Throughout the sermon, Shelley exhorted the men listening to care for their postpartum wives, and he discouraged women from being active (specifically from returning to church) too soon after giving birth.
The pastor spent over 20 minutes of his sermon discussing breastfeeding, emphasizing its importance and using passages from the Bible to support his position. At one point, Shelley mentioned he was initially reluctant to give his wife advice about breastfeeding because he is not a woman, but says that looking back, he thinks he “should have just been a man and told her what to do anyways.”
Noting that breastfeeding inhibits conception, Shelley segued into the topic of birth control, at one point implying that using birth control was equivalent to murder.
God is the one who should decide if people should have kids, said Shelley, not the husband and certainly not the wife. Continuing his remarks about the preacher who wanted to get his wife’s input on this topic, Shelley said, “You know, how effeminate is that to let your wife tell you when she’s going to have kids or not? I mean, that’s feminism if I’ve ever heard it in my life. You know, my wife doesn’t get to make that decision, and frankly speaking, I don’t get to make that decision.”
Shelley depicted choosing to have children as pushing a button and choosing not to have children as pushing a different button, saying those are buttons he does not press, as he leaves the decision up to God. He added, “You know which button I ask my wife if it’s ok to press? None. ‘Cause she doesn’t tell me what to do. That’s a weird relationship.” The fact that some preachers are letting their wives tell them what to do is “sad,” he said.
As Shelley made these comments, men in the audience responded by saying, “Yeah” and “Right.” Women telling their husbands what to do is destroying marriages and manliness, said the pastor, which in turn is destroying the country. “What’s destroying America is the lack of manliness, is the lack of men,” he yelled, pounding the pulpit. “If you have great people, the last thing you want to do is limit their reproduction.”
Shelley did not allow for any form of birth control. Citing Genesis 38:9, he said that the only time birth control is mentioned in the Bible, someone gets killed. He also denied that a lack of money is a good reason to avoid having kids, arguing that Black and Hispanic people, whom he said are the poorest in the country, have the most children.
He condemned vasectomies, saying that any man who gets one is “a woman” and the main reason someone would do this is in order to commit adultery. Avoiding having children because a couple is on the brink of divorce is foolish, Shelley argued, because divorce is evil and not an option under any circumstances.
Shelley spent the last section of his sermon explaining why he believes pediatricians, and the medical community in general, have little to no value. The pastor, who refuses to get exams unless he is already sick, said he and his wife have had difficulty finding a pediatrician as they do not vaccinate their children. Shelley said that after one pediatrician kept recommending they stop giving their kids milk, he never took the kids back to her because the idea was “so obviously anti-biblical.”
