Pastor Backs Out of Obama Inauguration over Previous Comments
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VisionsofAmerica/Joe Sohm/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) — Rev. Louie Giglio, who had been announced as the pastor to give the invocation at the presidential inauguration, has now pulled himself out of the ceremony after criticism of his previous anti-gay comments and actions, sources confirmed to ABC News.
Giglio is now a pastor at Passion City Church in Georgia. His role at President Obama’s second inauguration was first announced on Tuesday.
But the liberal website ThinkProgress.org reported Wednesday on audio of Giglio delivering a sermon in the mid-1990s in which he said homosexuality is a sin and advocated gay “recovery.”
Here is one passage from Giglio’s mid-90s sermon uncovered by ThinkProgress:
“We must lovingly but firmly respond to the aggressive agenda of not all, but of many in the homosexual community. … Underneath this issue is a very powerful and aggressive moment. That movement is not a benevolent movement, it is a movement to seize by any means necessary the feeling and the mood of the day, to the point where the homosexual lifestyle becomes accepted as a norm in our society and is given full standing as any other lifestyle, as it relates to family.”
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