Scott Lively is one disturbed man. He’s apparently stung by the fact that Sexual Minorities Uganda and the Center for Constitutional Rights are suing him for human rights offenses tied to his role in inciting hatred against gay people, hatred which gave birth to the now infamous “Kill the Gays” bill being pushed in Uganda. However, though he may be stung, that’s not stopping him from grabbing a shovel and digging his hole deeper. Right Wing Watch has the audio and transcript from Lively’s recent interview on the Janet Mefferd show, where he again advocated either forced therapy or prison for gays:
Mefferd: When you go back to 2009 and what you actually said during the conference, was there anything that you did say at that time that gave them actual fodder for screaming and yelling, do you regret anything you said—
Lively: No, no, no.
Mefferd: Or do you stand by what you said?
Lively: First of all as regards to the bill, the bill hadn’t been written yet, I had an opportunity, I spoke to members of the Ugandan Parliament in their assembly hall, and there was several other speakers and the minister of ethics and integrity was there and he made a few comments. My suggestion was, rather than focusing on punishment, you should focus on therapy. I gave my own personal testimony, before I became a Christian, an instrumental factor was I got arrested for drunk driving and they gave me the option in Oregon of taking diversion, as they called it, or losing my license and going to jail. I chose the therapy option, it was one of the best things that ever happened, it was in that rehab center that I got down on my knees and surrendered my life to Christ, so I gave that as my testimony to the Ugandans saying this is the model you should follow, you could be the first country in the world to offer this as a standard, a national standard, that we want to help people overcome this sin.
First of all, no one alive or dead can prove that homosexuality is a “sin.” But more than that, it’s sick that he thinks his drunk driving conversion experience is relatable to happy, healthy gay people simply living their lives. And even more than that, as we all know, there is no scientific evidence that so-called “ex-gay” therapy is effective, and people in those programs don’t actually end up changing their sexual orientations. Therefore, his advocacy of prison as the second choice would end up being the de facto result of his grand plan. Somehow, I don’t think that bothers him.
There’s much more at the Right Wing Watch link, including Lively again claiming that the existence of homosexuality in Uganda is somehow tied to George Soros and infiltration from the United States, a fever dream that can only come out of the sort of disturbed mind of a man who believes that the Holocaust was primarily conducted by gay people.
On Saturday, I repeatedly confronted Holocaust revisionist and anti-gay activist Scott Lively during his lecture at his Draper Park Christian Church in Oklahoma City.
For those unfamiliar with Lively, he founded Abiding Truth Ministries, which was labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is author of the heinous book, The Pink Swastika, that blames the Holocaust on gay men. He claims that people are gay because they are molested and promotes the discredited idea that homosexuals recruit children. His latest book, Redeeming the Rainbow, quotes disgraced researcher Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute. He is considered responsible for fostering a climate of hate in Uganda that led to the infamous Kill the Gays bill.
There were 33 people attending his seminar at the suburban Oklahoma City church. My purpose for going was to monitor his talk and confront his lies. This was not easy, because this hardcore fundie church was hostile territory. There was also a police officer on-hand, which made confronting Lively a dicey task. The last thing I needed was to leave the talk in handcuffs, which would have played to Lively’s bogus narrative that he is a Christian martyr besieged by homosexuals.
My trip inside the Lion’s Den was the final action taken in this city by LGBT advocates and their allies. On Thursday, we held a press conference that was covered by the local newspaper, The Daily Oklahoman. On Friday, I participated in a live-audience edition of Oklahoma: Inside Out called “Speaking Only The Truth,” hosted by the Cimarron Alliance’s amazing Executive Director Scott Hamilton.
In the following audio clip, you will hear me repeatedly confront the lies of Scott Lively. There will be numerous instances where you will beg me to speak out, but I was unable to do so. It is critical that people understand that this was not a debate. It was a lecture by Lively, which made speaking out incredibly difficult. I had to look for openings where I could interject without being ejected or arrested. The civil, but glowering, crowd did not make the task any easier. Nevertheless, Truth Wins Out was there on the scene to ensure that Lively would not be able to spew lies without opposition.
At the moment, I am traveling in the heartland so I cannot provide a specific time code for our verbal tussle, nor give an in-depth analysis of his screed. That will come when I get to a proper desk in which I can write more. In the meantime, I have provided the audio of his talk and our sparring for those who are interested.
Yesterday, Scott Hamilton of the Cimarron Alliance did a terrific job hosting a press conference in Oklahoma City with national implications. We were speaking out against despicable holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, who runs Abiding Truth ministries, an official Southern Poverty Law Center hate group. He is also the author of the Pink Swastika. Our press conference was covered by Carla Hinton of the Daily Oklahoman:
The Rev. Scott Hamilton, executive director of the Cimarron Alliance, held a news conference Thursday in which he and a local church pastor, a Muslim civil rights group leader and others voiced opposition to author Scott Lively’s planned visit to Draper Park Christian Church, 8500 S Walker. The news conference was held at Church of the Open Arms, 3131 N Pennsylvania.
Hamilton said coalition members think Lively spreads hate and untruths by espousing themes in a book Lively co-authored called “The Pink Swastika.” The coalition characterized Lively as a Holocaust revisionist who has been placed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups.
“This book lays squarely at the feet of gay people the atrocities of the Holocaust,” Hamilton said.
Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, also spoke out against Lively. He applauded the coalition’s efforts to hold Draper Park Christian Church accountable for bringing Lively to Oklahoma City. Truth Wins Out is a Vermont-based nonprofit organization that aims to fight anti-gay religious extremism.
“This is not Christianity, it’s insanity. It’s not faith, it’s folly. It’s not history, it’s a hoax,” he said.
Here is a video of the press conference that I was honored to be a part of (for those interested I speak at 13:25):
Tonight, we will fight back against Lively again. If you are in the Oklahoma City area, please join us:
What: Live-Audience edition of Oklahoma: Inside Out called “Speaking Only The Truth”
When: Friday, April 27, 7-8:30 P.M.
Who: Scott J. Hamilton, Cimarron Alliance, show host
Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out
Michael Kornblit, author of Until We Meet Again: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Holocaust
Pastor Neill Spurgeon, an evangelical minister who suffered at the hands of the “ex-gay” industry and today suffers PTST as a result
Elevating Unity and Love Over Divisiveness and Hate is the Goal of Diverse Coalition of Local Faith Leaders, Community Advocates, and Experts
What: A diverse coalition of local faith leaders, community advocates, and national experts will hold a press conference on Thursday, April 26 to spotlight the hateful and divisive career of Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, author of the discredited book The Pink Swastika, which blames the Holocaust on gay people. The coaltion was compelled to mobilize and speak out after Oklahoma City’s Draper Park Christian Church unwisely invited Lively to preach to the congregation on April 27-29. Lively’s ministry, Abiding Truth is recognized as an official hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Elevating unity and love over divisiveness and hate is our goal,” said Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen, who will speak at the press conference. “It is critical that we put a bright spotlight on Scott Lively’s reprehensible record so people understand that he is a Holocaust revisionist. Far from being the moral leader that he presents himself to be, Lively is notorious and widely discredited for cynically twisting one of the world’s most horrific historical events for political gain.”
Where: Church of the Open Arms, 3131 N. Penn, Oklahoma City
When: Thursday, April 26, 1:30 p.m.
Who: Rev. Dr. Kathy McCallie, the open-and-affirming faith community
Scott J. Hamilton, Cimarron Alliance
Nathaniel Batchelder, Central Oklahoma Human Rights Alliance
Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out
Additional Speakers TBA
Additionally, there will be an open community meeting broadcast live from Church of the Open Arms.
What: Live-Audience edition of Oklahoma: Inside Out called “Speaking Only The Truth”
When: Friday, April 27, 7-8:30 P.M.
Who: Scott J. Hamilton, Cimarron Alliance, show host
Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out
Michael Kornblit, author of Until We Meet Again: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Holocaust
Pastor Neill Spurgeon, an evangelical minister who suffered at the hands of the “ex-gay” industry and today suffers PTST as a result
There will also be a time of reflective prayer:
What: Supportive churches will have their doors open for a time of personal prayer; individuals are asked to reflect on the importance of truth.
When: Saturday, April 28, 9AM-Noon
Background: Lively first came into the public eye twenty years ago in Oregon as an activist in the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which worked to pass anti-gay laws. Lively, a “Holocaust revisionist,” co-authored The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party in 2002. According to the authors:
“The Pink Swastika will show that there was far more brutality, torture, and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi deviants and homosexuals than there ever was against homosexuals.”
In February 2009, Lively took his teachings to Family Life Network (FLN) in Uganda. For three days he exploited Ugandan fears with his outlandish lies: gays are child molesters, they recruit children, they were Hitler’s henchmen in the Holocaust because “gay men are exceptionally brutal and savage,” their intention is to overtake society and destroy the family, and the only hope (besides imprisonment) is to get them into conversion facilities to make them straight. Within one month of the conference, FLN was quoting Lively’s work and calling for mass arrests of gay and transgender people. The very next month Ugandan Parliament leader, David Bahati, introduced a bill to strengthen Uganda’s law against homosexuality to include arrest and even death.
Lively is currently active in Eastern Europe, Moldova, and Russia bringing them the same strain of anti-gay teaching he once exported to Uganda.
Last week, Republican U.S. House Speaker John Boehner appointed Dr. Robert George — co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the National Organization for Marriage — to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). George’s two-year appointment that comes with a taxpayer-funded federal salary.
GLAAD’s newly-launched Commentator Accountability Project – which aims to unmask the extremist views of anti-LGBT activists frequently consulted and quoted by the media – names George as one of the 36 homophobes most often cited in news reports. George appears on the list alongside other famously outspoken bigots like Scott Lively, Tony Perkins, Alan Chambers, Matt Barber, Peter LaBarbera, and NOM’s own Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher.
For those of you who may not be familiar with him, Dr. George is an anti-LGBT extremist who once described being gay as “beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures” and said that committed same-sex relationships have “no intelligible basis in them for the norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and the pledge of permanence.” The organization that he co-founded, the National Organization for Marriage, is the nation’s foremost opponent of marriage equality, fighting to preserve the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on the federal level and pushing constitutional marriage discrimination amendments in the states.
NOM was disgraced earlier this week when internal documents revealed that the group engages in disrespectful and unsavory race-baiting tactics in its fight against marriage equality. The confidential memos asserted that NOM’s strategic goal is to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” and “make opposition to gay marriage an identity marker” among young Latinos, “a badge of youth rebellion to conformist association to the bad side of ‘Anglo’ culture” and “a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”
Last year, Speaker Boehner and House Republicans decided to defend DOMA themselves after President Obama’s Justice Department halted its defense, citing the law’s unconstitutionality. Boehner hired a team of private attorneys and committed to spend as much as $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars to defend the discriminatory measure in court.
By appointing an extremist like Robert George, Speaker Boehner is again using taxpayer funds to further an aggressively anti-gay social agenda. This stunt makes it clear that the USCIRF is the equivalent of a kangaroo court intent upon casting victimizers as victims. It is utterly farcical that Robert George — a man who has dedicated his life to curtailing liberties and limiting the freedoms of those who hold different beliefs — would be named to a commission that oversees liberty. But given George’s demonization of LGBT people and his group’s appalling use of racial politics, Boehner’s appointment may ultimately backfire with Latino and African American voters.
Scott Lively, one of the most vicious anti-gay activists in the United States, is currently the subject of a lawsuit concerning his involvement in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill. He, of course, claims complete innocence, as Religious Right figures tend to do when called on their insipid activities abroad. Lively’s strange fear and hatred of gay people has been well documented, but it appears that he’s really bought into the same fantasy-land lies that African despots use to engender hatred against the gay community, lies which deflect attention from the actual problems of poverty, disease, hunger and economic disenfranchisement in those nations, problems which are often inflicted by their own governments. Scott Lively went on the radio show of another head-in-the-clouds conspiracy theorist and hatemonger, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association hate group, to explain how all this gayness came to Uganda in the first place. Get ready for some Grade A Black Helicopter content, folks:
Uganda, in the 1990s, entered into an incredible Christian revival and, as a result of that revival, Christian values were just infusing the whole society and they went from having the highest level of AIDS in Africa to the lowest through the promotion of abstinence and fidelity in marriage, you know, the core Christian values about sexuality.
Because of that, that represents a huge threat to the globalists who use the sexual revolution and the whole Planned Parenthood Federation and the global homosexual movement, they use all those components are a population control method as they gather more and more power for themselves.
So what Uganda did represented a major threat to them, so they began infiltrating the country. George Soros, for example, I don’t know what stage of the process, but he went in like he always does, bought media and set up grassroots activist groups. And then, starting in the late 90′s, early 2000′s they started, these infiltrators, starting introducing pornography into this very conservative society.
And so, in 2002, to combat this sort of threat to the Ugandan culture, the government held a conference against pornography and obscenity. I had the privilege of being the keynote speaker at the conference – the Lord really had orchestrated this because I knew how this was happening; I knew who was doing this and what it’s all about, so I was able to just lay it out. I said this is who’s doing it, this is what’s going to happen next, and you need to organize in your society to stop this group of people from homosexualizing your society.
Yes. He believes that George Soros was really freaked out that people were not dying of quite so much AIDS, so he sent an army of porn and gays into Uganda. Granted, many wingnuts view George Soros as some sort of Goliath-sized boogeyman, but most couldn’t pick him out of a crowd if their lives depended on it. These are REALLY SPECIFIC BELIEFS, Scott! It’s sad and creepy to see a man so unhinged by fear and hatred, but it’s scary when you realize that his lies, distortions and general contempt for an entire minority group actually has currency in other, less connected parts of the world.
Anyway, the question in the post title stands: don’t you just hate it when George Soros sends you all kinds of porn just to further his insidious agenda? All together, one big “LOL” at Scott Lively.
Note: it’s worth pointing out that the fundamentalist wingnut belief that HIV/AIDS rates dropped in Uganda due simply to monogamy and abstinence is mostly crap. The story is quite complex, but the evidence suggests that it was a comprehensive approach that reduced their rates of infection and death. Moreover, it’s worth noting that their decline didn’t last forever and rates have been rising again for several years.
In an October 2010 post on his blogspot.com site, Invisible Children’s Director of Ideology Jedidiah Jenkins grouped “homosexuality” as a sin along with “sexual addiction” and “pornography.” On the other hand, in a February 2012 post, Jenkins praised writing from a Christian theologian who is critical of ex-gay ministries.
Jenkins’ overtly evangelical tone, echoed in a November 7, 2011 Liberty University appearance by Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell, evokes deep conflicts that run through Invisible Children, which as an organization has branded itself as welcoming to religious, cultural, and sexual diversity.
But IC has also partnered with politicians and governments, in America and Uganda, which seem intent on annihilating diversity – by law or, if necessary, through violence. And, while Invisible Children bills itself as primarily devoted to human needs, the nonprofit’s choice to spend less than a third of its budget last year on African programs is consistent with a less obvious mission, as a multimedia-based, stealth evangelical performance ministry that targets young Americans in the “millennial” generation.
Along with his role as Director of Ideology, Jedidiah Jenkins is a co-author, with Jason Russell, of the KONY 2012 viral video that’s been viewed over 83 million times on Youtube. Prior to its Internet launch, Russell identified KONY 2012 as “literally the best piece of propaganda we’ve ever made.”
Czar of Propaganda
Jedidiah Jenkins, whom Russell calls “Propaganda Czar”, has emerged as one of Jason Russell’s key IC captains marshaling hundreds or even thousands of young Americans who have fund-raised for Invisible Children and helped loft its videos, from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, to superstardom. The 2011 version of Invisible Children’s website described Jenkins’ role in the organization as,
“to digest the vision of Invisible Children handed down from the collective leadership and articulate it, expand it, and build the world we hope to see in 100 years… His job is to be in all parts of the organization, from engaging with the interns to leading trips to Uganda to drafting partnership contracts and investing in donors… Jed is the main voice and vision of Invisible Children’s blog.”
In one YouTube video, Jedidiah Jenkins asks Invisible Children to take a Myers-Briggs personality test – apparently so IC could use the data to put volunteer skills to better use. Invisible Children has cultivated a deeply devoted fan base, and on Invisible Children fanpages across the Internet one can find young IC disciples’ worshipful quoting of “Jedi Sayings” from Jenkins’ prose poem ruminations, such as one on the hunt for Joseph Kony and the LRA, in which Jenkins writes,
“power can be used for evil and sinister spirituality and magic and murder and the LRA and G-d understands this better than i that when our flesh falls He has something to do with it… i believe the physical life matters, but i think the spiritual life matters more… may G-d have mercy.”
In his October 2010 blog post, Jenkins appeared to characterize Islam as a false religion, stating that he had never read the Koran because he had been “born into the truth.” Jenkins then referred to,
“the Christian scriptures that predict a very real deception
and an anti-christ
and a season of unrest
and violence
and a worldly kingdom ruled by Jesus”
As a July 2, 2010 Wall Street Journal story by Brad A. Greenberg noted, “Invisible Children’s media kit emphatically states that its founders “believe in Christ, but do NOT want to limit themselves in any way.” Later on, Invisible Children scrubbed the reference to Jesus.
Invisible Children v. Satan
The centrality of Invisible Children’s evangelical mindset emerges in a March 17, 2012 blog post from Jedidiah Jenkins that followed Jason Russell’s naked public meltdown, on a San Diego street corner and a wave of criticism, attacking Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 video, from Ugandan journalists, and academics and NGO members who study and work in Uganda and the DRC Congo.
In his “letter” that Jenkins described as inspired by a conversation with Hollywood director and screenwriter Tom Shadyac, writer of “Ace Ventura, Pet Detective” and other blockbuster films (and an early financial contributor to Invisible Children), Jenkins, writing in the style of in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, takes on the voice of Satan castigating the lesser demon Screwtape, for a bungled plot to destroy Jason Russell and Invisible Children’s global youth movement.
In the letter, which seems to identify critics of Invisible Children as minions of the Devil, Jason Russell is portrayed as a Jesus-like figure, crucified for the greater good of mankind:
“You brag and gloat that you got the face of the world’s largest youth movement to go mad. To tear off his clothes and cry out to the Enemy in the streets for all the world to see. You list the lies you whispered in his ear as if it was some brilliant chess move. I understand that you think this is a huge victory, but I’m afraid you are terribly wrong. You fool. You have ruined everything… These millions of disgustingly idealistic and optimistic young people could have believed that this man is the author of love and justice… You could have made them think ‘I’ll never be that smart, that creative, that loving, that handsome, that true, so I might as well do nothing.’
…The youth are now looking beyond the madness, beyond the man. They are looking at the ideas. They are looking at the Enemy… They are loving the man behind the madness and seeing themselves in him. They are cleaving to the Enemy and singing songs of strength, brotherhood, and victory over evil… They now have no idol. They now have no icon… I’m afraid all might be lost.
I am convening an emergency meeting of devils and demons this very evening to do damage control.”
Conservative Evangelicalism is not LGBT friendly
In a March 2011 interview with PMc Magazine, Jason Russell, whose father founded a chain of Christian youth theaters across North America, described himself as a “dream evangelist” and during a November 7, 2012 Liberty University appearance, Russell told students,
“”We feel like God calls us to be joyful in the work that we’re doing, no matter what we’re doing. [...]
A lot of people fear Christians, they fear Liberty University, they fear Invisible Children – because they feel like we have an agenda. They see us and they go, “You want me to sign up for something, you want my money. You want, you want me to believe in your God.” And it freaks them out.”
Russell was responding to a raft of questions posed by Liberty students that included queries such as “How do you motivate hypocritical, apathetic Christians?” and “What is the greatest challenge to the millennial generation in impacting the world for Christ?”
Over the decades, Liberty University has emerged as one of the leading educational institutions for the politicized evangelical right, and has a strong ideological bent. Liberty University’s website describes, the school’s doctrinal statement is,
“An uncompromising doctrinal statement, based upon an inerrant Bible, a Christian worldview beginning with belief in biblical Creationism, an eschatological belief in the pre-millennial, pre-tribulational coming of Christ for all of His Church, dedication to world evangelization, an absolute repudiation of “political correctness,” a strong commitment to political conservatism, total rejection of socialism, and firm support for America’s economic system of free enterprise.”
On September 13, 2001, two days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell appeared on the 700 Club, and told the world,
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians – who are actively tying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For The American Way, all of them who tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’”.
Although Liberty University students now receive substantial federal funding to attend the school, the university teaches Young Earth creationism and has welcomed as a speaker, to the same fall convocation speaker series that featured Jason Russell, co-founder of the Watchman On The Walls ministry Kenneth Hutcherson.
Watchman On the Walls has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an antigay hate group. Along with Hutcherson, another co-founder of the group is Scott Lively, a key speaker at a Spring 2009 Kampala, Uganda conference on homosexuality that has been widely accused of helping ramp up the mounting, eliminationist antigay hysteria in Uganda.
Following the Uganda conference Lively, who equated homosexuality with Nazism and fascism, stated that he had delivered a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.”
Liberty University, which has hosted conferences featuring ex-gay ministries such as NARTH and Exodus, was one of the sources of student activist energy that has helped launch Invisible Children, and KONY 2012, to international fame.
A 2009 YouTube video shows over a hundred Liberty students, assembled in formation on the steps of a campus building, calling out, “Mike Huckabee, come to our rescue!” and talking about their plans to attend one of Invisible Children’s April 25, 2009 The Rescue events held in cities across America.
Currently the largest evangelical university in the world, Liberty University requires students living on campus to attend chapel and convocations three times weekly. Along with Jason Russell and Kenneth Hutcherson, recent Liberty convocations have featured right-wing speakers including Dinesh D’Souza, Clarence Thomas, Oliver North, creationist Ken Ham, and many evangelical leaders.
LGBT Friendly?
Invisible Children has positioned itself as LGBT rights friendly. On its board of directors, the nonprofit includes a gay San Francisco pastor, and Vice President of Business Operations at Invisible Children Chris Sarette has stated,
“I have been a core member of the management staff at Invisible Children for five years. The fact that Invisible Children sees people as PEOPLE – whether they be family, neighbors, or children in Central Africa – is one of the reasons I finally came out as a gay man… Invisible Children is not an anti-gay organization.”
But Invisible Children was also launched with support and funding — including from one of the top financiers of the campaign to pass California’s now-notorious Proposition 8 — by leading funders of the antigay evangelical right such as the National Christian Foundation, and since 2006, or earlier, the nonprofit has worked closely with and enjoyed political support from virulently antigay politicians such as Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and United States Senator James Inhofe.
Invisible Children leaders Laren Poole and Jason Russell, meeting with Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.
The problematic nature of Invisible Children’s partnership with the Museveni regime extends beyond the issue of LGBT rights – while Invisible Children has identified Lord’s Reformation Army commander Joseph Kony as perhaps the worst war criminal of our age, facts sharply contradict that charge. Far more deadly than Joseph Kony’s LRA, by between one and two orders of magnitude, has been the ongoing conflict in the People’s Democratic Republic of The Congo.
As described in the 30-minute video documentary Crisis In The Congo: Uncovering The Truth, Uganda and Rwanda, which both serve as United States military proxy powers in Sub-Saharan Africa, played a major role in the war that wracked the DRC Congo from the late 1990s into 2003 and killed an estimated 5.4 million civilians.
The Museveni Government’s War On Gays
In his 2008 book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, journalist Jeff Sharlet identified U.S. Senator James Inhofe as an important member of The Fellowship — a secretive Washington D.C. based neo-fundamentalist group with international political influence. In his subsequent book C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, Sharlet charged The Fellowship with helping to inspire Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill.
While Inhofe’s senate office has a policy against hiring homosexuals and has boasted that “in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship”, Yoweri Museveni’s anti-LGBT rights campaign traces back at least as far as 1999, when he told Uganda’s government-controlled New Vision news service,
“I have told the Criminal Investigations Department to look for homosexuals, lock them up and charge them.” The Ugandan president added, “God created Adam and Eve…I did not see God creating man and man.”
In a June 3, 2010, New Vision story, the news service reported that Museveni had warned Ugandan church leaders, “The African Church is the only one that is still standing against homosexuality. The Europeans are finished. If we follow them, we shall end up in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Both President Museveni and First Lady Janet Museveni have also promoted a conspiracy theory, now endemic to Ugandan culture, which portrays homosexuality in Uganda as spread by Westerners who bribe Ugandan youth with cash and electronic goods, such as iPads.
While President Museveni has aired a version of the conspiracy theory as recently as a February 2012 interview with the BBC, Janet Museveni promoted the conspiracy trope in an August 2010 speech to the Uganda Youth Association. According to New Vision, the First Lady declared,
“In God’s word, homosexuality attracts a curse, but now people are engaging in it and saying they are created that way. It is for money The devil is stoking fires to destroy our nation and those taking advantage are doing so because our people are poor.”
Some have credited such rhetoric as helping incite hatreds that led to the brutal murder of Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato.
It is also well established that Janet Museveni has appointed to government commissions several Ugandan evangelical leaders who have been in the forefront of Uganda’s mounting antigay eliminationist campaign, including Stephen Langa, who organized the 2009 Kampala conference that featured Scott Lively.
Another of Janet Museveni’s appointments has been Martin Ssempa, who was tapped to co-authored a new HIV/AIDS policy for Uganda and testified before the U.S. Congress about HIV/AIDS reduction strategies. Ssempa subsequently emerged as one of the leading evangelicals inciting anti-LGBT hatred in Uganda and pushing for speedy passage of the Anti Homosexuality Bill, and works closely with MP David Bahati, who helped draft the bill and who took the lead in introducing in Uganda’s parliament.
Ssempa and Langa were specifically recognized in Uganda’s parliament when the bill was introduced, along with powerful Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet, who also enjoys the favor of the Musevenis. Oyet has held top positions in Uganda’s born-again evangelical church networks that, prior to Uganda’s 2006 presidential election, were the sole major block among Uganda’s faith community to support Yoweri Museveni’s successful bid to amend Uganda’s constitution so that he could run for a third presidential term.
In April 2011, Julius Oyet and Martin Ssempa, co-chairs of a Ugandan entity called the “‘Inter-Religious Taskforce Against Homosexuality”, presented a petition to Uganda’s parliament, reportedly signed by two million Ugandans, calling for speedy passage of the Anti Homosexuality Bill. Oyet and Ssempa have also taken the controversial step of screening, in churches, fringe pornography in churches in an attempt to further demonize Uganda’s LGBT population.
It’s Their Own Fault
Julius Peter Oyet, who has extensive ties to American evangelists in Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation (whose star apostles fighting LGBT rights include Lou Engle, Cindy Jacobs, and Bishop Harry Jackson) was the star of a 2005 American evangelical-produced video, “An Unconventional War”.
An Unconventional War, which features President Yoweri Museveni and was made with help from his Presidential Media Team, has been shown to Christian audiences around the world.
The video portrays Joseph Kony as having demonic powers and blames Uganda’s Northern Acholi people for the savage attacks and child kidnappings they suffered from Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army – because they had disobeyed the will of God by practicing idolatry and witchcraft (for more information on An Unconventional War, (see this detailed treatment of the video, from researcher Rachel Tabachnick).
In 2007, an organization that is now one of Invisible Children’s major campaign partners, the Uganda Conflict Action Network (now Renamed Resolve Uganda) helped create the “Northern Uganda Faith and Action Kit”, designed to enable people concerned about the conflict in Northern Uganda to raise awareness and lobby American politicians to address the issue.
The kit contained sample letters to Senators and Congress members, and a list of actions to take, one of which was screening two movies. One was Invisible Children’s first film. The second was “An Unconventional War”, by George Otis, Jr.
The blaming-the-victim theme in An Unconventional War is mirrored disturbingly in a September 18, 2011 blog post from Invisible Children Director of Ideology Jedidiah Jenkins, who wrote,
” ‘there are no ordinary people, only eternal souls becoming gods and monsters’ or somethinglikethat cs lewis said
I think about that a lot as I ignore a jabbering homeless woman that looks at me with distant eyes dehumanizing me as a pocket-book-preppy-asshole-with-spoiling-parents as i dehumanize her as the result of a long string of short-sighted-self-serving-corroded-willpower-weakness-decisions
and she tells me some weak and tired lie that once probably sounded real about a bus ticket to see her children and i might buy her something at 7/11 although i probably wont because i’m rushing somewhere far less important than the state of her life
and as with everything I am, so enter the mitigating factors of: my belief that a free society must give people the right to suffer from their decisions, and my spread-too-thin lifestyle of care can destroy me and more importantly them as they see in me a promise i cannot fulfill… blah blah “
Yesterday, TWO’s John Becker traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts to represent Truth Wins Out in an action directed against notorious anti-LGBT extremist Scott Lively. The action, which has been covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Timesand the UK’s Guardian, was conducted by groups that included Springfield’s Stop the Hate and Homophobia Coalition, GetEQUAL MA, Join the Impact MA, Out Now, Arise for Social Justice, and TWO. It coincided with a federal lawsuit filed yesterday by the Center for Constitutional Rights over Lively’s role in the ongoing persecution of LGBT people in Uganda; attorneys and representatives from CCR were also in attendance.
As virulently homophobic bigots go, Scott Lively is the worst of the worst. His organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, is certified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group. His inflammatory writings include The Pink Swastika – a book that outrageously claims that gay people helped to bring Nazism to Germany and mastermind the Holocaust — and his latest volume, Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child, which purports to help parents take steps to ensure their children won’t be gay by preventing so-called “pro-homosexual indoctrination.”
Lively is a general in the global war on LGBT people, traveling the world and slandering gay people in countries as far-flung as Moldova, Latvia, Uganda, and Russia. In March 2009, he was one of three American evangelicals who flew to Uganda to keynote a three-day anti-gay conference that indoctrinated literally thousands of Ugandans, from government officials to teachers, with the most putrid and pernicious lies imaginable. Lively himself likened it to dropping “a nuclear bomb on the gay agenda.” Ugandans were falsely told that gay men sodomize vulnerable teenage boys in a kind of quasi-vampiric lust for new sexual conquests, “recruit” young people into homosexuality, and actively seek to undermine society and marriage, replacing it with sexual anarchy. They were told that it was possible to “pray away the gay,” that gays were to blame for the recent genocide in neighboring Rwanda, and that they should take measures in their homes and society to clamp down hard on the “evil” of homosexuality and strengthen weak anti-homosexuality laws.
We all know what happened next. A month after the conference, Ugandan parliamentarian David Bahati — one of Lively’s key men in the country — introduced the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill, also known as the “Kill the Gays” bill. An international outcry ensued, led by LGBT rights groups including Truth Wins Out, whose American Prayer Hour drew national attention to the Ugandan bill and its disturbing connection to American evangelical Christians and D.C. politicians. The bill stalled temporarily, but was re-worked and re-introduced last month. In the meantime, LGBT people in Uganda have faced threats, intimidation, persecution, violence, and even murder.
Yesterday’s lawsuit was filed by CCR on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a major LGBT advocacy group in that country. Lively is being sued for persecution under the alien tort statute, a law allowing foreigners to sue American citizens in federal court for violating international law. TWO has been consulted on the suit, due to the prominent role the “pray away the gay” myth plays in Lively’s anti-LGBT bigotry and Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
Demonstrators in Springfield, including TWO’s Becker, processed yesterday from the federal courthouse to Holy Grounds Coffee House, a local coffee shop owned by Lively where he lures people in (including students from a school just down the street) with free coffee and wifi in order to expose them to anti-gay, fundamentalist propaganda. The protesters wore all black. Some also wore masks to symbolize the silencing of Uganda’s LGBT people, others carried signs with the names of LGBT victims of violence and persecution in that country. Still others carried coffins representing those who have been murdered for being gay. One of them bore the name of prominent LGBT activist David Kato, who was killed last year. The signs and coffins, along with flowers memorializing the victims, were laid in front of Lively’s coffee house, symbolically placing the blame at his feet. The peaceful demonstration was conducted in complete silence, punctuated only by slow, solemn drumbeats keeping time as the mourners marched.
Scott Lively, hate group leader extraordinaire, speaking at a church in California:
I want to just attack this idea that people have raised that homosexuality is just another sin because that’s not true and the more that we embrace that, the more that we accept that as a concept, the more distant we are from understanding the warning that God gives us when we see this phenomenon in our society.
Gay is especially bad! And not only because gay is the thing that Scott Lively is unnaturally fixated with!
When you see the gay pride parade going down the street in the major cities, what banner are they flying over them? They’re flying the banner of the rainbow. What is the rainbow? The rainbow is God’s covenant with man never to destory the Earth by water again …
God never promised not to send a flood of gays to cover the earth. Loophole!
So there’s an enormous warning there and, at the same time, we’re also given a clue as to what’s happening with apostasy in the modern age when people will raise the rainbow flag – and there’s a passage in Isiah, I forget the chapter and verse, that says “they parade their sin like Sodom.” And that is what is exactly going on with people who have defined themselves by this particular behavior and lifestyle. They parade their sin like Sodom. And they do it under the rainbow banner almost as if they’re saying “God, you can do nothing to us” because they don’t believe that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality so they aren’t learning the lesson from that.
Because the only way you can believe that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality is if you A. Have been taught that repeatedly and never looked at the verses for yourself, B. Only halfway glance at a bad translation and also do not own or know how to use a concordance, as the actual sin of Sodom is explained fourteen times throughout the Bible, and it’s not Gay, or C. Are like Scott Lively, and have such a weird, unhinged hatred of gay people that, even though you’re theoretically capable of studying the text for yourself, you simply continue lying because it props up your smelly bigotry.
In fifty years we have seen this tiny group of people – they really only represent about two percent of the population – that has grown from being a reviled subculture to now having more power in the legislatures and courtrooms of the world than the Christian church does.
Uh, no.
In fifty years! Nothing has ever grown that fast globally, nothing. Not Islam, not Darwinism, not Marxism, nothing has ever grown that fast. Which shows you that this is a spiritual phenomenon that is unparallelled and that’s why God has selected it, singled out this particular behavior to be the indicator of extreme apostasy, the furthest edge of deviance and the warning sign that things are in really, really bad shape.
Islam is a huge, ancient world religion with over a billion adherents. Darwinism is what morons call “evolutionary biology,” and as such, its “spread” is referred to as “education.” Etc. But none of these things have grown faster than GAAAAAAAY, says Scott.
Perhaps it’s more that none of those things keep Scott Lively awake shivering at night, and that’s why he views the gays as more powerful.
Oy. The more he talks, the more I’m inclined to feel sorry for him. Right Wing Watch has the video.
By now, you know the story. A few weeks ago, Porno Pete got twelve or thirteen of his closest bigots together for a Spaghetti-O’s dinner of some sort out in the Chicago suburbs, for the purposes of honoring super-bigot Scott Lively, the main proponent of the lie that gays caused the Holocaust. Scott Lively, of course, had a huge hand in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” legislation. Anyway, some ne’er-do-well gay “activists,” or possibly Porno Pete’s own people [who knows?] decided to make a pathetic situation more pathetic by throwing a couple of bricks through the window of the establishment where the soiree was to be held. This is, of course, worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and Carrot Top, combined. At first Peter was crying that it was a “hate crime,” which it isn’t, as bigotry is not actually a protected class under hate crimes laws. It’s a simple, stupid, misguided act of vandalism. Oh, but now, craving more attention from the ordeal, he is calling it a “terror-attack.” Really. Here he is, setting up a video from his butchest friend, Matt “Bam Bam” Barber, the one he can always rely on to be his manly defender when people hurt his feelings:
Note that at the time of this recording, Barber was relying on early reports coming from the Oct. 15th terror-attack on Christian Liberty Academy, in which it was feared that the pro-homosexual assailants had entered the building and perhaps created water damage. Actually, they did not enter the building, and the vandalism that did occur was created by large paver bricks thrown through the glass doors and windows of CLA (accompanied by notes threatening further violence).
Yeah, bricks thrown through a window when nobody is around do not constitute an act of “terrorism.” Sorry. I’m in complete agreement that whoever did it — and if it was gays of ANY sort, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for being such grade-A dumbasses — was in the wrong, but this melodrama really gets under my skin, especially when I have to report seemingly every week on some gay kid who killed himself because he was bullied so badly by his schoolmates, family, church or community into feeling he had nothing to live for. Considering that those sorts of messages start with people like Porno Pete and Scott Lively and their perverted interpretation of the Bible, and then trickle down to those kids, I’m just having a hard time writing about this “terror-attack” with a straight face.
The video Porno Pete was setting up is from the Liberty Counsel, and features a really pathetic, fearful conversation between Matt Barber and Mat Staver. They discuss the incident, and then go on to ratchet up the victim mentality by saying that the Southern Poverty Law Center, by labeling them hate groups [for their vicious anti-gay bigotry, and also the fact that they are pathological liars], is doing the same thing to them that the Nazis did to the Jews.
Seriously. I would cry them a river, but my eyes are too busy rolling into the back of my skull. Why do wingnut men always come across as such sissies?!
Staver: This aggressive homosexual agenda is not about tolerance, it’s about dominance. And the more emboldened they get, the more laws that they get, the more vocal they become, the more hostile they become, the more aggressive they become, and the more violent, in this particular case, they become.
Barber: Americans for Truth, as well as Liberty Counsel for that matter, is one of those flashpoints, they have been unfairly labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hard left-wing extremist organization that uses smears in order to label Christian organizations that take a principled stand on the biblical model of sexual morality in love, speak God’s truth in love, they label them hate groups. But really, they are fanning the flames of this kind of violence with their rhetoric, by labeling organizations a hate group. And they’re partly responsible for this, indirectly, I’m not going to say they’re directly responsible …
Staver: Well, when you go out and label somebody a hate group you think of the KKK …
Barber: It emboldens these people …
Staver: It also, it begins, you know, it’s the same thing that happened in the Nazi Holocaust where they start to just demonize and stigmatize and then at some point in time you don’t even think that someone’s human and then, you know, we look at it and our consciences are shocked but if you look at how it ultimately began where they began to just demonize and dehumanize them, that’s what’s happening with this labeling of hate groups.
