a megachurch pastor running for senate in kansas got asked about trans people and just said love thy neighbor. we're seated.

Adam Hamilton at Church of the Resurrection in 2011. Photo: Wikigear, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via LGBTQ Nation, PBS NewsHour and the clip itself

"Where do you come down on transgender rights?" is a question that, in a Kansas Senate race in 2026, usually produces a candidate sweating through a sentence about girls' sports. Adam Hamilton went somewhere else.

what adam hamilton said

Hamilton is the Democrat running against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, and his day job is senior pastor of Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, according to PBS NewsHour. In an interview with Kansas City's KMBC, reported by LGBTQ Nation and the Advocate, that spread on X on Sunday, he started by admitting he does not understand everything there is to know about trans people. Then: "I don't think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them."

"Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor," he went on, "so I'm gonna love the trans person as well as the straight person." And the line that made the clip travel: "We've turned a group of people into a campaign issue because it polls well. I just don't think that's okay."

why it landed in kansas

It is not a policy platform, and it is not trying to be. It is a minister quoting the second great commandment at a reporter, which in this election cycle somehow reads as a radical act. Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, PBS notes, and Marshall has called Hamilton "too woke for Kansas." Hamilton's answer to that, also via PBS: if Jesus were standing in front of them, "Roger Marshall would call him 'woke.'" Reader, we screamed.

Whether it wins him a single vote is a question for Election Day. As a sentence said out loud by a man who wants to be a senator from Kansas, it already did more than a lot of his party has managed all year.