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Group Behind Central Park Coronavirus Tent Hospital Asks Volunteers To Support Anti-Gay AgendaThis isn't charity.
By Jake Offenhartz
March 30, 2020
https://gothamist.com/news/samaritans-purse-franklin-graham-anti-gay-evangelical-central-park
On Tuesday morning, a makeshift tent hospital in Central Park will begin treating overflow patients from Mount Sinai, as the spread of COVID-19 begins to overwhelm local hospitals. Announcing the 68-bed respiratory unit this weekend, Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the relief organization, Samaritan's Purse, responsible for funding and erecting the facility.
The mayor did not mention that the group is led by Franklin Graham, a notorious anti-LGBTQ and Islamophobic preacher with a track record of using humanitarian missions to proselytize an evangelical agenda.
Graham, the son of prominent minister Billy Graham, has specifically sought to recruit Christian medical staff to the Central Park facility. According to the group's website, all volunteers, including health care workers, should read and adhere to a statement of faith, in which marriage is defined as "exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female" and the unrighteous are sentenced to "everlasting punishment in hell."
It's not. They'll call it that, they'll say it's that, and others will defend them.
But it's not.
Arguably, it's charitable. They're doing a charitable work - for the select, for themselves - but it's not charity, not in the real sense of it. Not when you're attaching strings like this.
What is it, then?
It's a political statement. It's a power play. It's recruitment. It's all of the above.
It's a chance for them to rub in the face of every faggot, "we hate you, you're going to literal hell, and we think you deserve to die." It's a chance to make a statement like that and get applauded for what they're doing. It's a chance to make clear they have the power to do this, the dominance to heal some while spitting in the face of their favourite targets.
It's many things.
It's partially a chance to do some good - for their own. For the right kind of people, or for people who might become the right kind of people, it's charitable.
It's certainly seeing a crisis as an opportunity and using that crisis to make a political statement. To gather various kinds of PR benefits.
It's also a chance to remind those filthy faggots who's really in charge here - during a plague.
It's hateful, it's mean, it's spiteful, it's bigoted, and most of all, it's cruel.
It's many things.
But it's not charity.
