Courtesy Gloria Copeland:
An evangelical minister who advised President Donald Trump’s campaign sparked an uproar Tuesday by suggesting that Christian faith makes people immune from the flu.
Texas minister Gloria Copeland, who sat on the Trump campaign’s evangelical executive advisory board, denied the country is in the midst of a severe flu outbreak in a Facebook video that went viral because, “Jesus himself is our flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of the flu.”
“We have a duck season, a deer season, but we don’t have a flu season and don’t receive it when someone threatens you with ‘everybody is getting the flu,'” Copeland added. “We’ve already had our shot: He bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases. That’s what we stand on. And by his stripes we are healed.”
Public health experts immediately panned the remarks while some other members of the evangelical board distanced themselves from the comments. [Politico]
Which reminds me of all the various religious beliefs supposedly immunizing their, uh, believers from various real world consequences. When you’re living with a make-believe supernatural being, sometimes you just gotta have some tangible evidence that the supernatural being exists. Still, it’s hard to explain all those dead warriors who believed their religion would protect them from bullets.
And it sure hurts when you run face-first into that pane of glass you just proclaimed wasn’t there. The sad thing? Gloria’s done this before:
Back in 2013, the Texas megachurch run by televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a member of President Trump’s faith advisory council who recently became the proud owner of a Jesus-provided private plane, was at the center of a measles outbreak that was attributed to the church’s belief that congregants can forego vaccines because Jesus will protect them from illness. [Right Wing Watch]
The only thing she learned was that you have to deny the scientific statistics when they come a-callin’. The next step is to suggest that everyone who does fall ill isn’t really a Christian. In the silty, sterile lake of these tinny religious zealots, that’ll cause a real ruckus.
[h/t Steve Benen on Maddowblog]
