Last week, Christian hate-pastor Steven Anderson was on his way to Jamaica to convert heathens when he was stopped in the airport during a layover. It turned out Jamaican officials had banned him from entering the country because of his history of homophobic comments — the fifth country to do so. His faith-based hate was just too toxic.
Not that any of that stopped him. He ended up going to a different island and spreading his message, and in a recent video, he claims that getting banned from Jamaica was a wonderful development because more people wanted to hear his hate. It’s downright biblical, he added.
… the fact that I got banned actually made people more interested in listening to the preaching, more interested in listening to the Gospel, and more interested in watching the DVDs the were handed out…
…
… everybody was ready to hear, “What’s this about?” because they’d seen it on the front page of the newspaper, they’d seen it on TV, they’d heard it on the radio, and so it actually made people more interested. That’s actually biblical!…
Anderson thinks the very fact that he was banned means he was being persecuted. He’s confusing his bigotry, which had no redeeming value, with genuinely interesting authors and artists whose works are banned because they might encourage people to think about taboo topics.
Jamaica had every right to prevent someone from preaching vitriol against already marginalized groups of people. That doesn’t make Anderson a hero. That just makes him a villain. There will be no week in the future during which we celebrate his sermons.