On Nov. 7, a truly disturbing event was held in Iowa: the so-called “Freedom 2015 National Religious Liberties Conference.” The Press Herald didn’t report on this conference, and it wasn’t newsworthy except for two things.

The organizer of the event was a fundamentalist pastor named Kevin Swanson, who, preaching at the event, said: “In Romans 1, Paul affirms that this particular sin (homosexuality) is worthy of death. … The Old and New Testament, I believe, both speak with authority and we ought to receive it.”

More notably, the conference was attended and addressed by three Republican presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee.

At the conference, not one of these candidates denounced or otherwise dissociated himself from Mr. Swanson’s proposed Nazi-style gay Holocaust.

The three cannot credibly profess ignorance of Mr. Swanson’s views: People for the American Way called on all three to drop out of the event a week before it started, citing Mr. Swanson’s defense of the death penalty for gay people.

In fact, Ben Carson was originally listed as a speaker at the conference but had the good judgment or decency, or both, not to appear.

Another speaker at the conference, Phillip Kayser, distributed the pamphlet “Is the Death Penalty Just?” in which he maintained that the death penalty is, in fact, just. He wrote:

“If we accept the Old Testament penalty for murder, then we need to accept the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, blasphemy and all the rest.”

I expect that the Republican Party would disavow any candidate associating with neo-Nazis or the KKK.

Why have none of its current leaders expressed moral outrage at the complicity of three presidential candidates at a conference sponsored by advocates of a gay Holocaust that in its scale would dwarf even the worst crime of the 20th century?

Meredith N. Springer

Scarborough

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