Arkansas Pastors Say Protecting Christian Tourism Trumps Protecting Local LGBT Residents

Religious businessmen in an Arkansas town which conservatives claim relies on Christian tourists are fighting an ordinance that would protect LGBT residents.

Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Population, 2073. Thanks to its Victorian charm and the history of the healing powers of its natural springs, the entire tiny downtown is listed as a protected historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, instead of being visited by hundreds of thousands annually, its main draw has become the Great Passion Play (image, above), which bills itself as “America’s ‘#1 Attended Outdoor Drama,'” a Eureka Springs website states. “Since 1968, 7.6 million people have witnessed this magnificent drama. Over 200 actors and animals help bring the Greatest Story Ever Told to life in a way that you have never seen it before.”

But now, Christian business owners and local Christian pastors are protesting a proposed ordinance that would help protect the town’s LGBT residents – and tourists. 

Rev. Randall Christy “and his allies here contend that Christian visitors are the foundation of the tourism trade in Eureka Springs,” the New York Times reports. “For nearly five decades, those visitors have flocked to the Passion Play, the seasonal outdoor depiction of Jesus’ final days that is presented in this 4,000-seat amphitheater. But in recent years, Mr. Christy said, those tourists have become more reluctant to visit Eureka Springs because of efforts to promote the town as the ‘Gay Capital of the Ozarks.'”

“I think that is a mistake,” said Mr. Christy, the pastor of Union Valley Baptist Church in Ada, Okla., and founder of a gospel radio network who has operated the nonprofit Passion Play since late 2012. “Family vacation destination should be the thrust of this town again.”

Pastor Philip Wilson “thinks the law could force churches to perform acts in violation of their religious principles.”

“Most mothers and dads who have 4- and 5-year-old daughters are not comfortable with open expressions of homosexual behavior,” he told the Times, “and they don’t want to expose their children to that.”

Local conservatives have forced a nondiscrimination ordinance the city council passed unanimously in February onto a ballot next month. And they’ve chosen to stoop as low as they can go.

“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,” one local newspaper ad reads:

The anti-gay and anti-trans religious conservatives have banded together to wage an ugly war on the bill, promoting their fear- and hate-mongering online and on Facebook, and in an especially vulgar, hate-filled example of ignorance in this video they posted to YouTube:

 

Image, top, by jdudley via Flickr