Steven L. Anderson, pastor at Faithful
Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday applauded a mass
shooting in Orlando that left 50 people dead and 53 wounded.
Described as the deadliest mass
shooting in U.S. history, a lone gunman with possible ties to ISIS
attacked a gay nightclub.
(Related: 50
killed in Orlando gay nightclub; worst mass shooting in U.S.
History.)
In a video posted Sunday, Anderson
cheered the massacre, saying that the only down side was that more
people did not die.
“These homosexuals are a bunch of
perverts and pedophiles, that’s who was a victim here, a bunch of
disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar,” Anderson
said. “The good news is that at least fifty of these pedophiles
are not going to be harming children anymore. The bad news is that a
lot of the homos in the bar are still alive, so they’re going to
continue to molest children and recruit people into their filthy
homosexual lifestyle.”
Anderson added that he does not approve
of the gunman's actions because the victims should have been
“executed by a righteous government.”
“These people all should have been
killed anyway. But they should have been killed through the proper
channels, as in, they should've been executed by a righteous
government,” Anderson said.
Anderson made headlines in 2014 when he
told his congregation that AIDS was God's judgment on gays. “[I]f
you execute the homos like God recommends, you wouldn't have all this
AIDS running rampant,” he said at the time.
Anderson added that Sunday's victims
were already facing an early death from AIDS.