Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has announced that anti-gay American pastor Steven Anderson will not be granted a visa to visit South Africa. ”Mr Steven Anderson and members and/or associates of his church are prohibited from entering the Republic of South Africa,” Gigaba announced in Parliament on Tuesday morning. The Department of Home Affairs Department has previously promised to act if Anderson ‘spews hate speech’ on South African soil, with Minister Gigaba saying at the time that the department had no legal standing to stop him from entering the country. Provisions of the immigration act only applied where someone had committed a crime locally or internationally.
Just today the pastor stated on his twitter “I have been banned from South Africa AND the United Kingdom. I am not even allowed to have a connecting flight in…”
This pastor has been on a rampage shaming gay people, another recent blow was after the Orlando shooting in America when he stated ‘look on the bright side’ after the attacks in Orlando on Sunday and celebrate what he called the “good news” that came out of the shooting: “there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world.” Another blow is “The Bible says that homosexuals should be put to death in Leviticus 20:13. Obviously, it’s not right for someone to just shoot up the place because that’s not going through the proper channels. But these people all should have been killed anyway but they should have been killed through the proper channels as in, they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed…That’s what the Bible says. Plain and simple.” Last one “[those who were killed] were going to die of AIDS and syphilis and whatever else. They were all gonna die early anyway. Because homosexuals have a 20 year shorter lifespan than normal people anyway.”
The problem is that often religious figures attempt to impose ideologies within legislation. For instance the Anti-Homosexuality bill that was in 2014 when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the nation’s harsh new anti-gay bill into law, he claimed the measure had been “provoked by arrogant and careless western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality.” What he failed to mention is that the legislation—which makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison in some cases—was itself largely due to Western interlopers, chief among them a radical American pastor named Scott Lively. There was and still is an entire syllabus that is centered on teaching children why being gay is bad in Uganda, even plays that are acted out in showing how “fortification” within the LGBTQ community is bad.
The reason why Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba’s rule in banning the pastor is so controversial is because it is a true test of African sovereignty from foreign *coughs European states* imposing these ideologies that have failed within their own nations. And further it is another beautiful step in eradicating the underlying homophobia and transphobia that continues to persist within the South African general society.
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