Pastor Anderson has been banned from the U.K. and South Africa

Which is silly.

Everyone is reporting on Steven Anderson’s mission to Botswana (he’s there right now, “winning souls to Christ”), and how both the U.K. and South Africa banned him for “repeatedly calling for gays to be put to death”. That’s misleading, however. Anderson has repeatedly said that gays deserve to die, but that only a theocratic government has the right to pass sentence of execution. In his sermons and public speeches he makes clear that vigilante killings are wrong. He does believe the end result of something like the Orlando shooting is good (which is obviously perverse), but his position is that the killer should not have done what he did, and always that people should never take it on themselves to do what is the job of a “righteous government”, as he understands it.

So, no, Pastor Anderson is certainly not “calling for the death of gay people” as the statement implies — except by the wish-fantasy of an American theocracy which will never be. The U.K. and South Africa were silly to ban him. Anderson has never been a danger to society in the 10+ years he has preached his toxic hate-sermons (since Feb 2006). Frankly, Donald Trump’s speech is more dangerous than Steven Anderson’s. With Trump you can at least make a case that he has sometimes crossed the line by what he tells people to do at his rallies. (Anderson explicitly tells his flock that while they should hate sodomites, they should never go out and harm them.) Yet even Trump wasn’t banned from the U.K. when a petition was filed against him.

Now, having defended Pastor Ass, I admit I find it hilarious that it was apparently difficult (and expensive) for him to reroute himself to Botswana through other countries, because the U.K. and South Africa won’t even allow him a layover between flights.