Pastor Stands by Inflammatory Remarks on Gay Sex

Patrick Wooden, a North Carolina pastor active in the push to amend that state's constitution to ban same-sex marriage, used an appearance on Michelangelo Signorile's radio show to defend his graphic and inflammatory comments about gay sex.

Wooden has recently made statements, in an interview with antigay activist Peter LaBarbera, that many gay men must wear diapers for incontinence as a result of anal sex and offered undocumented anecdotes about objects including cell phones and baseball bats being removed from gay men's rectums. He has also said, "The God of the Bible made the human sperm, the God of the Bible designed it, and it was not designed to be emptied into an area that is filled with feces," and that gay sex would "most certainly mean the extinction of the human race."

When Signorile pointed out that male-female couples have anal sex too, Wooden said that's OK. "The issue was less of anal sex in and of itself but sex with a member of the same sex," he told the host. He added that he believes any sexual activity is all right for a married, opposite-sex couple. "This pastor is telling you without apology that the Bible allows a husband and a wife to enjoy each other," he said, but he thinks "it's a perverted desire to put your [penis] in the area of another man where his feces is excremented, I think it's a terrible thing."

Wooden is pastor of the Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh and has made many public appearances in support of the anti-marriage equality amendment, which will go before North Carolina voters in May. Among other things, he is seeking to mobilize African-American support for the amendment; in his interview with LaBarbera, he denounced the idea of any relationship between the LGBT rights movement and the black civil rights movement. African-Americans, he said, should "say to the homosexual lobbyists, the homosexual groups, how dare you compare your wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, antihuman sexual behavior to our beautiful skin color."

Find a transcript of his appearance on Signorile's show and an audio file here, via The Huffington Post, and information on his LaBarbera interview, with video, here via Right Wing Watch.