Republican candidate who said gay people should be stoned to death refuses to back down
Scott Esk. (Facebook/ Scott Esk for HD-87)
Scott Esk, a candidate for the Oklahoma House of Representatives once said he thinks it’s “totally right” for gay people to be executed.
Esk, 56, is standing in the Republican primary runoff election in Oklahoma on Wednesday (24 August) for the state’s House of Representatives’ 87th district.
Comments have resurfaced where he advocated for the execution of gay people, and despite trying to win votes, he has refused to retract or apologise for them.
In 2013, Esk posted on Facebook suggesting that gay people were “worthy of death”.
He was asked by a follower: “So, just to be clear, you think we should execute homosexuals (presumably by stoning)?”
Esk responded at the time saying: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it… Ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”
A year later, when asked to clarify the comments by a journalist, he said: “What I will tell you right now is that that was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God. In that time it was totally just, came directly from God.”
He later reiterated: “What was done back then was just.”
Am I the only one who rejects being 'proud' or having 'pride' because of the kind of perversion that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were put to death directly by God for (Genesis 19:1-29)???
— Scott Esk (@imscobol) June 17, 2022
In a 2015 YouTube video, he described being gay as “an insidious addiction”, advocated for conversion therapy, and decried the fact that “gay used to mean happy, it now means perverted”.
But Esk is still, in 2022, refusing to back down.
GOP candidate Scott Esk is running for House District 87 in Oklahoma.
The runoff is tomorrow.
Scott Esk literally stated that he feels it is okay to execute gay people by stoning, because the Bible.
"Well, does that make me a homophobe?… It simply makes me a Christian. pic.twitter.com/VIQFP31jin— Tyger Songbird ? ? ♠️? (@TygerSongbird) August 22, 2022
Ahead of voters going to the polls, Scott Esk posted a new video to Facebook in which he said he would “set the record straight” on his “opinion against homosexuality”.
He asked: “Well, does that make me a homophobe?
“Maybe some people think it does. But as far as I and many of the voters of House District 87 are concerned, it simply makes me a Christian. Christians believe in biblical morality, kind of by definition, or they should.”
He added that even if others thought his views on gay people being worthy of death were “indecent”, it was actually “much more offensive knowing what obscene things homosexuals do with each other”.
