WTF? A Woman Charged with Assault for Kissing a Preacher at a Gay Pride function?

This is so silly, but it's true. Joan Parker saw a preacher shouting fire and brimstone at a gay pride event in North Carolina and decided to give him kiss. Now she is charged with assault.

Here's the story:

"He was just waving his arms and has a Bible in one hand, up and down, and screaming at the top of his lungs, `sodomites' and `you're going to hell,'" Parker said in a phone interview. "I thought he needed a hug. So I gave him a hug."

At some point, Parker said, the preacher turned to yell to a man with a camera to take a picture of her. Also at some point, she kissed him. On the cheek, she says, not on the mouth.

"He claims I kissed him on the lips, and he's a damned liar," said Parker, who is from Colfax and said he was at the event with her husband to show support. "I believe I did kiss him on his cheek."The preacher, James Edward Belcher of Taylorsville, says he never claimed Parker kissed him on the lips, but that's only because he turned his face as she came toward him.

"If I hadn't turned my head, I'd have gotten it right on my mouth," said Belcher, 49, minister at New Light Baptist Church No. 2 in Millers Creek.

He described the encounter this way: "She ran her arms all the way around me and pulled me toward her." As he held his Bible in one hand, he stuck both arms in the air and turned toward a police officer standing nearby who witnessed the exchange, he said.

Belcher contends the kiss "was just one of many attempts to silence the preaching to those in need of salvation who practice a death style that they call a lifestyle."

Silly... Joan is due in court on Sept. 12. This charge could bring a sentence of up to 30 days of community service for her.

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