Why Does This Keep Happening? (Another Homophobe Activist Busted On Sex Charge)

At Least He's Not Gay ....

Perhaps the best thing the Reverend Grant Storm's followers can say right now is that at least he's not gay.

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At least he's not gay? The Rev. Grant Storms (right, with broom) leads an anti-gay protest on Bourbon Street in 2003.​

The broom- and bullhorn-wielding activist much disdains the annual Southern Decadence festival, a gay rights celebration in the French Quarter. In 2003, Storms irritated local businesses by petitioning to have the event, which draws between 100,000 and 300,000 people to the city, outlawed for the fact that some homosexuals have acted irresponsibly—exposing themselves, engaging in sex acts, and urinating in public.

In the French Quarter, of all places. Really, how outrageous is that? People exposing themselves, getting drunk and pissing in public, and performing sex acts where other people can see in and around Bourbon Street? It's unimaginable, isn't it?

This is the man who is responsible for the city enacting a bullhorn ordinance, who thinks his anti-gay cause is so important that restraining orders shouldn't apply to him.

To the other, while one might disagree with the cause, it is not so important to criticize the civil disobedience.

Rather, the fundamentalist Rev. Storms has apparently given folks all around the Big Easy something to criticize by managing to get himself arrested. For masturbating. In public. At a playground in Metairie.

Storms, 53, of 2304 Green Acres Road in Metairie, was taken into custody at Lafreniere Park after two women reported seeing him masturbating in the driver's seat of his van, which was parked near the carousel and playground, a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office report said.

The first woman told deputies she was taking her children to the playground and parked next to the van at about noon. As she was walking around her own vehicle, she noticed the van windows were down and the occupant was "looking at the playground area that contained children playing, with his zipper down...," the report said. The woman noted that he was masturbating and quickly ushered her children out of her car.

She told a second woman, who walked to the van and also spotted the man masturbating, the report said. The second witness told deputies that the driver saw her and tried to conceal the zipper area of his pants with his hand.​

There is no question that the man witnessed was Storms. The only question is what he was actually doing. His defense, apperently, is that he was having lunch at the park when he decided to urinate in a bottle instead of finding a restroom.

The suspected sex criminal was booked on a charge of obscenity, but released from jail for overcrowding at the correctional center in Gretna.

Chuck Robinson, organizer of the Southern Decadence festival, suggested that if the charge is true, "it is ludicrous and heinous that he would have the nerve to complain about any kind of sexuality".

Earl Bernhardt, a Bourbon Street club owner who has faced off with Storms in a battle of the bullhorns after the preacher ignored a restraining order in 2004, was more direct in his criticism, calling the suspected sex criminal "just repulsive". He added, "I'm not surprised at all that he got caught doing that."

And, certainly, we might remind that Storms has neither pled guilty nor been convicted of masturbating in front of children, but many who hear that another fundamentalist Christian homophobe has been arrested on a charge involving sex and children are already wondering, "Why does this keep happening?"

The short answer, of course, is that it might just be a side effect of being obsessed with sex.
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Notes:

Hunter, Michelle. "Southern Decadence protest leader booked with masturbating at Metairie park". The Times-Picayune. February 28, 2011. NOLA.com. February 28, 2011. http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/02/man_booked_with_masturbating_a.html