Piers Morgan rips into preacher who insists gay people are ‘sinful’ – Metro.co.uk
Piers Morgan has ripped into an Evangelist preacher who insists gay people are ‘sinful.’
On Thursday’s episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, the TV personality interviewed evangelist Franklin Graham, who is currently on a preaching tour of the UK.
The presenter spoke to the controversial evangelist about the plummeting belief in God and organised religion in the United States, and suggested the churches views on gay people could be a reason why.
Graham has had events canceled in the past due to his comments on gay people, with Morgan saying he is a believer on free speech but challenged his views.
Morgan, who himself is known for his own controversial views, put it to Graham that he believes being gay is a sin, to which the preacher replied: ‘It’s what God says.
‘It’s what the Bible teaches.’
Morgan pointed out that the Bible says ‘all sorts of things that we don’t do now,’ but Graham insisted he ‘believes in the Bible from cover to cover.’
‘The Bible has stuff in it that would be absurd today,’ Morgan pressed, but the preacher stood firmly: ‘No, I believe the Bible to be the word of God.’
‘So we should still be stoning people in the street?’ Morgan asked. ‘Would you do that? Would you allow adulterers to be stoned in the street?’
Graham dismissed this by saying ‘Jesus straightened that up’ and recalled a story from the Bible in which a woman was brought before him to be stoned for adultery but he told her to ‘go and sin no more.’
‘Your tour is called God Loves You,’ Morgan went on, asking: ‘Why do you think it’s Christian to stigmatise gay people?’
Graham insisted: ‘I don’t stigmatise them… we’re all sinners, you and me.’
He went on: ‘God loves homosexual people, he loves all of us,’ and when asked if he himself ‘loves homosexual people,’ he said: ‘Sure.’
‘I love them enough to want to warn them and tell them the truth.’
He insisted he doesn’t think the LGBTQ+ community are ‘more sinful’ than straight people as ‘all of us are born into sin.’
‘But for us to be forgiven we have to turn from our sins.’
Disagreeing, Morgan asked: ‘For me to have sex with my wife and we’re both straight people, that is not sinful right? But if I was gay and having sex with a man, you would think that’s sinful.’
‘It’s not that I would think that, it’s what God calls it,’ Graham insisted. ‘It’s what God teaches. It’s what the Bible teaches.’
Morgan suggested this way of thinking could be the reason religion ‘is going out of fashion with younger people’.
He added: ‘I don’t understand why I should be free and you should be free to have sex with who we like but gay people can’t.’
The evangelist claimed that he doesn’t ‘hate gay people, I don’t preach against gay people…’
Morgan added: ‘You’re entitled to your views, but I think one of the reasons religion is becoming less popular is because young people look at senior figures like you and think “That doesn’t sound very Christian to me, that sounds to me like somebody who is homophobic.”‘
He told the preacher: ‘I think you should think about this a bit more. Times are changing. People are changing.’
However the preacher responded that God is ‘the same today, yesterday and tomorrow.’
Piers Morgan Uncensored airs weekdays from 8pm on TalkTV.
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