“I would say to you gentlemen, the best person to rape is your wife,” said Burnett Robinson, senior pastor of Grand Concourse Seventh-day Adventist, a church located in the Bronx borough.
In his sermon, Robinson says, “In this matter of submission, I want you to know upfront ladies, that once you get married, you are no longer your own. You are your husband’s. You understand what I’m saying? I emphasize that because I saw in court the other day on TV where a lady sued her husband for rape. And I would say to you gentlemen, the best person to rape is your wife. But then it has become legalized.”
Robinson was apparently preaching from a passage in the Buybull.
In 2018, one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention came under intense criticism after he suggested that wives abused by their husbands should focus on praying and not seek divorce. That leader, Paige Patterson, was later fired from his position as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, for allegedly lying about and mishandling complaints of student rape.
The Seventh-day Adventist denomination is far smaller, with about 1.2 million members in the U.S. and Canada and more abroad. It traces its origin to William Miller, who predicted that the world would end in the mid-1840s based on his reading of the Buybull. When that failed to occur, Miller’s followers split into smaller groups, one of which eventually became the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Seventh-day Adventists are best known for observing Saturday as their Sabbath.
