Pastor Rusty Thomas: Pro-life campaigner who addressed anti-Northern Ireland Protocol rally says ‘rise of feminism is to blame for 56 genders’

A long time pro-life campaigner, he had been asked to NI for several weeks of speaking engagements by pro-life group, Abolish Abortion NI. It is understood he came to members of members of the loyal orders during his speaking engagements and was then asked to open the event in prayer. 

However, his new-found profile saw views on a wide range of issues highlighted in NI, which lit up social media with anger from critics.

In previous online speeches he had said “good, Godly men” were being “marginalised” and “considered fringe in that nation” where feminism grows. “And while the true men are marginalised the culmination [of that will be] children will be their oppressors.”  

In another clip played on ‘The Nolan Show’, he said: “So whenever a nation exchanges patriarchy for feminism, you are going deeper and deeper into the curse of God upon your nation.”

Mr Thomas also claimed the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was being fuelled by “white, progressive, Marxist young women” and that as a result, “women will rule over you”.

Speaking recently outside Craigavon Area Hospital he also said it was “the actual gates of hell” because abortions are now carried out there.

UUP leader Doug Beattie said the comments were “pretty abhorrent” while the DUP and TUV distanced themselves from his historic speeches.

But speaking to the News Letter today, Mr Thomas firmly defended his beliefs.

“I get Nazi, white supremacist and insurrectionist thrown at me a lot,” he said. “It is the cancel culture. To disregard the message you have got to kill the messenger.

“But the truth is that I grew up in a neighbourhood that was 90% black and Puerto Rican. All my friends growing up were minorities.”

He grew up as a gang member in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “In my background there was jail and mental hospitals, drugs, alcohol, gang violence and sexual immorality to the max. And then I ran smack bang into the Lord and he delivered me from all that stuff.”

A father of 13, his first wife died of cancer when she was 38 and he later remarried.

Career wise, he related that he was “a manager with Columbia Pictures” and had “the whole world before him” before he was called into Christian ministry.

He trained at Whitfield Theological Seminary for two-and-a-half years and was a pastor at a non-denominational church called River of Life in St Petersburg, Florida for two years, which he says was about 20% African American.

He also spent six years as a travelling evangelist before he became a full-time campaigner against abortion in 1988.

This trip represents his first visit to Northern Ireland, and he had no other connections here aside from Abolish Abortion NI, he said.

The News Letter put it to him that Christ in the New Testament elevated women high above their culture at the time – so how can he be so supposed to feminism?

”What most people don’t know is that when Christ instituted church leadership one of the qualifications was to be the husband of one wife – not a wife of one husband,” he responded.

The News Letter put it to him that women have now proven themselves capable as pastors, CEOs and prime ministers. He replied: “Yes but at what price to civilisation? At what price to culture?”

”Now we may have women who mean well and are very, very successful. You can choose to do anything you want to do but you just can’t choose the consequences. We can reject that if we want to, but you look at the fruit – the breakdown of the family, the rise of divorce, massive sexual confusion among this generation, we got boys that want to be girls and girls that want to be boys. We have come up with 56 genders.”

And this leads him back to abortion.

“We have resorted back to the brutal darkness of paganism, child sacrifice and the shedding of innocent blood. 

“For all our modern technology and higher learning we still fall for the ancient evils. Now we may dress it up but altars of Baal – we just have them set up in hospitals.

“We break their bodies, we shed their innocent blood and we do it so that our lives can be enhanced at the expense of our own children. And God says he hates the hands that shed innocent blood.”

One of the most provocative clips of him circulating on social media among critics shows him speaking for about four seconds, where he bellows from a stage: “Jesus is Fuhrer”.

But he responded that he is actually quoting from Pastor Martin Niemoller, a prominent critic of Hitler in the Nazi era. “That was something he said when he became aware of what Hitler was doing to the scriptures. They take a lot of my stuff out of context to put me in a really bad light”.

On Black Lives Matter (BLM), again he firmly rejected claims he is on the far right.

“I am not a right-wing political guy, I am a biblical Christian.”

He still insisted that the research shows the BLM movement is being funded by “young white progressive marxist women”. Pressed that racial discrimination still exists in the US for racial minorities, he said this was the case “at one time”.

“Politically the ghettos where black people live in poverty are predominantly in Democrat cities,” he says. Democrats “may identify” with the daily struggles of poor African Americans “but they aren’t ending them” as the lack of progress on the issues over many decades in Democrat cities proves, he says.

Today he is a member of Country Church in China Spring Texas, which he says is one-third black, one-third white and one-third Hispanic; “a great representation of the kingdom of God”.