Brother Jed

After my procrastinating lunch I walked out of the LSC to find a huge crowd congregated outside. As per usual I am totally void of any of the happenings around campus but evidently this preacher, Jed Smock, has been at our school for the past two days preaching and ranting. Of course this fire and brimstone style of preaching draws quite the crowd. Today there was a huge homosexual (or at least pro homosexual) group as well as the agnostic/atheist group. Hard to tell how many actually were in audience but if I had to ball park it I would say 200 (+/-). I had a hard time following what he was saying because of the continuous yelling of those around me. You would think that for someone who has dedicated their lives to traveling around the nation to different schools he would at least splurge on a megaphone.

What I found more interesting (and certainly more depressing) than his preaching style and content was the crowds response to him. In preparation of day two of his teaching many brought home made signs with phrases such as, "Cast the first stone here", " Separate church and hate", and my personal favorite " Homophobia is gay". Among these signs other marvelous spectacles were taking place such as the standard getting in his face and yelling at him but some of the most extreme things that I saw were two lesbians approaching him and start making out with each other as he preaches against it, and people messing with his personal possessions. Some of the more amusing events were a group of guys managing to get the entire crowd to participate in group wave and someone grabbing a SHSU flag and running circles around Jed (which I caught on my video phone).

At one point a gentleman decided it would be funny to walk out to where he was and sit down in his chair. Well, Jed evidently didn't like this and pulled the chair out from under the man. Well, this set a few people off and decided to rush the scene which caused the police to have to intervene. During this altercation someone managed to steal Jed's bottled water and poor it out right in front of him. This is when I decided to leave. Things were getting somewhat out of hand and I was beginning to relive the Jr. high playground all over again.

I haven't had a lot of time to research brother Jed but I know there's plenty online about him.

-Matt-

P.S. The video will only be up for a limited time due to the limited server space the school gives me.