Make America Straight Again

Make America Straight Again (abbreviated MASA) is an anti-LGBT conference that was held by the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Cult Movement (NIFB) from June 14-16, 2019. Pretty disgustingly, it is spitefully being held during pride weekFile:Wikipedia's W.svg near the anniversary of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, in which 50 people were killed at the Pulse Nightclub, an LGBT bar in Orlando, Florida. The conference is being held at Revival Baptist Church in Clermont, a nearby town, though the exact itinerary of the event is unknown.[1] Conference topics include (much in the same vein as the Westboro Baptist Church before it) celebrating the murder of homosexuals and calling for the death penalty to be given to all homosexual people by governments. Lovely.

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Background and promotion

The NIFB is a fundamentalist conglomeration (but totally not a denomination) of churches across the United States,[2] similar to the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Movement but actually a different organization.[3]

Sometime in May 2019, a promotional video for the conference was released onto Pastor Tommy McMurtry's YouTube channel. The video included a summary of the conference by Pastor Patrick Boyle, and ended with several clips of vile anti-LGBT preaching from NIFB-affiliated pastors who would be attending the conference.[4]

The NIFB had been very secretive about the exact itinerary of the conference "due to safety concerns",[5] but we do know some things for sure. Several notorious asshole bigots with no sense of morality fundamentalist pastors, including Steven Anderson, Roger Jimenez, Aaron Thompson, and Tommy McMurtry, would attend the conference.

Pastor Boyle has stated that he expected protests at the conference, but that that would not change any of his bigoted and self-admittedly hateful views.[6] The YouTuber Mr. Atheist has recommended for people to protest against the conference with police protection, since NIFB adherents "are vocal regarding their ownership of weapons and ammunition."

Ironically, Pastor Boyle, the host of the event, contacted the local sheriff's department in Clermont, Florida asking for police protection himself at the conference, and their Lt. John Herrell responded:[5]

It appears as though the organization disparages homosexuals and will be targeting them during the group's conference this week. Furthermore, the fact that the timing of this conference coincides with the three-year anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in nearby Orlando did not go unnoticed by our staff. We felt as though the timing of the conference is in poor taste and we chose not to allow the group to hire our deputies.

Conference

The first night of the conference was livestreamed on the YouTube channel "Red Hot Preaching Conference" for several hours on June 14. The stream was reported by many of Mr. Atheist's fans, and was eventually taken down by YouTube staff due to violation of their hate speech policy.[7] Some channel with the name "Christian Verity" (possibly affiliated with the Verity Baptist Church but having no content, channel started 2013), however, has commented on another video that "they're still there preaching and filming. the sermons will be distributed and then mass uploaded for the world to see... hahahahahahahahaha....". So a clone may yet be uploaded to that channel.[8]

Reactions

Mr. Atheist

The conference, as well as the NIFB movement itself, gained massive attention from LGBT rights activists when the popular YouTuber Mr. Atheist made several videos covering the conference. The first of these videos that Mr. Atheist released called to YouTube staff for the deletion of the promotional YouTube video for the conference, because it violated YouTube's terms of service due to containing hate speech (one of the preachers in the video called for capital punishment of all homosexual people).[9] Mr. Atheist was quite successful, since the video was literally taken down the day after.

Pastor Tommy McMurtry of NIFB-affiliated Liberty Baptist Church posted a response video to the takedown, calling Mr. Atheist out personally, but instead slurring him as "Mr. Pumpkin" ("because a pumpkin is the biggest fruit on the planet". In McMurtry's response, he recognizes that Mr. Atheist identifies as pansexual. On that topic, McMurtry says earlier in the video that he doesn't know what pansexuality is, but later in the same video, implies that someone who is pansexual "doesn't even know whether he's a guy or a girl." McMurtry concludes that Mr. Atheist has absolutely no power over the NIFB.[10]

Mr. Atheist made another video on the topic of the NIFB, this time responding to McMurtry's video. Because McMurtry underestimated Mr. Atheist's power, Mr. Atheist presents his plan to his fans in this response to trick search engines into showing results for Mr. Atheist's content rather than McMurtry's when his own name and church are searched for. To aid in this plan, Mr. Atheist bought the website tommymcmurtry.com, which Tommy McMurtry himself never bothered to do for some reason, and filled it with pumpkin-themed erotic art (thus embracing what was originally an insult to him).

Mr. Atheist's fans and supporters of the anti-NIFB movement have been using pumpkin emojis on Twitter, uploading pumpkin-themed videos, and using the slogan "I'm not saying that Pastor Tommy McMurtry is sexually attracted to pumpkins; I'm just saying, we don't really know."

Several other hateful videos and mirrors of such videos by the NIFB have been also spotted and taken down. Tommy McMurtry's YouTube channel is still currently up, but was abandoned by McMurtry himself, after claiming that Internet users have no power over him.

gollark: I don't know. Nobody will particularly care.
gollark: ZetaCraft would work as a name, and is kind of similar but a bit different to the current one.
gollark: There are 25 or so of them, we're in no danger of running out.
gollark: Or [another Greek letter]space, even.
gollark: xkcd, qntm, 2b2t, whatever.

References
  1. http://nifbcult.com/masa-conference-re-victimizes-pulse-nightclub-tragedy/
  2. https://www.thenewifb.com/what-is-the-new-ifb
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwmbAFNZ5lI
  4. http://nifbcult.com/make-america-straight-again-conference/
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ub61taSswA
  6. https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2019/06/11/make-america-straight-again-conference
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0c5-c7tQCU
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeMbGwopZSI
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4rgRBW1nvA
  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QifobHPNV58
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