Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
Scott Lively, the head of Abiding Truth Ministries, is a resident of Springfield, Massachusetts. Lively is a controversial evangelical pastor known for having a homophobic agenda. He “specializes in stirring up anti-gay feeling around the globe.” When he was a young man, Lively said he had a “live and let live” attitude toward gays. Once a liberal, he admits that he was an alcoholic and a drug addict until he “got saved” in 1986. He says that since then his “focus has been to restore a biblical focus with regards to marriage and sexuality.”
Jack Rodolico (Latitude News) says that after coming to Christ, Lively began to view social issues “from God’s perspective”—and his “faith began to fuel the fire of his activism.” According to a report in the National Journal, “Lively became a lawyer, author, and advocate in pursuit of the cause.” In 1992, Lively got involved in Oregon’s Ballot Measure 9. That measure “would have amended the Oregon Constitution to summarily recognize ‘homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism as abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.’” Rodico reported that Oregon voters denied Lively and his anti-gay colleagues a victory—but only after “an ugly political battle ensued.” Rodico said that the defeat left a lasting impression on Lively.
BALLOT MEASURE 9
About a decade ago, Lively gave up on the United States “when one of his cases (challenging an antidiscrimination law) failed.” Lively said, “I began shifting my emphasis, which is going to the other countries in the world that are still culturally conservative to warn them about how the Left has advanced its agenda in the U.S., Canada, and Europe—and to help put barriers in place. And the goal is to build a consensus of moral countries to actually roll back the leftist agenda in my country.”
According to Mariah Blake (Mother Jones), Lively first visited the country of Uganda in 2002. Blake said that Lively “has cultivated ties to influential politicians and religious leaders at the forefront of the nation’s anti-gay crusade.”
Blake:
Just before the first draft of Uganda’s anti-gay bill began circulating in April 2009, Lively traveled to Kampala and gave lengthy presentations to members of Uganda’s parliament and cabinet, which laid out the argument that the nation’s president and lawmakers would later use to justify Uganda’s draconian anti-gay crackdown—namely that Western agitators were trying to unravel Uganda’s social fabric by spreading “the disease” of homosexuality to children. “They’re looking for other people to be able to prey upon,” Lively said, according to video footage. “When they see a child that’s from a broken home it’s like they have a flashing neon sign over their head.”
Alex Seitz-Wald (National Journal) said that Lively and a small band of “incredibly influential” American activists “spend their time crisscrossing the globe to meet with foreign lawmakers, deliver speeches, make allies, cut checks, and otherwise foment a backlash against the so-called international gay-rights agenda…” Seitz-Wald says that—in a large part of the world—they’re winning. Seitz-Wald wrote that in the month of December 2013 alone India’s Supreme Court “re-criminalized homosexuality, Nigeria outlawed LGBT advocacy (gay sex was already punishable by up to 14 years in prison), and Uganda passed a watered-down version of its infamous ‘kill the gays’ bill, which allows for life prison terms—if not the death penalty—for ‘aggravated homosexuality.’”
Mariah Blake wrote that when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the new harsh anti-gay bill into law in late February, he said that 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.” She said that what Museveni “failed to mention” was that the legislation itself was “largely due to Western interlopers, chief among them a radical American pastor named Scott Lively.”
Blake—like Seitz-Wald—reports that Scott Lively isn’t the only US evangelical “who has fanned the flames of anti-gay sentiment in Uganda.” She says that as the anti-gay groups continue to lose ground at home, religious conservatives are increasingly turning “their attention to Africa. And Uganda, with its large Christian population, has been particularly fertile ground for their crusade.”
In The Uganda Anti-Gay Bill’s U.S. Roots, Michelle Goldberg writes about Uganda being an African country “where American-style evangelical Christianity is exploding.” Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, has reported that the sponsor of the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill is David Bahati—the secretary of the Uganda branch of The Family…and that the bill’s champion C. Martin Ssempa “was a protégé of Rick Warren.” Goldberg added that Stephen Langa, a major anti-gay activist, is the head of Uganda’s Family Life Network, which happens to be “an affiliate of the Phoenix-based group Disciple Nations Alliance.” Note: The Family, a secretive American evangelical organization, has a number of powerful and influential members—including “Sens. James Inhofe, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn.”
Goldberg says that American Christians never urged their counterparts in Uganda “to try to institute the death penalty for homosexuality.” Still, she notes that the “ideology underlying the bill comes from American conservatives.” She adds, “It is Americans who have elaborated a vision of homosexuality as a satanic global conspiracy bent on destroying society’s foundations, akin to the Jewish octopus in classic anti-Semitic narratives.” Goldberg also reports that according to Warren Throckmorton—“an evangelical psychology professor once associated with the ex-gay movement”—anti-gay activists in Uganda “cite materials by Scott Lively and Paul Cameron, two of the fiercest American opponents of the so-called homosexual agenda.”
Scott Lively on how homosexuals supposedly prey on children
SOURCES
Barney Frank: ‘Repudiated’ U.S. ‘hatemongers’ are promoting anti-gay laws in Uganda (Raw Story)
The painful case of Pastor Scott Lively, homophobe to the world (Washington Post)
Evangelicals Are Winning the Gay Marriage Fight–in Africa and Russia: Evangelical advocates, having failed here, are finding friendlier audiences all over the world. (National Journal)
The Crusader (Boston Magazine)
Uganda’s anti-gay bill refocuses attention on US evangelical influence: Uganda’s President Museveni signed into law Monday a bill that criminalizes homosexuality with life sentences and punishes efforts to raise or discuss gay issues. (Christian Science Monitor)
U.S. exporting homophobia to Uganda: And debate in Uganda divides evangelicals back in U.S. (Latitude News)
Scott Lively & Rick Warren: The PR Campaign to Whitewash the Right’s Anti-Gay Uganda History (Political Research Associates)
The Uganda Anti-Gay Bill’s U.S. Roots (The Daily Beast)
U.S. evangelicals on the defense over Uganda’s new Anti-Homosexuality Act (Religion News Service)
~ Submitted by Elaine Magliaro
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