Conservative Montana lawmakers are under fire from their Democratic counterparts for inviting a virulently anti-gay, anti-abortion Wisconsin pastor to deliver a sermon at the state Capitol on Sunday, reports the Billings Gazette.
The Rev. Matt Trewhella, co-founder of the Wisconsin-based Missionaries to the Preborn in 1990 and current pastor at Mercy Seat Christian Church in Milwaukee, was scheduled to deliver the Election Sermon at the Capitol Rotunda at 2 p.m. today.
Sen. Dick Barrett, D-Missoula, expressed his concerns about a religious ceremony at the Capitol, placing his focus on Trewhella.
“I don’t know that he’ll talk about his views on gay marriage but they’re abominable,” Barrett said. “It just seems to me totally inappropriate, offensive to many legislators and blatantly political.”
Trewhella's Missionaries to the Preborn gained notoriety for arrests while picketing abortion clinics with signs depicting alleged aborted fetuses, according to the Montana Human Rights Network. MHRN issued a statement saying, “(Trewhella and his associates) have aligned themselves with the militia movement and most violent fringe of anti-choice activists.”
In 1993, Trewhella signed a declaration stating that Michael Griffin had committed "justifiable homicide" in the murder of Florida Dr. David Gunn, according to Newsweek. Trewhella later said he removed his name from the declaration, although Newsweek challenged whether he truly advocated against violence.
In 1998, Toronto’s NOW magazine quoted Trewhella as saying, “I don’t condemn people who use force to try to protect babies, because they are human beings.”
Trewhella has also come out strongly against homosexuality and people who refuse to condemn it.
“I have no respect for people who are parents, who actually have children, and have no problem with homosexuality or homosexual marriage,” he said in one of his videos posted on YouTube. “They are the most base people on the planet to have totally abandoned every God-given vestige to protect your child from the filth of homosexuality, to blatantly go along with it is disgusting.”
In video below, Trewhella expresses the extreme political view that God’s teachings must come before the law and the failure of lawmakers to base law on God's word will lead citizens to be more accepting of sin.
