Conversations with a Street Preacher at the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival Youth Parade
Carl and his signs are a common and controversial sight in North Central Washington, but he sees himself as a "light in the darkness"
Curly fries, funnel cakes and homemade signs damning the wicked to hell – these are all fixtures of the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival in Wenatchee, Washington.
The man who holds the signs is Carl. He declined to give his last name but said he’s from Wenatchee originally.
“My hometown of Wenatchee, I just love it. People are as sweet as they ever were and as devilish as they ever were,” he said.
Easy to spot around the periphery of Memorial Park, the epicenter of the festival, his signs target different groups from year to year. Their fates are always the same – they are damned.
“Drag queens are going to hell,” his sign read last year.
This year, one side asks a question: “Does God love the transgender?”
Hundreds of children and their parents, teachers, and coaches filed by on Orondo Avenue outside the Chelan County Courthouse as family and friends looked on for the Apple Blossom Youth Parade on April 27. Above the heads of the crowd as the children passed was Carl’s sign.
“Only Jesus Christ gives peace. The wicked have no peace,” it read.
His message isn’t for the kids though. It’s for the parents, he said.
“I see the precious little children out here. The little girls especially, because there’s a beauty to them (as the men have but it’s not the same) to take and turn them into something they aren’t,” he said. “And this is done by the fostering of the public school system and the fathers and mothers.”
At one point a man came up and called him “a disgusting human being” and said he had no right to judge anyone. He admonished Carl for bringing signage like that to a youth event. Carl shouted at him, telling him he did have a right to judge and that the man should get away from him.