This Friday the Executive Director of the Houston Area Pastor Council and the Texas Pastor Council, Dave Welch, will award Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott a special award at the organization’s fundraiser. In recent years, Welch has consistently issued controversial statements about faith and religion, insisting that Muslims should not be elected to office and that President Obama is an “enemy” to America.

Texas Freedom Network (TFN) has collected some of Welch’s most disturbing comments, which include:

• Welch has accused President Obama of being an “enemy” of Christianity and the United States, charging that the president promotes “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” policies. He says pastors who acknowledge President Obama’s Christian faith are “much like the clergy of Hitlerian Germany and the ‘Positive Christianity’ that represented complete acquiescence to and control by the Nazi state.” In 2010 he called President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “the Fourth Reich.”
• He calls gay people a “morally depraved special interest group” and Houston’s twice-elected, openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, a “sodomite.” He was one of the leaders of a group of social conservatives who warned of a “gay takeover” of Houston’s City Hall if Parker were elected mayor. He later cited her election as evidence that Houston is a “sin-sick city.”
• Last fall the Pastor Council praised conservative evangelist Tim LaHaye as “one of the greatest pastors of all time.” LaHaye, a prominent fundamentalist preacher and coauthor of the apocalyptic Left Behind books, in the past has called Roman Catholicism “a false religion” and even asserted that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.
• In October 2010 Welch called a federal judge a “domestic enemy” and said she was guilty of treason for ruling that the Pentagon’s policy against gay people serving openly in the military was unconstitutional.
• Welch has said that clergy who accept the science of evolution are “no more a Christian than the chimpanzees from which he or she claims to have evolved.” When clergy criticized an anti-Muslim resolution at the State Board of Education as misleading, divisive and inflammatory, Welch attacked them as “pathetic preachers, pitiful pastors and compromised clergy” and said “they disgust me.”
• Welch says he opposes Muslims who seek leadership positions in government because “we have deep concerns about the loyalty of Muslims to the Constitution.”
• When Texas Gov. Rick Perry called for Americans to unite in prayer at Houston’s Reliant Stadium in August 2011, Welch publicly insisted that the event be limited to Christians only. He characterized the alternative as a “polytheistic approach and … interfaith event that requires Christians to squelch the mention of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

It is troubling that Greg Abbott would accept to receive an award from a hateful bigot like Dave Welch. In a press release today, Progress Texas Executive Director Matt Glazer applauded the leadership of TFN and joined them in calling on Greg Abbott to refuse the award.