Amidst all the rhetoric that has surrounded the Steve Stanton fracas, one declaration has taken on a life of its own.
"If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated," Ron Sanders, pastor of the Lighthouse Baptist Church in Largo, told city commissioners on Feb. 27. "Make no mistake about it."
Sanders' invective roused Stanton opponents and supporters both, helping turn the already-fraught political showdown over Largo's transgender city manager into a heated religious debate.
But if you think Sanders' most famous line was controversial, you should hear his sermons.
Lighthouse Baptist Church, located just off Seminole Boulevard in the middle of a small Largo neighborhood, hasn't changed much in the 30 years since a farmer built it for rural Pinellas County residents. It remains a small two-room building with an unpaved parking lot. Inside, the church is just as modest. Fourteen pews face a small wooden pulpit. Two American flags hang from the walls and behind the pulpit is a diorama of a river and grassy knoll that would make a great puppet theater stage.
On this Wednesday night, organ music wafts outside as 10 worshippers and the tall, baritone Ron Sanders sing the old hymn "Farther Along." The parishioners smile as I take a seat in the back pew. After another hymn, Sanders launches into his sermon "Putting on the Armor of God," an allusion to the criticism he's received since the City Commission meeting. The Stanton controversy has given Sanders enough hell-and-damnation sermons to last the rest of the year.
"We're preparing for battle," he shouts revival-style. "We are at war."
A red-haired middle-aged woman in the congregation nods her head like a dashboard doll. Sanders pulls out a handful of letters.
"You wouldn't believe the hate mail I've been getting," he says. As he reads a letter with lines like "your Lighthouse is going dark" and "your church must be full of hate," the women in the pews gasp. But Sanders laughs and says he's enjoying himself.
For the next half hour, Sanders paces around his pulpit preaching against Stanton's "selfish" decision, lamenting the fate of his son and offering up words from the latest Dr. Phil episode about transgender people. He bashes the "liberal" religious leaders who held the rally the previous morning ("Their Jesus is not our Jesus!"). Then, sweat beading on his forehead, he digresses into Jerry Falwell territory: Sept. 11 was God's first "wake-up call." Hurricane Katrina was the second. And if his town doesn't end its "kinky" ways, a devastating hurricane might just hit Largo, too.
One day earlier, religious leaders from a dozen churches and temples organized a rally to support Stanton's choice to become a woman, and to criticize the Christians who had spoken out against him.
"The Bible was not written as a sexual handbook," Harold Brockus, a retired Presbyterian minister of 37 years, told the cheering crowd of 300. "It was written to encourage all of us to love each other in a complex and wonderful world."
That message was reiterated by a dozen other ministers and rabbis.
"Our insight into the divine is limited and imperfect," said Rev. Sue Sherwood from the Good Samaritan Church in Pinellas Park. "How can anyone claim to perfectly know God's plan?"
In Sanders' opinion, these clergy's encouraging words are hurting rather than helping Steve Stanton.
"I love him more than these people," Sanders insists during a post-sermon conversation in his office. "They're telling him what he wants to hear." He says he has offered the former city manager "free" spiritual counsel.
Despite his predictions of doomsday during the church service, Sanders says "fire and brimstone" sermons are his second-least favorite to preach, right above ones on "tithing." Settled into his leather chair in an office cluttered with newspaper articles and religious tracts, he tells me about arriving at the church seven years before to lead the 30-member congregation, just before his wife's untimely death from cancer in 2000. And he talks about his past life as a ninth grade dropout, biker gang member, dope smoker and fornicator.
"That was my favorite thing — fornication," he says. "Before I got saved, I was in deep with fornication."
Sanders says he was never involved in city politics before the Stanton controversy, and insists he never expected to speak at the City Commission meeting. He only arrived to support another firebrand preacher, Charlie Martin of the First Baptist Church of Indian Rocks. But then, he says, God told him to approach the commission and give the quote that has generated so much hate mail.
"I didn't want to do this at all," he maintains. "I struggled with this for a while."
But now that he has the spotlight, Sanders is finding it hard to give it up.
"I have a responsibility as a preacher," he says.
Sanders rambles on, changing subjects in mid-thought, and when he doesn't have an answer, he repeats Bible verses. He contends his comment at the meeting was taken out of context, then lashes out bitterly against his critics.
"If I was saying it myself then I'd be wrong, but I'm saying this by the authority of God's word," he says, shaking his Bible. "I get blamed for that — 'You're judging, you're judging' — but it's not me. No, Jesus is judging."
His voice lowers and his eyes widen.
Despite his large-as-God comments, Sanders doesn't want to be Largo's Pat Robertson (though he admires him). After the Stanton situation is resolved, he says, "I want to take a rest."
But that probably won't be happening anytime soon. On March 8, Stanton announced he will appeal the City Commission's decision to fire him, which will convene a new hearing in the next 30 days. Sanders has promised to attend every City Commission meeting until then, and other religious leaders from both sides are vowing to come out in force.
"I think God is leading me to speak out and be bold," Sanders says. "Now that I'm in it, I'm not going to run from it."
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.