AP:
A complaint filed with a Canadian broadcasting council has prompted evangelist Jimmy Swaggart to say he regrets talking about killing gay men in a televised worship service.Long stretch, indeed. You said you'd kill the man. How could anyone interpret that to mean, you know, that you'd kill the man?
Audio clips purporting to be of the Sept. 12 Swaggart service have circulated on gay-oriented Web sites, with Swaggart saying "I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry."
"And I'm going to be blunt and plain: If one ever looks at me like that, I'm going to kill him and tell God he died," Swaggart says, to laughter and applause from the congregation.
A complaint was sent to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, a self-regulating industry group that enforces broadcast standards, after a Toronto television station broadcast the service, said Ann Mainville-Neeson, the group's executive director.
Expressing regret, Swaggart is quoted in The Times-Picayune on Tuesday saying the remark "was a tongue-in-cheek statement best left unsaid. I won't make it anymore."
Swaggart explained he was talking figuratively about killing: "I've said it about other people, including other preachers."
Swaggart also dismissed contentions from gay advocacy groups that such language encourages violence against gay men and lesbians.
"Good gracious alive, it would be a long stretch of the imagination to come up with that," he said...
