PRIDE: Event doesn’t represent Coeur d’Alene

My name is Jason Murray. I’ve served as Families Pastor at Candlelight here in Coeur d’Alene for the last three years, under my pastor Paul Van Noy. I joined him in 2021 after 30-plus prior years as a pastor, spending more than two decades helping dads, moms and kids overcome the trauma of sexual confusion.

Over that nearly 35 years counseling families from Kentucky to Los Angeles County to Coeur d’Alene, I’ve observed a deeply disturbing trend on two fronts. First, while our culture has played fast and loose with traditional moral protections, to the increasing and documentable harm to young children, at the same time, second, journalists and other gatekeepers have celebrated the abandonment of those moral protections.

My local press — you — epitomized both horrific trends this morning with the claim that my city “celebrates” the “win” of “queer joy” by spotlighting a catastrophically confused family whose “pansexuality” can be demonstrated to be harmful to the gender formation of deeply impressionable and vulnerable children. 

Your press all but silenced the National Day of Prayer, the Marches for Life, and right now, National Family Month, whose celebration right now at this very moment occupies a percentage of Coeur d’Alene’s residence so large it seems like journalist malfeasance to ignore. 

Here’s a title: “Dangerous LGBTQIA+ Social Experiment on Children Celebrated in CDA Today.” 

That headline might seem stark… but it would have been honest. And much more representative of the love our city has for kids. 

DR. JASON MURRAY, Th.M., M. Div., D. Ed. Min

Candlelight Assisting Pastor

Sleepy Hollow, Coeur d’Alene