During a June 12, 2024 livestream, Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon defended making homosexuality a capital offense. Webbon suggested that death, as a “maximum penalty,” would act as a deterrent. He also claimed that it is a “natural reaction” to want to “throw up” at the sight of same-sex couples holding hands or kissing.

On his YouTube show, Right Response Ministries, Webbon, along with his co-hosts Wesley Todd and Michael Belch, defended the use of capital punishment for homosexuality. Webbon explained that in the Old Testament, death was often a “maximum penalty” for a crime, but wasn’t necessarily mandated.

He likened the situation to a Texas law which made littering an offense punishable by “up to two years in jail and a $5,000 fine.” Webbon remarked that he doesn’t “know anybody in the state of Texas who’s doing hard time for throwing a Coke bottle out the window” as a first offense. However, he suggested it might be necessary for “repeat offenders.”

Webbon said that murder was the only crime for which capital punishment was mandated in the Old Testament, and claimed that this was because “the Bible does care about life.”

“Because life is so precious, if life is taken the only appropriate retribution is that by taking a life you forfeit your own,” he said. “And what does that actually do? We can map it out so easily. Statistically from state to state, where capital punishment is on the books for murder, guess what? There’s less murder.”

The available evidence does not support Webbon’s claim that capital punishment acts as a deterrent for would-be murderers. In fact, available homicide date suggests that states with the death penalty actually have higher murder rates than states without it. Nevertheless, he insisted that it could deter more than just murder.

Webbon said that the Old Testament also made it a capital offense for a child to strike their parents, but that “there’s not even one case that we can find of a child being put to death for dishonoring his father and mother.” He reasoned that this was because children were dissuaded from striking their parents by the threat of death.

Steering the conversation back to homosexuality, Webbon said that if a man slept with another man — and there were either witnesses or a confession — there was no guarantee they would be sentenced to death.

“If you got somebody who sleeps with another man, and there’s witnesses — that’s the other thing, there would have to be two or three witnesses, not just hearsay, they had to actually see it occur, or the person gives their own confession — and even then, it didn’t necessarily mean the death penalty. It could,” he said.

Last year, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), Webbon wrote that capital punishment for homosexuality is “the just penalty according to God’s Immutable Law.”

Michael Belch began reading what he claimed were facts about the LGBTQ community — including their average mortality rates. When Belch claimed that the “median age of death” for gays and lesbians is 42 and 45 respectively, Webbon joked that it “sounds like if society won’t enforce the penalties, God’ll do it.”

Webbon then began ranting about how people “have been lied to by Modern Family, by Will & Grace” into believing that LGBTQ people are like everyone else. “The key characteristic of the gay community is butt sex,” he fumed. “That’s the key characteristic. It’s feces. That’s the key characteristic. It’s AIDS. It’s disease.”

Wesley Todd chimed in to say that he used to be a “normie” who believed same-sex couples should be able to marry. “I was dumb and I was wrong,” Todd said, claiming that anti-LGBTQ statistics convinced him that “they’re disgusting” and that he “despise[s] this and everything it stands for.”

Webbon called this the “proper and even Godly reaction” to LGBTQ people, and told his co-hosts that more people should feel a “God-given” sense of “disgust” when seeing same-sex couples holding hands or kissing:

That is the proper and even Godly reaction. If we want to make shame, right — make America great again? Make shame great again. And make disgust great again. Disgust is a God-given, natural reaction that propels us from things that are bad, and harmful, and destructive. And so, that doesn’t mean that there can’t be still love, but it’s not love overriding disgust. It would be both. The natural, immediate reaction if you see two guys walking down the street holding hands or, you know, PDA in a movie theater — you know, a guy kisses another guy on the cheek — the natural reaction used to be — used to be, and they had to work really hard to overcome this because it’s nature, nature’s hard to overcome — but it used to be, and by God’s grace will be again, that you see a homosexual couple in the front row of a movie theater and a man leans over and kisses another man on the cheek, you should throw up in your mouth a little bit. That is the proper, God-given, natural reaction.

Belch then resumed reading statistics — including claims that LGBTQ people often have over 100 sexual partners, and that “17% of homosexuals” consume human feces — which appear to have been sourced from discredited anti-gay researcher Paul Cameron and his Family Research Institute.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Cameron’s FRI is a “one-man statistical chop shop” which “churns out hate literature masquerading as legitimate science.”

At the end of the livestream Wesley Todd complimented Webbon on a recent sermon he gave in which he said, “It’s either the closet or the cross.” In other words, people can either “come to Christ through repentance,” or “it’s back in the closet.”

Webbon elaborated on this sermon, and complained that “white Christians” are currently the ones who are forced into the closet — a metaphor usually associated with LGBTQ people hiding their true sexual orientation or gender identity.

As he told Todd and Belch, “It’s not whether we have shame. But simply which group will be ashamed. And we’ve gone from the LGBT community being in the sights of shame — in the crosshairs of shame — to Christians. Shame hasn’t been eradicated. It’s just been redirected.”

Webbon, of course, would like to redirect this away from Christians and back the LGBTQ community.

“So it’s the closet or the cross,” Webbon said. “Every society will have a closet, and somebody will be locked away inside of it. Right now it’s white Christians. That’s who has to be in the closet. You shut up. You go and sit in the corner. You shut your mouth. You’re privileged. You’re an oppressor.”

He went on to say that “Anglo Protestants” are the “ashamed group,” and that while the Bible “doesn’t support shaming white Christians,” it does support shaming LGBTQ people.

“But the Bible does support shame — Romans 1 says men committed shameful acts with one another,” he proclaimed. “So this is biblical and true and honoring God. They should be ashamed and run and hide in the closet if — again if — they don’t choose the first option, which is the cross.”