[There was a video here]

The potential for anti-gay Pastor Matt Makela’s hypocrisy is apparently sky high—all the way to heaven, even. Jennifer Kish told Saginaw, Michigan’s WNEM that the disgraced pastor, who was exposed for soliciting gay sex on Grindr earlier this week, made her son 17-year-old son Tyler feel like “if he was going to go to hell for being gay that he might as well go to hell by committing suicide.”

Tyler Kish told anchor David Custer he went to Makela for guidance less than a year ago. “What I took away from it was that I needed to repent and hold onto the hope that God could change me,” he said. He also contemplated suicide.

Makela’s former church, St. John’s Lutheran, offered a rambling, incoherent, pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-sex-app statement in the wake of Makela’s resignation. Here’s some more of it (the church’s website has been down for the past few days):

Never about the details? I can’t think of a more perfect instance of the devil being in the details!

Here’s something a little more succinct to complement St. John’s statement: Shame is the real gay cancer.

[H/T Queerty]

Update (May 22, 2015, 3:27) : I just got off the phone with Jennifer Kish, who told me that Pastor Makela never told her son Tyler that he should kill himself, as the original version of this story reported. She says her quote—“if he was going to go to hell for being gay that he might as well go to hell by committing suicide”—was taken out of context.

“The way it was cut was incorrect,” Kish told me. “That is not what the pastor said. It is how Tyler felt after the pastor told him he would go to hell for being gay...It was the result of being delivered a message and feeling hopeless that made him feel suicidal.”

You can see in the clip above that she is shown saying these words after having already started the sentence containing them. Nonetheless, WNEM’s site posited the quote like this in its online story accompanying the broadcast report: