Evangelicals justify their judgmental and parochial attitude by uttering the magical phrase, “hate the sin, love the sinner.”

This ubiquitous phrase suggests that they draw a distinction between a person’s behavior and their inherent worth as a child of God. This may hold true for most sins like adultery, gluttony, pride and racism that are endemic in evangelical congregations, but they hate the “sin’ of homosexuality, and they hate gays with a passion.

Evangelicals use this cliché to rationalize their unhinged, vicious, and cruel rhetoric against the LGBTQ community. They condemn them as sinful, unnatural, perverted, and anti-God, then they try to protect themselves from being labeled homophobic by saying, “we hate homosexuality but we love the homosexuals.”

Bullshit!

Gays aren’t accepted into an evangelical congregation unless they renounce their inherent same-sex attraction and pretend to be heterosexual. If a gay is too swishy, they’ll try to pray the gay away, and if that fails, they will force him into gay conversation therapy, and as a last resort they will hold an exorcism to banish the demon of gay perversion.

It is not even true that evangelicals hate the sin and love the sinner. Evangelicals justify and excuse the sins of adultery, political corruption, greed, and even the horrible sin of pedophilia if committed by Trump or any of his supporters.

These hypocrites love sin, and I hope God smites them the next time they say, “hate the sin, love the sinner.”