Michael Brown is a preacher with the Coalition of Conscience. He cavorts with Lou Engle, an extremist linked to the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda.
Brown’s game is to try inciting followers to possible violence against LGBT people, while innocently maintaining that he loves homosexuals and simply wants them to meet his militant and perverted version of God.
Last weekend, Brown tried to ruin LGBT Pride in Charlotte. He rounded up a large group of “Red Shirts” (aka fundamentalist would-be thugs) and marched on the festival under the smug and self-righteous banner of “God Has a Better Way.” Presumably, his “better way” is converting happy and loving LGBT people into self-loathing bigots who pray at the altar of discrimination and hate.
Brown is a slick dude. He fully understands that he is imposing on what should be a day of affirmation for LGBT people in North Carolina.
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He also knows that many of the people attending Pride in this southern state are victims of anti-gay prejudice, and religion-based bigotry. They come to this annual get together to feel good about themselves and heal old childhood wounds — such as getting bullied, rejected by family, or preached at for their sexual orientation.
Instead of being able to enjoy the weekend, Brown inundates already suffering people with heaping doses of spiritual violence, that I’m quite sure will one day lead to actual violence. I do strongly believe to my core that Brown’s ultimate goal is to create the conditions for a nasty physical clash — in which he will play the victim in the mainstream media, while claiming to be a crusading holy warrior with his incited base.
Indeed, the sick and cynical Brown will likely spin such a brouhaha as a fundamentalist version of Stonewall, where Christians began to fight back in the name of “religious freedom.”
Q-Notes editor Matt Comer has followed Brown’s antics for years and has documented his vile speech which seems, in my view, designed to encourage martyrdom. Here is the typical language Brown uses when he addresses his flock:
After being fired as director of the Brownsville Revival School of Ministry, Brown wrote he was founding the new FIRE School of Ministry and vowed to “continue to pursue the vision that has burned in my heart for many years: to raise up a holy army of uncompromising, Spirit-filled radicals who will shake an entire generation with the gospel of Jesus-by life or by death” (emphasis added).
I’ve met Brown on two occasions and I have spoken to him. It is my view that he has a messiah complex and is a diabolical individual who aims to manipulate impressionable followers to launch some sort of holy war. Of course, he’s too much of a coward to start the war himself — so he stirs the boiling pot by creating divisive events that just might lead to violence on the part of his followers or a violent response by an LGBT individual — which will offer the opportunity for his Red Shirts to retaliate in the name of “self defense.”
Of course, I’m not claiming that every person in a red shirt at Pride or involved with Brown wants to harm LGBT people.
No doubt, there were well-meaning, yet deceived, individuals that were part of his rude and intolerant invasion squad. However, Brown is a smart man who know how violence works. The madman fully understands that he only has to create a hostile climate to inflame the most unstable of his thugs and they will eventually provoke the type of confrontation that this pathological monster deeply desires.
When Brown’s dream of a brutal clash finally occurs, the blood will be on his hands no matter who throws the first punch or pulls the trigger. After all, Brown is the instigator and is doing everything in his power to bring his twisted dreams to fruition.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Watch out for this man, he’s bad news.
(Here is a loving message from a theocratic thug at Charlotte Pride. Is it possible to have fun and a sense of community when being screamed at by a lunatic?)
