NEW YORK (BP) — Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land was among those who rallied to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's dinner meeting with members of the World Council of Churches in New York City Sept. 25.
“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. And you can call a murderous dictator ‘His Excellency,' but he is still a murderous dictator,” Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said at the rally.
“I am appalled at the moral obtuseness of people, some of whom come from historically pacifist religious traditions, being so eager to talk with a man who advocates ‘annihilation' and ‘destruction' of Israel and America,” Land added. “He is within his own country a vicious persecutor of non-Muslims, including Christians, and the 300,000 followers of Bah'ai who live in his country.”
Land, who also is a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which urged the cancelation of the banquet, told Baptist Press that by rallying in protest he was exercising a right not afforded to citizens in Iran.
“I thought it was ironic that we were doing in our country what he would throw us in jail or kill us for doing in his country,” Land said of Ahmadinejad. “Thank God for America.”
“Let it be recorded: We are not silent,” Land said. “We condemn this man's regime. We condemn everything he stands for. We condemn those … who help his evil causes by their witless complicity in meeting with him.”