Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday that he has been “assured” the evangelical Christian charity overseeing the makeshift Central Park hospital will not discriminate against patients.
Hizzoner acknowledged that he found it “very troubling” when he first learned that Samaritan’s Purse — a charity run by Franklin Graham, who has raged about “the sins of homosexuality” — wanted to open a pop-up hospital in the park to help handle the city’s deluge of coronavirus patients.
“I said immediately to my team that we had to find out exactly what was happening,” de Blasio said. “Was there going to be an approach that was truly consistent with the values and the laws in New York City, that everyone would be served and served equally?
“We’ve received those assurances from the organization,” the mayor said.
“I spoke earlier today with the CEO of the Mount Sinai system, Dr. Ken Davis, who was adamant that they will only continue their relationship with the organization if those rules are followed, that they have a written agreement, that there’s going to be no discrimination whatsoever.”
“We’re going to send people over from the Mayor’s Office to monitor” the park facility, de Blasio added. “So I’m very concerned to make sure this is done right. But if it is done right, of course, we need all the help we can get.”
Samaritan’s Purse has been called out over its anti-LGBT stance — including, for example, requiring its workers to adhere to a “statement of faith” opposing same-sex marriage.
“We believe God’s plan for human sexuality is to be expressed only within the context of marriage, that God created man and woman as unique biological persons made to complete each other,” the statement on the group’s website reads.
“God instituted monogamous marriage between male and female as the foundation of the family and the basic structure of human society. For this reason, we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”