Pastor Scott Carpenter: Clergyman Delivers Bizarre Message To Graduating High School Seniors


Pastor Scott Carpenter delivered a speech at a recently at a night set aside to honor members of the Kings Mountain High School graduating class in Cleveland County, North Carolina. But the message that the clergyman conveyed to the otherwise happy seniors as they readied themselves to make their way in the world was so weird and inappropriate that several parents have complained.

But Carpenter says he has nothing to apologize for — he was only telling “the truth,” he said.

According to reports from students, Carpenter took it upon himself to tell the seniors at the school’s annual pre-graduation baccalaureate ceremony that if any of them happened to be gay, they should look forward to burning in hell.

None of the students in the Kings Mountain graduating class are known to be gay, but that didn’t stop Carpenter from unleashing his rant, later explaining that he “had to do what I had to do as a Christian minister.”

But parents say his strange and distasteful address to the class was less about being a Christian and more about being abusive toward a group of young people who had gathered to celebrate their accomplishments as they reach their final moments of high school.

“This is bullying,” said parent Chuck Wilson. “Bullying doesn’t have to happen from the back hallway of a school or a back parking lot. It can happen from the pulpit, it can happen from the stage.”

But Carpenter doesn’t feel he did anything wrong, saying that the high school kids, or their parents, were not the audience he cared about.

“Nobody got bashed or anything. All I did was simply speak biblical truth,” Carpenter told a local news station, WBTV. “The number one audience that I have to please is God.”

Carpenter is reportedly the interim pastor at an establishment known as Temple Baptist Church. He told the TV station that though his message was that gay people will be condemned to hell, his speech was not intended to be angry or hateful.

“Do I hate anybody? Absolutely not. I just love them too much not to tell them the truth,” Carpenter said. “Was I trying to be mean spirited? Absolutely not. Was I trying to hurt somebody’s feelings? Absolutely not.”

But parents now worry that the bad feelings generated by Pastor Scott Carpenter’s bizarre anti-gay rant will cast a pall over the graduation ceremony itself later this week.

“It’s a public school. There are children here. I think there should be some level of responsibility of the speaker coming in to not take advantage of a captive audience,” said Wilson of the strange remarks by Pastor Scott Carpenter.

[Image: WBTV Screen Grab]

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