Scott Lively - the Face of Ant-gay Hate

Lively with fellow liar and hate merchant, Peter LaBarbera

There are many in the professional Christian class who disseminate anti-gay hate and lies on literally a daily basis, but few - other than perhaps Paul Cameron - rise to the level of Scott Lively who in his thoroughly debunked "Pink Swastika" maintains that gays were the cause of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.  More recently, Lively has taken his message of lies and hatred to Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia, with his most pernicious work having taken place in Uganda where Lively played a large role in causing the hysteria behind that nation's newly enacted draconian anti-gay law.  Mother Jones offers a look at Lively and his anti-gay animus.  Here are highlights:

In late February, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the nation's harsh new anti-gay bill into law, he claimed 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." What he failed to mention is that the legislation—which makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison in some cases—was itself largely due to Western interlopers, chief among them a radical American pastor named Scott Lively.

Lively, a 56-year-old Massachusetts native, specializes in stirring up anti-gay feeling around the globe. In Uganda, which he first visited in 2002, he has cultivated ties to influential politicians and religious leaders at the forefront of the nation's anti-gay crusade. 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."

Lively is not the only US evangelical who has fanned the flames of anti-gay sentiment in Uganda. As they lose ground at home, where public opinion and law are rapidly shifting in favor of gay equality, religious conservatives have increasingly turned their attention to Africa. And Uganda, with its large Christian population, has been particularly fertile ground for their crusade. Journalist (and past Mother Jones contributor) Jeff Sharlet has reported at length on the Family, a politically connected US-based ministry, which promotes hard-line social policies in the East African nation.

But, according to Ugandan gay rights activists, Lively has played an unparalleled role in fostering the climate of hate that gave rise to Uganda's anti-gay law. "The bill is essentially his creation," says Frank Mugisha, director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a coalition of gay rights organizations. Mugisha's group has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in US federal court, accusing Lively of international crimes against humanity on the grounds that he and his Ugandan allies allegedly conspired to deprive gay Ugandans of basic human rights.

Lively has an unusual history for a family-values crusader. A former alcoholic, he spent his late teens and 20s drifting around the country, occasionally sleeping under bridges and begging for spare change. After finding God in a Portland, Oregon, treatment center in the mid-1980s, he joined a conservative evangelical church and took a job as communications director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which was loosely affiliated with the then powerful Christian Coalition and was deploying radical tactics to fight abortion and the gay rights movement. In 1992, OCA introduced a ballot initiative with the first faint outlines of the legislative strategy Lively would later deploy abroad. 

Measure 9, as it was known, barred the state government from offering any "special rights" to gays or "promoting" homosexuality. It also required public schools to treat "homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism" as "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse." The backlash was fierce. Opponents likened Lively and his colleagues to Nazis and lobbed bricks wrapped in swastika flags through the windows of businesses supporting the measure. OCA's aggressive campaign, likening gays to pedophiles, was also blamed for a steep uptick in gay hate crimes.

In 1995, he coauthored what would become his signature book, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. It argued that gay elements in the Nazi regime tried to wipe out the Jews because their religion condemned homosexuality. And it claimed that gays intentionally spread immorality and corruption so others were "less likely to oppose homosexuality on moral grounds."

Lively's theories have also gained currency in foreign countries, including former Soviet republics, where he has helped advance anti-gay legislation. But nowhere has his influence been more keenly felt than in Uganda. During his first visit there in 2002, he spoke at an anti-pornography conference and warned participants that Western cultural Marxists, backed by liberals (such as George Soros), were trying to erode Uganda's independence by attacking family values—a message that played on lingering colonial-era resentments. One of their core tactics, Lively argued, was deploying homosexuals to infiltrate Ugandan society.

At one point, he scrawled "Causes and Types of Homosexual Dysfunction" across the top of a white board and, beneath this, drew a continuum with what he claimed were the various types of gay men. On one extreme sat the transsexuals and transvestites; on the other were what Lively called the "super machos" and "monsters." "The Nazis were super machos," he said. "You also see them in prisons…brutish, brutish, animalistic, men that want to hurt other people…men having sex with boys and other men, usually in some sort of aggressive way."  

Moving on to "the monsters," Lively continued, "They are so far from normalcy that they're killers. They're serial killers, mass murderers. They're sociopaths. There's no mercy at all, there's no nurturing, no caring about anybody else…This is the kind of person it takes to run a gas chamber. " He added that the genocide in neighboring Rwanda "probably involved these guys." 

It is a long article and deserves a full read if one is to understand just how sick and dishonest Lively and his cohorts are in their anti-gay jihad.   In my view, Lively is mentally ill and belongs in an insane asylum rather than on the lose disseminating hate and lies.