Two Massachusetts clergymen confronted U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday during a speech in Boston and were escorted from the venue. A video clip of the incident can be viewed here.
The Boston Globe reports that a third protester, sitting throughout Sessions’ talk in a motorized wheelchair, stood up near the end of the event. That protester apparently has not yet been identified.
The protester reportedly “held up what appeared to be a transgender pride flag, shouting, ‘We will not be erased!’ That person was also escorted out of the room, with police wheeling out the motorized cart,” the Boston Globestates.
According to reports, Green stood up and began reciting the Gospel of Matthew, particularly those passages in Chapter 25 attributed to Jesus in which He speaks parabolically of the final judgment, when God separates “the sheep and the goats.”
In the video, Green can be heard calling Sessions, also a United Methodist, “brother.”
“Brother Jeff as a fellow United Methodist I call upon you to repent, to care for those in need, to remember that when you do not care for others, you are wounding the body of Christ […] ‘I was hungry and you did not feed me’ and ‘I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.’”
When Sessions attempted to respond to Green, Hamilton interrupted, criticizing those gathered for hypocrisy, suggesting they were not living up to the theme of the event, religious liberty.
“I thought you were here to protect religious liberty,” Hamilton can be heard saying. “I am a pastor of a Baptist church and you are escorting me out for exercising my religious freedom, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Hamilton also referred to his race: “And as a black man,” he said, but did not finish his thought during the video clip.
According to several sources, including TownHall.com, Sessions thanked the protesters for their words and then spoke about the “heckler’s veto.”
“Thank you all for your comments and we’re glad to hear them,” Sessions reportedly said, “but that’s pretty close to what we refer to as the heckler’s veto: the ability of one individual to prevent others in a proper forum to be able to express a hopefully coherent thought about a serious subject.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in the Scripture, I don’t believe there’s anything in my theology that says a secular nation-state cannot have lawful laws to control immigration in its country and that’s what we’re talking about,” he said.
Hamilton states on his curriculum vitae, found online, that he is “[c]alled to preach justice, fairness, and equality; to promote the importance of diversity and diversification […] and to aid in moving our world toward greater justice and love for all.”
In the video, Hamilton can be heard haltingly referring to the “words of Jesus Himself, the words of Jesus that are actually represented in the, in the, in the book of Isaiah.” It is unclear in the video whether Hamilton finished his thought.
New Boston Post notes that the Book of Isaiah, a Jewish canonical text, is held by Christians to be part of the Old Testament canon. Scholars believe the major prophet’s work was written at least eight centuries before Christ’s birth.
Green pastors a church that describes itself online as having “a pretty good history of seeking greater inclusiveness in our church for persons whom Christianity has often discriminated against. This means that our church family includes people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people.”
More photos are below.
Editor’s Note: A previously published version of this story inaccurately described the transgender activist. New Boston Post has learned that the transgender activist suffers from a condition that allows walking only a short distance at a time.
