Claiming Trans People Are Sex Offenders, Pastors’ Spokesperson Turns Out To Be Serial Rapist

A group of pastors and conservative businessmen in a small Arkansas town are fighting a bill that would protect LGBT people from discrimination. Claiming gay, and especially transgender people are dangerous pedophiles, violent rapists, and “sex offenders,” they are using a man who, it turns out, is a convicted serial rapist, as their spokesperson.

Eureka Springs, Arkansas has a population of just 2073. One of the area’s local businesses, a passion play recreating the last support and the crucifixion of Jesus, has a theater that seats twice that number. The area is known for its reputed healing springs, its religious extremists, and its LGBT community. 

It’s not surprising that the town council passed a bill to protect its LGBT citizens from discrimination, and it’s not surprising that local pastors and conservatives teamed up to fight the ordinance as if it were the battle of Jericho. They also claim the bill would dissuade Christians from visiting the town, harming its tourism industry.

LOOK: Little Rock Challenges Arkansas’ Religious Freedom Law

Pastors and conservatives paid for an ugly, lying ad, which appeared in a local newspaper.

“If you think tourists are going to be excited about even the possibility that their wives, daughters and girlfriends will be sharing a bathroom with a guy who decides he’s ‘transgender’ just to have a little fun (or worse) at the ladies’ expense, you don’t know tourists and you don’t know sex offenders,” the newspaper ad reads.

They also released a four-minute video featuring local area pastors, a pastor’s wife, a lawmaker, and a “concerned grandmother” as spokespeople fighting the bill. Voters will decide if the nondiscrimination ordinance will stay on the books or be repealed on May 12.

But the group that released the video included a local pastor who, as the Arkansas Times first reported today, “is a convicted serial rapist.”

“Acra Lee Turner, 60, currently serves as a pastor of Penn Memorial Baptist Church in Eureka Springs,” David Koon at the Arkansas Times reports today. “In an interview with the Times, he confirmed that he is the same Acra Lee Turner who, as a 22-year-old man, was convicted of three counts of rape in Stephens County near Lawton, Okla. In April 1977, he was sent to prison for three concurrent sentences of 30 to 60 years for those crimes, including — according to this story from an Oklahoma newspaper — the rape of an 80-year old woman who was beaten so badly that she was almost unrecognizable.”

In the video, Pastor Turner says LGBT civil rights are not a human rights issue. No LGBT person he says, “has been lynched, no one has to sit on the back of the bus. It’s not a human rights issue, it’s a human behavior issue.”

He says he has nothing against gays, and that he loves them.

That video also includes a speech from another spokesperson the group chose. Joann Turner, identified as a Baptist pastor’s wife.

Turner claims the LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance would give anyone “the right to come into the ladies’ bathroom.”

“As a mother and as a grandmother, and having young children, even innocent ladies going into the bathroom, this [bill] would open us up to being abused in any way.”

Watch:

 

Image: Screenshot via Repeal 2223 Vote Against May 12/YouTube