You see, behind every obnoxious book is a secret gay author!
Dianetics? Richard Simmons.
Atlas Shrugged? J. Edgar Hoover.
Twilight? That would be Bruce Vilanch.
Jewel’s book of poetry? Wanda Sykes!
This is the world according to gay-obsessed Scott Lively, who’s most known around these parts as the man who went to Uganda and told an audience there, among other grotesque and dishonest things, that gays were responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, essentially handing David Bahati one of the proverbial guns he needed to get the genocide going. Now he’s popped up again, e-mailing a blogger named Benzion Chinn, who had been writing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to let him know that there’s a theory out there that maybe it was written by George Bernard Shaw! Here’s Lively’s e-mail:
At the Library of Congress is an obscure book by Samuel Igra which makes the case that “The Protocols…Zion” was actually written by George Bernard Shaw. I don’t remember the title, but I read a portion in DC when I was researching another book by Igra and I remember thinking at the time that his case seemed quite plausible, though I don’t remember the details now.
It is common knowledge that Shaw was a close friend of the homosexual poet Bruce Douglas, the “translator” of the Protocols.
Regards,
Dr. Scott Lively
He’s just sayin’! Here’s a thought, you know, maybe it was written by one of my super-homosexual boogeymen!
Chinn, of course, handily disposed of this notion after doing a bit of research on Lively’s obsession with blaming gay people for every evil that’s ever befallen the world:
Samuel Igra, Lively’s source, seems to have been one of the main originators of this Nazism and homosexuality link with his 1945 book, Germany’s National Vice. According to Igra, Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna and then in Munich from 1907-1914. (See Gregory Woods A History of Gay Literature: the Male Tradition pg. 251-53.) Obviously there were Nazis who were homosexual. The most famous example is Ernst Rohm of the SD. While an early member of the party, Rohm was killed off in the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. Considering the very real persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime, saying that Nazism was a homosexual movement (as opposed to individual Nazis being homosexual) strikes me as the height of perversity.
Bruce Douglas was the young lover of Oscar Wilde’s, whose father got into a libel suit with Wilde, which eventually brought about the downfall of Wilde in English society. Douglas did do one of the first English translations of the Protocols in 1919, nearly twenty years after it was first written. The Protocols came out of Russia, and while it was plagiarized from many sources, including one French anti-Semitic tract, it is clearly a product of reactionary Russian circles. Personally I find the idea that George Bernard Shaw would have written the Protocols to be offensive. I would have no problem accepting Shaw as an anti-Semite along the lines of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But to think that Shaw would have written such a piece of garbage as the Protocols, boggles the mind. If Shaw had wanted to write a book about Jews plotting to rule the world, this book would have been a model of wit and would have me convinced to become an Elder.
Heh. And what is Chinn’s expertise? Oh, just Jewish History. In other words, Chinn sort of knows what he’s talking about.
So anyway, that happened.
But wait, there’s more! Lively got a bur in his britches over Chinn reprinting the e-mail on his blog and sent another e-mail, wherein he called the (conservative!) Jewish History teacher an anti-Semite! Really. No, seriously, really. You cannot make this stuff up:
Dear Mr. Chinn,
I offered privately what I thought would be a helpful research tip regarding a source you were not likely to have discovered, not a personal conviction to be publicly ridiculed. It was a friendly gesture to a stranger. Your incivility is unbecoming a man of letters.
If anti-Semitism is the dehumanization of people because of their beliefs and values, I’m sorry to say you have become your own case-in-point.
It’s very strange, though, that Lively would be bothered by this. He has, after all, made a career based on just cold making things up about gay people in order to make us look like murderous maniacs, pedophiles and what-have-you. This fits right in with his pattern.
You really should go read Chinn’s entire response to this. It’s fair to say that there are things in there that, in another situation, I would disagree with fervently. Bear in mind that this is a conversation between a conservative religious person and an irrational, insane,and most importantly, malevolent homophobe. I’m willing to grant that there is a difference. But Chinn seems like an honest broker. Not so, Mr. Lively.
So anyway, there you have it. If you’re interested, the discourse just keeps going and going… Somewhere in the second link, Lively tries to defend his work in Uganda, but you know, we have the video, and it says otherwise. As I said before, it’s a discourse between a conservative Jewish man who I could spend hours debating (but will not, because there comes a point when it’s boring) and the extremely disturbed, delusional homophobe Scott Lively. So it gets a bit tiresome.
I think we’ve covered the parts of this that are important.
Left Behind series? Ghostwritten by RuPaul, but I’m sure you figured that…
(h/t Wendy Leigh for tipping me off to this)
A key player in Uganda’s antigay genocide bill is also Uganda’s envoy to Hollywood and the U.S. Christian Right.
