Wednesday marked the third anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, where a gunman shot and killed 49 people and wounded another 58 at a gay dance club in Orlando, Florida.
The anniversary was marked with solemn remembrances, including a declaration from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ordered the state’s flags to be lowered to half-staff. A movement by political leaders in the state legislature is also hoping to make the site a national landmark memorial, ABC News reported.
But while some remember and mourn the individuals whose lives were lost or severely altered that day, others are marking the occasion with a disgusting display of celebration.
A group calling themselves the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church is hosting a “Make America Straight Again” conference in Orlando this Friday, The Friendly Atheist reported. Their choice of venue and timing for the event doesn’t seem accidental, especially when you consider who is invited to speak at the anti-LGBTQ conference.
The list of speakers includes Tommy McMurtry, who has advocated in the past putting gay people “six feet under.” McMurtry said he’s hopeful people come to protest the event (even though the venue has not yet been revealed by organizers) because then they can use the occasion to possibly incite violence from picketers, resulting in them justifying murdering members of the LGBTQ community.
“Pray that if they do any protests, that it gets violent,” McMurtry said. “They have ‘Stand Your Ground’ in Florida. So we’re allowed to fight back. So… I say ‘bring it!'”
There’s also Roger Jimenez, a pastor who has said the worst thing about the shooting was that the assailant “didn’t finish the job.” Jimenez has also stated he hopes one day that the government will round-up LGBTQ people, “put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.”
In addition to Jimenez and McMurtry, Steven Anderson will be speaking at the event, too. Anderson openly celebrated when the shooting in Orlando took place three years ago, proclaiming that there were “50 less pedophiles in this world.”
“The bad news is a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive, so they’re going to continue to molest children and recruit children into their filthy homosexual lifestyle,” Anderson said immediately after the Pulse shooting.
Anderson’s church, Faithful Word Baptist Church out of Tempe, Arizona, is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group to do its ardent belief that homosexuals (and other members of the LGBTQ community) should be put to death.
Anderson’s bigotry is so extreme that he’s actually banned from travel to several European countries. He’s said in the past that, in a hypothetical situation where a button might exist that would kill everyone in the LGBTQ community instantly, he’d push said button “until it breaks.”
Featured image via YouTube screen grab
