The eldest children of vehemently anti-LGBTQ+ pastor Steven Anderson have spoken out with allegations of years of domestic violence by their father and his wife, Zsuzsanna. In a series of interviews with Dead Domain, a trans YouTuber, Steven Anderson’s children paint a traumatic picture of their childhood. The interviews detail punishments that could be defined as extreme. Steven Anderson is the self-appointed leader of the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (NIFB) sect. For more than a decade, he has advocated the execution of gay people, and his hateful, violent rhetoric has seen him banned from multiple countries, including the U.K., Ireland and Botswana. Anderson garnered national attention in 2009 for a sermon called “Why I Hate Barack Obama,” in which he exhorted his congregation to pray for the president’s death. The day after the sermon, ABC News reported that a parishioner named Christopher Broughton brought an AR-15 and handgun to an event where President Obama was addressing a veterans group. Anderson often refers to LGBTQ+ people in dehumanizing, pejorative terms like “sodomites” and “reprobates.” In 2014, he delivered a sermon just before World AIDS Day called “AIDS: The Judgment of God.” He claimed the cure for AIDS could be found in the biblical book of Leviticus, which calls for men who have sex with men to be put to death. Anderson said: “We can have an AIDS-free world by Christmas. Okay, it wouldn’t be totally AIDS free, but we’d be like 90-some percent AIDS-free by Christmas if we follow this.” He celebrated the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, saying that there were “50 less pedophiles in this world.” Anderson has spent much of the last decade leading and building the NIFB. He grew a fellowship of pastors including Jonathan Shelley of Stedfast Baptist, Aaron Thompson of Sure Foundation Baptist and Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church, all of whom espouse his antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. In 2019 this group held a conference called Make America Straight Again. Three of Anderson’s children have come forward to claim that their parents abused them. Their stories share many similarities, including beatings with an electrical cord and a pervasive environment of emotional manipulation and control where they were forced to hide the truth about the violence in the household. In an interview with Dead Domain posted Sept. 26, Miriam Anderson, 17, described a cycle of physical and psychological abuse from both parents. Currently classified by police as a runaway until her 18th birthday, Miriam is the most recent of Anderson’s children to speak about alleged domestic abuse. Miriam has said her memories of violence go back as far as she can remember.
via splcenter: PASTOR WHO CALLED FOR EXECUTION OF GAY PEOPLE ACCUSED BY HIS CHILDREN OF ABUSE