NYC Common Council Demands Samaritan’s Purse Leave City, Attacks Franklin Graham Over Traditional Marriage

Samaritan's Purse came to NYC to help with the unfolding humanitarian health crisis from COVID-19.

They treated at least 333 patients and did not expect to receive A SINGLE PENNY in compensation!

They did this as a ministry to show Christ's love for others.

But now, the city's Common Council wants them to leave.

There are even reports that New York will charage Samaritan's Purse an income tax, despite the fact that it is a charity.

According to the New York Times, Samaritan's Purse is packing its bags to leave the city, but Franklin Graham is not going quietly:

The last patients have been discharged from the Central Park field hospital run by Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical organization led by the Rev. Franklin Graham. Its white tents will soon be dismantled and sent to new makeshift coronavirus wards as far away as Ecuador and Alaska.

Doctors and nurses from Samaritan’s Purse treated more than 300 New Yorkers after Mount Sinai Health System invited the group to the city at the height of the pandemic, but its work has been dogged by controversy since it began.

In an interview on Thursday amid empty tents, Mr. Graham said the decision to leave New York had been motivated by falling infection numbers, not by politics. But he expressed pique at his critics, who he said had been “a distraction” from the work of saving lives.

The presence of Samaritan’s Purse in one of the country’s most liberal cities kindled a culture war in New York’s coronavirus response, drawing criticism from elected officials, religious leaders and L.G.B.T. groups unnerved by Mr. Graham’s past statements on Islam and gay issues, as well as by a requirement that the organization’s employees be Christians who oppose same-sex marriage.

Critics have included members of the Episcopal clergy, whose objections to the group’s position on gay issues and non-Christian faiths helped scrap a proposed field hospital inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the speaker of the City Council, Corey Johnson. He described Mr. Graham on Twitter as “notoriously bigoted” and said the group’s “continued presence here is an affront to our values of inclusion.”

Mr. Graham disputed Mr. Johnson’s sentiments.

“New York is — how many million people live here?” Mr. Graham said. “There’s not one set of values that represents nine million people. I think that’s just ludicrous to me even make a statement like that.”

Mr. Graham, 67, said he had piloted one of the organization’s Dassault Falcon planes to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey from North Carolina early Thursday morning to thank staff members and meet Mount Sinai officials.

According to Mr. Graham, the organization spent $1.8 million to run the hospital to help people in New York City.

They did this free of charge and SPENT money to be able to do it.

Now... New York state and New York City both want income taxes for the charity's work.

Talk about DISGUSTING!

View the comments from Corey Johnson, the NYC Council Speaker, below:

Fortunately, not everyone agrees with Corey Johnson.

There were many users on social media who were willing to respond and call him out.

Fox News confirms that Samaritan's Purse was forced to leave New York City due to public backlash that was likely stirred up by its liberal leaders:

The controversial Samaritan's Purse field hospital has been dismantled in New York's Central Park due to public outcry about the political and religious beliefs of the hospital's evangelical backers.

The final patients were discharged from the 68-bed hospital on May 5 and the dozens of tents have been decontaminated to be sent back to the warehouse in North Carolina, Samaritan's Purse said in a statement to Fox News.

Though many people worked with Samaritan's Purse to help the population of New York City, nurses and doctors admitted that it was difficult.

They faced persecution every day from secular New Yorks who adamantly despise the organization and Franklin Graham.

The Christian Post reports that Dr. K Elliot Tenpenny, a doctor who recently served in Central Park through Samaritan's Purse, said that the best thing Christians can do right now is pray:

As the debate over reopening the economy in the wake of the coronavirus continues to divide the nation, Dr. K. Elliott Tenpenny, a doctor who led the recently shuttered field hospital in Central Park for Samaritan's Purse, urged Christians to stand in the gap of that divide and pray.

“There are a lot of difficult decisions ahead, difficult decisions by our leaders, difficult decisions by the states when they need to reopen and people need to go back to work, go back to businesses and that has to happen eventually. … My biggest encouragement to the Christian community would be to pray for our leaders to make wise decisions,” Tenpenny told The Christian Post as the remainder of the tents for the field hospital which operated for more than a month was dismantled Monday.

“There is not one side to this argument or this desire to be done with this virus. The world has to open back up but we also have to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens and our people. As Christians, we stand in the gap and can fill that with prayer. We can pray for our leaders and pray for our leadership both locally and nationally that the right decisions are made and that people take this very seriously,” he said.

[...]

“We had cases like that that we had to treat but we got to know these patients. We knew them. We cared for them. So when they started doing poorly, it hit the staff hard.’”

During those hard times, Tenpenny said, the staff prayed and supported each other and began ringing a bell every time a patient was successfully discharged as a symbol of hope.

“We sustained ourselves through prayer. We sustained ourselves through supporting each other and sustained ourselves just through the hope of each one of those patients leaving. So that’s one of the reasons we starting having a bit of a ceremony — clapping, ringing of a bell — whenever a patient was discharged,” he said. “The patients were excited for themselves going home but one of the main reasons was encouragement to the community around us but also to our own staff that there is hope. People do get better. They are going home. They are surviving.”

And among the survivors are stories of the “miraculous.”

It appears that COVID-19 has not created a new culture war, but rather exposed some of the tensions that have been boiling beneath the surface.

Fortunately, there are servants like those at Samaritan's Purse who are willing to help others regardless of their beliefs.