Cortland dust-up: ‘Adam and Steve’ message in front of church leads to hundreds of comments on Facebook

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

CORTLAND

The pastor of First Church of God on South High Street says he didn’t imagine that the message that appeared on the sign board in front of the church for one week would cause the kind of stir that it did.

When a regular volunteer approached him to ask about the message he had planned for that week, Pastor Jason Horrocks approved it without much thought.

“It’s kind of a Christian saying,” the pastor said.

The message read, “In God’s plan it was Adam & Eve not Adam & Steve,” then it references two Bible passages, from Book of Genesis and the Gospel of Matthew.

After it appeared for close to a week, Pastor Horrocks was informed by a member of his congregation that some people were upset with the message, and the pastor went to a Facebook group called “Everything Cortland” to discover that the sign had generated about 300 comments, some of which were angry.

Meanwhile, chalk messages also appeared on the sidewalk in front of the sign, which is across the street from a busy gas station.

One playfully says “Adam and Steve forever,” but messages posted to the church’s Facebook page Saturday and Tuesday got more to the point: “I would rather attend a church that accepts and loves everyone the way Jesus taught us,” and “Apparently this church doesn’t believe in love and instead chooses to post hateful messages that alienate people who believe in LOVE.”

Pastor Horrock says he immediately wrote some comments of his own to the people in the Cortland Facebook group, trying to set the record straight.

“The intent was to take a stand on what we believe. The man who did it had no intent of malice,” the pastor told The Vindicator. “It was meant to remind people of what the Bible says.”

It was not meant to be a reference to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage and resulted in legal gay marriages occurring throughout the United States, the pastor said.

Far from being a message meant to incite, it was a “fairly common saying” that he’s heard many times over about the past five years, he said. “It was a random thing,” he said.

Perhaps the most-important thing he had to rebut, he said, was the notion that the message carried any connotation of hate.

“As far as being anti-gay or people who are gay are not welcome in our church, that is not our intent. But we do feel very strongly that a marriage is between one man and one woman. But we do not exclude anyone or discriminate against any particular group.”

Pastor Horrocks said he can understand how some people could perceive the message as anti-gay, but “there was absolutely no harmful intent.”

Since posting his comments, the portion of the site containing the 300 comments has been removed by the administrator.

“I cleared that up,” he said of misperceptions of what the message meant.

“We are a loving community of believers that does not hate anybody.”