Hate preacher calls lesbian slurs for helping translate the Bible

A hateful anti-LGBTQ+ Christian preacher went on a rant about a lesbian who helped translate a version of the Bible, calling her a “fa***t” and a “sodomite” and said that she is “roasting in Hell.”

Aaron Thompson of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas discussed Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, a college English professor who was a consultant for the New International Version of the Bible (NIV) in the 1970s. She worked on a stylistic committee for the translation, but when her sexuality was discovered, she was kicked off the project.

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“I would cut ties with any kid that was a f*g. My own kid, any kid. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

Thompson, though, wasn’t trying to educate his congregation about LGBTQ+ history; he used Mollenkott’s sexuality to attack the NIV.

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“I’ll tell you something that is true, there was a f*g that worked on the NIV translation!” Thompson said. “And her name was Virginia Mollenkott.”

“And she is a very, uh, you know… I’d say more like an ‘it.'” The congregation laughed at his insult of a dead Christian woman.

“She was a fat, filthy, feminist fa***t,” Thompson said, adding that the NIV is “gender-neutral” even though it is not; it just has some parts where it uses language that is inclusive of both men and women. God is referred to with he/him pronouns in the NIV.

“She was an activist, a feminist, and she was an open sodomite.”

“And you know what? She died and went to Hell. When I looked her up, I realized she’s already dead!” he said happily. “So thank God for that! She’s roasting in Hell today.”

Christian hate-preacher Aaron Thompson has a lot of love for a woman who translated the NIV Bible.

"When I looked her up, I realized that she's already dead. So thank God for that! She's roasting in Hell today." pic.twitter.com/uLpQ3AdQv0

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) January 23, 2024

Thompson is part of the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Movement (New IFB), an extreme branch of Christianity that preaches intolerance and all but promotes direct violence against LGBTQ+ people.

In 2022, Thompson explained why he uses slurs so much at the pulpit: The word “fa***t” just sounds nice to him, and he doesn’t believe his target audience will understand fancy words like “sodomite.”

“And so what the inspired word is in this book is the right word, we shouldn’t be ashamed of it,” he said before defending a word that isn’t in the Bible.

“You’re like, ‘Well what about fa***t, you say fa***t, you say fa***t,’” he said. “It’s like yeah but when you say sodomite, most of the time people don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not like everyone else there outside reads the Bible. It’s not like a real popular word.”

“You can say homosexual, but it doesn’t have the negative connotation that it should have,” he complained. “Because the negative connotation that it should have is that they’re a bunch of freaks and that God pronounces the death penalty upon them in Leviticus 20:13.”

“And I’m not gonna shy away from anything that the Bible says.”

The NIV’s website today mentions Mollenkott’s name, but only to distance the translation from her, calling her a “Lesbian sympathizer.”

“When her sexual views were known she was immediately asked to resign,” the NIV website states. “To anybody reading the NIV it is very clear that homosexuality is a sin.”