#1560: O'Neal Dozier

I suppose many associate the Ft. Lauderdale area with relatively liberal attitudes. I guess it might be, which means, of course, that the local fundamentalist crazies have cranked their volume up several notches in response. One such is Rev. O’Neal Dozier of Pompano Beach’s Worldwide Christian Center (no, but Dozier certainly possesses a streak of megalomania), who attracted some attention during the 2012 Republican primaries when he called on Mitt Romney“to openly renounce his racist Mormon religion.” It is, in fairness, not too hard to see where he is coming from. His claim that Romney’s Mormonism would “taint the Republican Party” is still, shall we say, a bit … off.

For Dozier’s anti-equality campaigning there is no possible excuse, however. Tensions in the Ft. Lauderdale area ran high for awhile in 2007 when then-Democratic-mayor Jim Naugle – who said that the American Civil Liberties Union acronym ACLU means “Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union” and that a proposal for reducing greenhouse gases was “hate-America stuff” concocted by “a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine” – launched a rather aggressive anti-gay campaign. Naugle, who regards homosexuality as a sin, defended rather quaint anti-sodomy laws, and Dozier was one of several bigoted lunatics who emerged as his allies (the group from Koinonia Worship Center in Pembroke Park led by Elder Mathes Guice even donned paramilitary attire for one of the press conferencse with Naugle). “We love the homosexual people,” said Dozier for the occasion, and was apparently suffering from the delusion that the campaigns for “Healthy Public Places” were really attempts to reach out to gays “in the spirit of love.” To try to clarify: “Our coalition is not anti-gay. We are anti-sin” (one of the negative impacts of the “abomination” that is homosexuality, said Dozier, is the spread of HIV/AIDS). Dozier just doesn’t “want to see God destroy America in the way he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.” Gays also “make God want to vomit,” according to Dozier. You probably don’t want to meet him when he’s not in his “spirit-of-love” mood.

Dozier is concerned with social issues beyond gay rights, however. A staunch dominionist, Dozier has declared that “[w]e should take control of every facet of society” (adding, for good measure, that God was “100 percent for capital punishment. Oh, yeah, God knew some were going to slip through, a few innocent ones. He knew that. But you cannot have a society without capital punishment”). In 2006, he also declared war on a local Islamic group trying to build a mosque: “One day,” claimed Dozier, “our grandchildren will live under the grips of sharia law. It’s coming our way. Islam has a plan, a 20-year plan, to take over America from within. And they’re doing it.” Moreover, Darwinism is a liberal plot, and teaching evolution in school is an obvious violation of the Constitution: “Why is it that no one ever challenges the teaching of this Darwinian religion on constitutional grounds?” asked Dozier, without checking whether anyone has, in fact, tried to do precisely that. It is also racist.