A senior pastor of Grand Concourse Seventh-day Adventist in Bronx, New York City has been placed on administrative leave after his shocking comments on how the "best person to rape" is one's wife. Burnett Robinson was preaching on November 13 to a congregation when he made that questionably immoral comment.
"I would say to you gentlemen, the best person to rape is your wife," Robinson said, as per the Miami Times Online. His controversial statement forced the Grand Concourse Seventh Day Adventist Church to delete the video of his sermon from its YouTube channel, but a YouTube user by the name of Sarah McDugal captured the sermon and uploaded the video for everyone to see.
In the video, Robinson quoted Ephesians 5:22 and then explained his own interpretation of the Bible passage. The New York City pastor remarked, "Wives, you must submit yourself to your husband as unto the Lord. And in this matter of submission, I want you to know upfront, ladies, that once you get married, you are no longer your own."
Robinson went on to preach that women no longer have ownership of their bodies after they get married because they will then belong to their husbands. The pastor explained that he saw on TV once that a woman sued her husband for raping her, which he did not agree with. That was when Robinson encouraged men to rape their wives, lamenting that rape "has become illegalized" today.
Marital rape in the U.S. is no laughing matter. The Health Research Funding reported that 30% of adult rape cases are committed by "husbands, common-law partners or boyfriends" and that spousal rape "wasn't completely illegal in the United States until 1993. Even with it being illegal, prosecutors rarely bring a case of marital rape to trial."
Following Robinson's statements, a Change.org petition was started by George Gia, which accused the pastor of making "damaging and harmful comments about women," which are "far removed from the standards of God and what we stand for as a society." More than 2,700 out of 5,000 signatures needed to reach the goal have been gathered to date.
The Christian Headlines reported that according to the Greater New York Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Robinson now "deeply regrets the statement and knows it caused injury and has given an unqualified apology." However, the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church has stood firm on its stance on rape and has issued a statement against it.
"We wholeheartedly condemn any form of behavior or rhetoric that perpetrates any type of violence against women - or any person," a satement from the church read. "This is not what the Seventh-day Adventist Church believes."
In the U.S. and Canada, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has over 1.2 million members. Issues about women, gender, and sexuality continue to plague conversative evangelical groups, especially in the midst of #MeToo, a social justice movement aiming to empower victims of sexual abuse to come forward and seek justice for their abusers' crimes.
