Gaylard Williams: Anti-Gay Pastor Arrested For Grabbing Man’s Genitals, Asking Him For Sex


Gaylard Williams was known in his Indiana community as an anti-gay pastor who preached against homosexuality at the pulpit, but this week, police arrested the 59-year-old man and accused him of trying to proposition another man for sex.

Williams was accused of approaching a man at a lake and grabbing and squeezing the man’s genitals, then asking him to perform oral sex. The man reportedly told the pastor that he was “barking up the wrong tree” and then left to call police.

When officers arrived, they arrested Williams, the pastor at the The Praise Cathedral Church, and found pornography in his vehicle.

Gaylard Williams then claimed he was returning the pornography to someone else, and he was only at the lake to look for a friend who was fishing there.

If the allegations are true, the act itself would have drawn Gaylard Williams scorn from his own church. The Praise Cathedral Church teaches, “We will engage in those activities which glorify God in our body and which avoid the fulfillment of the lust of the flesh.”

This is not the first time that an anti-gay pastor appears to be homosexual himself. Earlier this year John Smid, who once claimed his group Love in Action could “reform” gay people through prayer, announced that he planned to marry his same-sex partner.

Like Gaylard Williams, Smid once gave sermons against homosexuality and claimed that being gay was a sin. But now, Smid says he is embracing who he really is inside.

“I’ve believed in faith that something was going to happen, and it never did, and so at my age, right now in my life, I don’t have that many good years left in me, and I can’t live like this for the rest of my life, so I said no I’m not willing to keep pushing after something that’s not going to happen,” he told U.S. news outlet the Lone Star Q.

Smid said he married a woman in 1973, but later divorced and came out as gay. But as he became more involved in the evangelical Christian world, he came to see homosexuality as a sin and stopped dating men.

Smid claims he had a change of heart about his lifestyle once he met openly gay Christian men who said his way of living was not a sin.

Anti-gay pastor Gaylard Williams is due in court in February to answer to charges that he groped another man. Until then, he remains free on bail.

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