overturn of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.

Grimacing as the lesbian couple on screen kissed, Wooden said, gesturing to the video: “That is who is supposed to deliver us? Are you crazy?”

“I like what Maya Angelou says, she said ‘When people show you who they are, believe them.’ That’s Kamala. And let me tell you, anybody who’s trying to turn America into Sodom and Gomorrah is not good for this nation, she ain’t good for the state, and she ain’t good for Black folk.

“We need husbands and wives, we need fathers, we need mothers, men born male, women born female,” Wooden ranted. “We need real people.”

See also: YouTube pastor known for anti-gay rants says Chicago mayor shouldn’t be in office because she’s a lesbian

Wooden has a history of anti-LGBTQ activism, becoming one of the chief proponents of North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriage in the Tar Heel State in 2012. He has previously claimed that the show Glee and Tyler Perry’s Madea, Martin Lawrence’s “Big Momma” character, and Oprah Winfrey all promote gay “perversion.”

He claimed, during a discussion with anti-LGBTQ activist Peter LaBarbera, of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, that gay men regularly shove objects such as cellphones, baseball bats, and animals up their anuses and that by middle age, sexually active gay men will “have to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels because they are so sexually promiscuous.

Another time, Wooden claimed that a North Carolina-based lesbian blogger needed to find a man to breed with who could “rock her world.”

Watch Wooden’s rant below:

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