BUENA PARK, Calif. (ABP) — A former Southern Baptist Convention officer called the murder of a controversial abortion provider in Kansas an answer to prayer, and he told a talk show host he also is praying for President Obama to die.
But an SBC official insists most Southern Baptist are praying for the president’s well-being — not his demise. And the chief of the denomination’s ethics agency decried the killing of the doctor.
“I am glad George Tiller is dead,” Wiley Drake, the SBC’s former second vice president, said on his Crusade Radio program. Tiller, one of only a few doctors in America who still performed a controversial late-term “partial-birth” abortion procedure, was gunned down in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan., just after the morning worship service began.
Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., said he prayed nearly 10 years for the salvation of Tiller, an outspoken advocate for abortion rights. But about a year ago, Drake said, he switched to what he called “imprecatory prayer.”
“I said to the Lord, ‘Lord I pray back to you the Psalms, where it says that they are to become widowers and their children are to become orphans and so forth.’ And we began calling for those imprecatory prayers, because he had obviously turned his back on God again and again and again,” Drake said.
Later, Drake told Fox News Radio’s Alan Colmes he also is praying “imprecatory prayer” against President Obama. When Drake was discussing praying for Tiller’s death, he was asked if there were others for whom he was offering “imprecatory prayer.” Drake hesitated before answering that there are several. “The usurper that is in the White House is one — B. Hussein Obama,” he said.
Later in the interview, Colmes returned to Drake’s answer to make sure he heard him right.
“Are you praying for his death?” Colmes asked.
“Yes,” Drake replied.
“So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?”
“Yes.”
Colmes asked Drake if he was concerned that by saying that he might be placed on a Secret Service or FBI watch list, and if he believed it appropriate to talk or pray that way.
“I think it’s appropriate to pray the Word of God,” Drake said. “I’m not saying anything. What I am doing is repeating what God is saying, and if that puts me on somebody’s list, then I’ll just have to be on their list.”
“You would like for the president of the United States to die?” Colmes asked once more.
“If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct,” Drake said.
The SBC’s top ethicist condemned Tiller’s murder.
“Murdering someone is a grotesque and bizarre way to emphasize one’s commitment to the sanctity of human life. People who truly believe in the sanctity of human life believe in the sanctity of the lives of abortion providers as well as the unborn babies who are aborted,” Richard Land, head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said in a June 1 Baptist Press release.
Roger “Sing” Oldham, vice president for convention relations with the SBC Executive Committee, said he believes most Southern Baptists are committed to praying for the well-being of the president as instructed in Scripture.
