#2376: Tom Vineyard

In 2011 Oklahoma City just passed an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but not before a bizarre series of local clowns had been given the opportunity to speak their minds on the issue. Tom Vineyard, pastor of Windsor Hills Baptist Church, for instance, claimed that more than half of murders in large cities are committed by gay people, and received standing ovation for the remark. The claim was made as part of an attempt to argue that adding explicit protection against discrimination would “bring down God’s judgment on [the] city.” It is not the only time Vineyard has either just made up statistics to argue against gay rights or marriage equality, or picked them from old, strange websites like Tradition in Action (a radical traditionalist Catholic hate group that says that Hindus worship devils and apparently speaks approvingly of the Spanish monarchy’s 1492 royal edict expelling all Jews who declined to convert), the WND, a 1787 book that said Rome fell in part because of “an increasing interest and obsession with sexual perversions”, and the alleged 1963 congressional testimony of a Florida woman who said that Communists were promoting homosexuality as part of a plot to take over America. Relatively standard fare for people of Vineyard’s caliber, in other words. Otherwise, Vineyard is a fanatic advocate for gun rights, and his church is apparently offering plenty of gun training, also for children. 

Vineyard is also a (one-time) president of the Oklahoma Baptist College, a staunchly complementarian institution that pretends to offer “education” in line with Biblical principles (only men can take administration classes, for instance – women may choose between sewing and cooking classes), including teaching young-earth-creationism under the heading “scientific creationism” insofar no one would otherwise ever connect what they offer to anything having to do with science.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is a baptist pastor in Oklahoma, so minimal human decency, or cognitive abilities to rival rot, would be too much to expect. We know. Still.