The evangelist priest Franklin Graham, known for comparing transgender people with paedophiles and saying that homosexuals will burn in the “flames of hell, has been commissioned to build a hospital in the Central Park of New York with nearly 70 beds to deal with coronavirus contagions. The U.S. city has been overwhelmed since the onset of the pandemic with nearly 2,000 deaths (400 new in the last 24 hours) and over 50,000 infected, accounting for half of all Covid-19 cases across the United States.

The evangelist has called on Twitter for all healthcare (and Christian) staff to volunteer at his field hospital. “If you are a doctor, nurse, paramedic or other Christian medical professional and are interested in caring for patients with Covid-19 at our emergency hospital in New York, visit SamirtansPurse.org,” the tweet quotes.

According to the British newspaper ‘The Independent’, which has had access to the hospital reports, Graham’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse, demands all health professionals who have volunteered to comply with a ‘declaration of faith’ based on 11 points, among which it suggests that human life begins in conception and charge against same-sex relationships.

“We believe that God’s plan for human sexuality should be expressed only within the context of marriage, that God created man and woman as unique biological persons made to complete each other,” says one of the guidelines.

And he continues: “God instituted monogamous marriage between men and women as the basis of the family and the basic structure of human society. For this reason, we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of a genetic man and a genetic woman.”

New York Senator Brad Holyman has asked the evangelist for explanations and asks him to “publicly assure LGBTIQ New Yorkers that they will receive the same treatment as anyone else.”

Hours later, Graham has clarified on the NBC news channel that his organization “would try to help everyone in the same way” and denies that they make distinctions about the patient’s gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, or financial status. “We do not discriminate and we have a history of decades that confirms that,” he told the network.

This makeshift hospital has been built as an annex to Mount Sinai, which is at the epicenter of the contagion area in the New York City.