DURHAM – The son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker is urging voters to vote against next month’s gay marriage referendum in North Carolina.

Jay Bakker appeared Sunday at a rally in Durham attended by about 100.

Bakker said though his parents didn’t always bring favorable attention to North Carolina, they taught him that Jesus’s message was to love others.

Bakker grew up near Charlotte watching his parents run the Praise The Lord ministry, which collapsed in scandal the late 1980s. His father went to prison and his mother remarried and became a television personality who embraced gay men with AIDS.

Bakker now runs a ministry in New York City and says people north of the Bible Belt were watching to see what happened May 8.