Tennessee pastor does a very gay thing to avoid “gay beams” in TSA scanners - INTO
Gay and a Hard Place

Tennessee pastor does a very gay thing to avoid “gay beams” in TSA scanners

If it’s not hard-working drag queens turning your kids gay, it’s…gay laser beams at the airport? Just when we thought we heard every iteration of gay panic paranoia, a Christian nationalist pastor in Tennessee offered a truly unhinged take on airport security scanners.

Pastor Andrew Isker delved into a bizarre rant on the TSA during an episode of the Contra Mundum podcast he hosts with fellow Christian nationalist C Jay Engel. Local investigative journalist Phil Williams captured and uploaded the exchange to social media.

Isker begins by ranting about the Patriot Act—a controversial law passed under the conservative Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 that expanded the powers of law enforcement in the name of fighting terrorism. Likewise, the TSA was established around the same time to screen airport travelers.

But according to Isker, the TSA has an undercover agenda: turning us all gay through laser beams. That’s why he chooses to have a man pat him down rather than get those gay TSA lasers all over him.

“Where was the Constitution when the Patriot Act was passed?” Isker said. “Right? Give me a break. Like, I had to be molested at the airport to go to Florida, right, just to get on an airplane, just because I’m not going to go through the ‘gay beam’ machine. I didn’t let C. Jay do it. I wouldn’t let him do it. I said, ‘You’re getting patted down, too, buddy. I don’t want them turning you gay.’”

Isker apparently knows how this sounds. So he proceeded to explain (or talk around) why a pat down is somehow less gay than a laser screening. “It appears having a guy touch you all over the place, is on its face, seems worse, but you don’t really know what’s going, what those things are doing to you,” he said.

“Or where the imaging goes or what they’re, what they’re doing in the back room,” Engels replied.

“Yeah, they can just take a picture of me naked?” Isker said. “Like, no.”

From there, the conversation somehow gets into even more fringe conspiracies. The pair proceed to speculate on whether the TSA machines can extract “adrenochrome,” referencing the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy that liberals harvest youth preserving chemicals from Satanic rituals of child sacrifice.

All in all, bad news for the TSA wing of the queer agenda—our gay laser scheme has been exposed! We’re still testing gay automatic door sensors, so for now we’ll have to stick to turning the country gay through psychic messages in TikTok.

Sign up for the INTO newsletter and get your twice-weekly dose of stories that shape the queer experience, culture, and lifestyle.