"Kill the Gays" Preacher Becomes First Person Banned From Ireland
Anti-LGBTQ pastor Steven Anderson, who runs Arizona's Faithful Word Baptist Church, has become the first person to get banned from Ireland.
The Holocaust denying preacher celebrated the deaths of the victims of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, and prayed for the death of then-President Barack Obama. He was scheduled to preach in Dublin on May 26, according to the church's website.
A Change.org petition calling for him to be barred from the country gained over 14,000 signatures.
The Minister for Justice and Equality, Charlie Flanagan, signed an exclusion order keeping Anderson out of Ireland, calling it "in the interests of public policy." He is the first person to be banned under the Immigration Act 1999.
LGBT Ireland thanked Flanagan for the decision, as well as thanking fellow LGBTQ rights group All Out, and Gay Community News, an LGBTQ publication, for helping to call for Anderson's banning.
Ireland is not the first to show the fundamentalist Christian preacher the door. He has also been kept out of the UK, South Africa, Jamaica, and Canada.
Anderson released a video prior to Ireland banning him, saying he was going there to preach to the "righteous remnant," adding that "the vast majority of the wicked people over there have already just embraced bloody infanticide," referring to the country voting to legalize abortion last year.
However, he claimed he was planning on going to the country "to preach the good news of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm not there to talk about abortion. I'm not there to talk about homos. I'm not there to talk about all the other sick, perverted, filth that you have going on there in Ireland." He then launched into an attack on Catholicism, which remains the country's dominant religious denomination.