Eighty-one pastors claim to have so much Holy Ghost power flowing through them — yet they can’t walk past a cupcake stand without begging the government to “protect them.”
Seriously? Since when did faith mean lobbying politicians to fight your personal battles against frosting and sprinkles?
But let’s be clear — this isn’t really about cupcakes. It’s about the endless habit of turning pulpits into platforms of ridicule, judgment, and exclusion.
I know this first-hand. One of the pastors who signed that letter once mocked a Christian band I loved as a teenager. When he found out one of the members of Jars of Clay was gay, he stood before the congregation and joked they should be called “Jars of Mud.”
Everyone laughed. I sat there feeling like absolute dirt.
And that wasn’t the first or last time church leaders made me feel less than human.
And here’s the kicker: these same pastors who claim to be defending “family values” are the ones who took advantage of families like mine.
They stood in pulpits and insisted that if you didn’t give 10% of your gross income to their church, you were disobeying God — even warning that curses could fall on you if you didn’t comply.
Imagine being told your struggling family was at spiritual risk because you couldn’t afford to hand over a tenth of everything to the business they were building and calling a church.
Family values? Save it.
Meanwhile, our community is full of hurting people who desperately need connection and congregation. Many are battling addiction, others are drowning in mental health struggles — and too often, those wounds trace back to the very pulpits now throwing a fit about cupcakes. Enough is enough.
Jesus Christ would be flipping tables over this nonsense. If anything, He would have multiplied the cupcakes so that those who identified with them felt loved.
That’s the cost of this kind of rhetoric. For them, it’s just a clever line or a public signature.
For those of us sitting in the pews, it cuts deep. It teaches us we don’t belong. It convinces us that God’s love has conditions — conditions that Jesus Himself never placed on anyone.
If these 81 pastors want to represent the real Jesus, they’d do better to start with humility. Jesus never mocked. He never signed His name to declarations of exclusion. He didn’t beg Caesar to fight His battles. He loved — without exception, without condition.
If these pastors truly want to follow Him, then maybe they should stop writing letters and start showing up at Pride with hugs, with compassion, with actual Christ-like love.
Until then, their signatures aren’t power — they’re proof of hypocrisy.
Sincerely,
K.C. Ernst
Mansfield, Ohio