Anti-LGBTQ+ Pastor Who Blamed Katrina on Gays Has COVID

In a week when Donald and Melania Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and others associated with the Trump administration have tested positive for COVID-19, John Hagee, the anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical pastor who once said that marriage equality is "two disturbed people playing house," has also tested positive.

Hagee, the founder and senior pastor of the San Antonio-based evangelical Cornerstone Church, is also infamous for saying that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution.

"Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans. New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God," Hagee said in 2005. "There was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came." He was referring to the popular Southern Decadence event, held every Labor Day weekend.

Hagee has also made anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic remarks, saying the Roman Catholic Church was "the great whore" and a "false cult system," and that God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land. 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement because of these comments.

During a livestreamed church service on Sunday, Hagee's son Matt Hagee confirmed that his father had tested positive for the virus that is currently proliferating among the Trump administration and the president's allies.

"Pastor Hagee has been diligent throughout this entire COVID pandemic to monitor his health. And this past Friday, he was informed by his doctors that he did test positive for COVID," Matt Hagee said. "It was one, discovered very early, and two, his medical team has him under watchful care and three, he's feeling well enough to be frustrated by anyone in a white coat with a stethoscope."

In 2019, Hagee met with Brazil's anti-LGBTQ+President Jair Bolsonaro. The pastor is also a major supporter of Trump, being a member of Evangelicals for Trump, working for the president's reelection. Hagee and another deeply anti-LGBTQ+ minister (and Trump ally), Robert Jeffress, delivered prayers at the 2018 opening of the U.S. embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. The move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was controversial because of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims to the latter city, but it was supported by conservatives among both Jews and Christians. Some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians believe that a major Jewish religious revival in Jerusalem will bring about the battle of Armageddon -- humanity's last great war -- as well as the second coming of Jesus Christ and the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity.