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
The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.
AY,
Ignore the man wielding the fat red pencil. We know what you’re saying.
With Bertha the cow. 👿
AY, your punishment is banishment to the far pasture. 😯
Paul,
http://www.thenewamerican.com
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Yes Annie…. Please bring the civility rules out…. Is there anything in the civility rules about misspelling…… If so…. I wonder what JTs going to do…. Will he be admonished by Paul….
Enquiring Minds want to know…..
Inquiring
annie – thanks for correcting AY. And I think it is time for you to bring out the civility rules again.
Quit equivocating.
annie – does no one read?? Many is a lot less than most but more that a couple. God, I feel like i’m teaching 7th graders.
Nein! Nicht sig hiel, Sieg Heil!
AY – they spelled it correctly in the headline of the article, some IT techie got it wrong.
So Paul is White, good looking he says and a follower of Nazism….. Hmmmmm….. I’m surprised that he hasn’t uttered Sig Hiel….. I bet he has white supremist garb all over his house….
“Stay above it”? Whoa that’s rich coming from someone who first said many homosexuals are pedophiles, when in reality they are the a minority of pedophiles. Then you bring in homosexuality and Naziism? Hmmmm.
Please.
The Daily Mail did an article where they pointed out all the typos and misspellings in an official memo that had been sent by the British government. In the article they had at least 5 typos and misspellings of their own. The comments section was a delight to read.
Lol…. That’s Baaaaaaaaahhhh…. I can’t imagine how one even would go about that…. But as a condition of bond…. He must stay away from the barnyards sheeple…… Moooooyaaaaaa…. I guess the sheep lacked capacity to consent…. While he was rejected flat out by the Cow….
Wasn’t it that Duck Dynasty guy that equated homosexuality with besitiality? I almost forgot about that.
AY,
An excerpt from that Breitbart article:
“You see, jurors were told the story of Paul Lovell who was spotted by a picnicking couple September 4, allegedly attempting to have intercourse with a sheep near the Tottenham Hotspur training ground in north London.”
I heard Lovell told the sheep he was attempting to have relations with: “I only have eyes for ewe.”
😉
I guess Paul knows Jacks and Jenny’s come in all sizes….
😳 Hope this one works.
Hot damn! Breitbart misspelled bestiality! :Oops:
Exporting the Anti-Gay Movement
How sexual minorities in Africa became collateral damage in the U.S. culture wars
Rev. Dr. Kapya Kaoma
(The Rev. Dr. Kapya Kaoma is an ordained Anglican priest, citizen of Zambia, and researcher on religion and sexuality for the Boston-based Political Research Associates. He is the author of the investigative report Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, & Homophobia, published by PRA in 2009. )
April 24, 2012
http://prospect.org/article/exporting-anti-gay-movement
Excerpt:
In October 2010, a banner headline ran on the front page of the Ugandan newspaper Rolling Stone: “100 Pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak.” Subheadings warned of these people’s dark designs: “We Shall Recruit 1,000,000 Kids by 2012,” and “Parents Now Face Heartbreaks as Homos Raid Schools.” One of the two men pictured on the front page was David Kato, an outspoken leader of Uganda’s small human-rights movement. Inside the newspaper, his name and home address, along with those of other LGBT Ugandans, were printed. The article called for the “homos” to be hanged.
Three months later, after numerous threats, Kato was bludgeoned to death in his Kampala home. Police said the motive was robbery, but human-rights advocates did not believe the official story. At Kato’s funeral, an Anglican priest condemned homosexuality. Kato’s death was international news, making him the highest-profile victim of the anti-gay hysteria that has enveloped much of sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade. Although U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined other Western diplomats in being openly critical of African political leaders who fail to defend the rights of their LGBT populations, the crisis afflicting sexual minorities on the continent has its origins in the United States. Pejorative attitudes toward LGBT people in Africa have long been widespread. But the recent upsurge in politicized homophobia has been inspired by right-wing American evangelicals who have exported U.S.–style culture-war politics.
The best-known example of these efforts is Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Introduced in the fall of 2009, the bill imposed the death penalty for certain homosexual acts and criminalized human-rights advocacy on behalf of sexual minorities. It grew directly out of a well-attended conference, the “Seminar on Exposing the Truth behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda,” that took place in the capital, Kampala, in March. To put on the conference, the Uganda-based Family Life Network, which is supported by U.S. Christian-right groups, teamed with two leading anti-gay activists from the States, Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively and Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay group Exodus International. The seminar attracted high-profile religious leaders, parliamentarians, police officers, teachers, and concerned parents. I videotaped the proceedings.
The marquee speaker was Lively, head of the anti-gay Abiding Truth Ministries in Massachusetts and author of The Pink Swastika, which claims that homosexuals invented Nazism and were instrumental in the Holocaust. Lively began his anti-gay campaigning in the early 1990s as communications director of the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), which sponsored a spate of ballot initiatives to deny civil rights and state benefits to LGBT people. The OCA warned of the alleged homosexual threat to children. Ballot Measure 9, which failed in 1992, would have added this text to the state’s constitution: “All governments in Oregon may not use their monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism. All levels of government, including public education systems, must assist in setting a standard for Oregon’s youth which recognizes that these behaviors are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse and they are to be discouraged and avoided.”
Lively told his Ugandan audience that a powerful global gay movement had now set its sights on Africa. The “gay agenda” unleashes epidemics of divorce, child abuse, and HIV/AIDS wherever it gains a foothold, he said. If you allow homosexuality, he said, “you can’t stop someone from molesting children or stop them from having sex with animals.” He also suggested that the Rwandan genocide was the handiwork of homosexuals.
Lively accompanied his fearmongering with an argument that has particular resonance in sub-Saharan Africa: that the spread of LGBT rights is a Western idea—a postcolonial plot to destroy traditional African culture. He spoke of “the people coming to Africa now” to promote human rights for LGBT people, saying, “Many of them are outright liars, and they are manipulating history.They are manipulating facts in order to push their political agenda.”
The idea that gay rights are not human rights was hardly a new one for Lively’s listeners. A year earlier, it had been put more clearly and succinctly by the most influential U.S. evangelical leader in Africa, Rick Warren, head of the Saddleback “megachurch” in California and author of the best-seller The Purpose-Driven Life. During a visit with political leaders in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, Warren had declared, “Homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right.”