Dave Welch, left, and Robert Jeffress
The ever-looming threat of right-wing evangelicals in Texas
A coordinated attack by powerful conservatives threatens LGBTQ communities in Dallas-Fort Worth, and every other major urban area, as an anti-gay Houston extremist makes plans to grow his organization.
U.S. Pastor Council President Dave Welch boasts about his prowess in trampling on LGBTQ rights in Houston, and he makes clear his ambition to expand the group, — also known as the Houston Area Pastor Council and the Texas Pastor Council — beyond its current regional boundaries. Given his previous successes, Welch could succeed in his expansion plans.
Welch founded the U.S. Pastor Council in 2012 as an extension of the Houston Area Pastor Council he launched in 2003 with 12 associate pastors. The organization has steadily grown in size and influence since its inception.
The council’s website claims a membership today of 200 pastors in the Houston area, with associate pastor councils in Austin, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, El Paso, Fort Bend County, Montgomery County and Waco. The nonprofit’s
Form 990 for 2016 — the most recent available — showed total contributions of $1.8 million in five years.
As the only employee, Welch earned $95,090 in 2016.
Despite the modest size and financial strength of his organization, Welch convinced Houston voters in 2015 to shoot down the city’s anti-bias ordinance protecting LGBTQ people. In that election year, the group raised $833,749 — by far the largest fundraising year in its history.
The group’s success overturning the ordinance surprised many because in 2009 Houston voters had elected an out lesbian, Annise Parker, as mayor. But by organizing church congregations in Houston, Welch and his team of strident pastors managed to strike fear in conservative voters in 2016 with the slogan, “No Men in Women’s Restrooms,” a version of the debunked transgender bathroom myth.
In 2017, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that same-sex spouses of government employees are not entitled to marriage benefits, a decision that grew out of a lawsuit filed in 2013 by a pastor council member who objected to Mayor Parker’s plan to award spousal benefits to same-sex couples working for the city of Houston.
If Welch continues his success, he could easily recruit pastors in other states who will want to follow his model and form their own councils to achieve political gains favorable to conservative religious interests.
The councils orchestrate the involvement of pastors in influencing how congregants vote by distributing voter guides, registering congregants to vote and discussing politics and religion with congregants — all questionable activities as regards the status of tax-exempt entities for religious purposes.
The presence of several other archenemies of Texas’ LGBTQ community makes Welch’s threat even more sinister.
They are Dallas’ First Baptist Church Pastor Robert Jeffress, San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church Pastor John Hagee, Keller’s Vision America President John Graves and Austin’s Texas Values President Jonathan M. Saenz, who is the chief anti-gay lobbyist in the state.
The Trump administration’s policies enhance Welch’s chances of succeeding by creating an atmosphere of acceptance for outrageous beliefs. Jeffress and Hagee officiated at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, delivering, respectively, the opening and closing prayers. The appearances of both at the ceremony stunned many politicians and human rights leaders, not so much because of the pastors’ virulent anti-gay views but instead because of their unabashed condemnations of Jewish people.
Jeffress claims in sermons that Jews are going to hell, and Hagee has dubbed Hitler a “hunter” commissioned and sent to earth by God to return Jews to Israel. Their denunciations also extend to Muslims, Mormons and even the Catholic Church. The discriminatory language is common to Southern Baptist theology, which threatens the faithful with hellfire and damnation if they stray.
The reach of the Southern Baptist ministry is long in Texas, and that includes the state’s most liberal cities. To the mix of unfriendly-LGBT churches add Hyde Park Baptist Church in Austin, where Christian pastors gathered in February 2017 to develop strategy for promoting legislation to ban transgender-friendly restrooms. With that addition, a network of anti-LGBT institutions come into play in all of Texas’ largest cities.
Not all of the pastors are members of Welch’s council, but they all share a common goal: to suppress and reverse LGBT-equality gains.
With all of that ground work laid, Welch is off to a pretty good start. LGBT rights is not Welch’s only focus, but it is the one that gains him and the other conservative heavyweights the most publicity and contributions. They also decry abortion rights, the evolvement of the Boy Scouts, any efforts to regulate the sale of guns and any other progressive cause.
So far, the only cause Welch got behind that failed came when the Texas Legislature failed to pass Senate Bill 6, the so-called bathroom bill. Welch attributed the loss to corporate interests, or “fat cats” as he called them, who feared such legislation would harm business in the state.
In the wake of that loss, Welch vowed that he and his associates would continue to fight any measure that benefits the LGBT community. That includes, the right to marry, despite its guarantee in the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.
In the past, smaller towns and cities represented the stronghold of conservative religious political control, but that could change. Texas’ larger cities could come under a heavier coordinated attack from conservatives aiming to turn back LGBT progress.
The unfavorable political and social climate the Trump Administration fosters makes people — especially conservative Christians — more susceptible to the dogma of zealots like Welch, Jeffress, Hagee, Graves, Scarborough and Saenz. Texas already fostered the climate, but it is now more hostile.
No one should take past human rights gains or the possibility of new advancements for granted.
David Webb is a veteran journalist with more than four decades of experience, including a stint as a staff reporter for Dallas Voice. In 2016, he received the Press Club of Dallas’ Legends Award, bestowed in large part for his work with Dallas Voice. He now lives on Cedar Creek Lake and writes for publications nationwide.
