Local MAGA officials in Tarrant County, Texas flipped when they learned an Episcopal priest was hosting a Pride event on church property.

So they disinvited him from giving the invocation at a city council meeting last week.

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The Rev. Alan Bentrup — pastor at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas — decided to host the Pride event after a woman told him that if there’d been one when her son was younger, he might not have died by suicide, The Dallas Morning News reported.

When MAGA loyalists got wind of the festival, all eyes turned to the drag queen scheduled to perform a “family-friendly” number at the event.

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Keyboard warriors dug up what they described as Madame Lexical’s “violent language against conservatives.” Local GOP chair Bo French went off the rails over the “repulsive transgender rap ‘artist.'”

“There is no place in civil society for this kind of violent degeneracy,” he posted to social. “Leftists, and specifically the mentally deranged ‘trans’ community, have declared war on the right. It is time all of our leaders, from the Trump Administration down to the local level, put a stop to all of this immediately. We should not allow the continued incitement of violence by leftists towards the right.”

Lexical was dropped from the festival, which drew about 700 attendees, 140 vendors, and not much protest after the initial blow-up a few months ago.

But Pastor Bentrup wouldn’t get off that easy.

After enduring online threats before and after the event, he showed up last week to give the invocation at a city council meeting — and was unceremoniously dropped from the program. A staff member claimed the invocation had been “double-booked.”

Like the good Christian he is, Bentrup took the opportunity during public comment to thank the community for their support for the Pride festival, and police for handling threats against him and making sure the event ran smoothly.

His undelivered invocation would’ve called on council members to make decisions that “bend toward justice, tilt toward mercy, and lead toward peace.”

But Bentrup also called out the town’s MAGA mayor, Armin Mizani — who’s running for the Texas state House and denounced the Pride festival in the run-up to the event — for dismissing threats of violence directed at him and the festival.

That soon drew the MAGA loyalist’s wrath, and an admission that the invocation “double-booking” was just an excuse “not to elevate someone who is out of step with the majority of our community and its values.”

“Delivering the opening prayer before Keller City Council meetings is a privilege, not a right,” Mizani posted to Facebook. “It would be irresponsible for the Keller City Council to elevate an individual to lead us in prayer who offended a large majority of our residents when he recently welcomed children to attend an event that exposed them to male drag performers. We will not apologize for or equivocate on this decision.”

An unfortunate Facebook back-and-forth followed. Calls by Bentrup for “support, care, love, and community” were met by accusations that the pastor was trolling for clout.

One observation from the priest stood out from the rest, in a town riven with the politics of MAGA.

“If offering a prayer grounded in love, dignity, care, and respect for all people disqualifies someone from praying for this city, then we all should ask what ‘community values’ really mean here,” he wrote.

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