Scott Lively’s name is almost synonymous with “unbridled, unhinged hate” at this point.  We all know that he’s got his paws on quite a few of the SPLC-designated anti-gay hate groups;  that he’s a professional liar to a pathological degree, going so far as to write a completely discredited revisionist book called The Pink Swastika, which seeks to cast gays as the creators of the Nazi movement; and that he traveled to Uganda early last year to, among other things, inform his rapt audience that killer homosexuals were “probably” involved with the Rwandan genocide next door.  That last lie is almost perversely funny here, in a society with access to education and knowledge, but in Uganda, it’s a deadly lie.  In short, we know that Scott Lively is a sick man.

Jim Burroway has written an exhaustive profile of Lively that all should read and then bookmark for future reference.  It describes things like I mentioned above, but it also goes into details I didn’t know, pieces of the mosaic that really give insight into how and why he ended up being the detestable character he is today.  For instance, his family background:

He is the oldest of six children, and his father developed a mental illness when Lively was young. Lively himself became an alcoholic at the age of twelve. For the next sixteen years, he said, he couldn’t hold a job. He slept under bridges and begged for money on the streets. A brother and a sister, he said, “went into homosexuality,” and another sister “wasn’t able to enter into marriage until she was in her forties because of the pain of the family life that we had.” Finally, said Lively, “[I] got down on my knees and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I was healed in an instant. I never had another desire to drink or use drugs ever again. When I got up off my knees, I was clean and healed.”

Lively became involved in antigay activism because of two people who were, he said, “very close to me”—a four-year-old boy and a nineteen-year-old man, who, Lively said, molested the boy: “And I saw what happened to that little child. He was transformed [from] a sweet and innocent person into a tortured and tormented child, filled with anger and rage. And he never recovered from it.” The nineteen year old, Lively said, “is still living in a gay lifestyle in Los Angeles, California. He’s an active homosexual and he’s active in a church that endorses what’s called ‘gay theology.’”

So basically, Scott took all his past pain and rage and decided to use the LGBT community as a scapegoat, instead of actually trying to work through said pain and rage. Of course, the second paragraph, if it’s even true [again, Lively is a pathological liar], has absolutely nothing to do with LGBT people. If it’s a true story, it’s a tragedy, and the guy should have been punished to the fullest extent of the law, just as if it was a straight-identified man who molested a child. Child abuse is child abuse, period. This is what we’ve been trying to explain to the Vatican!

Another piece of the puzzle that caught my eye was an incident when Lively was still just a wee, new hater in Oregon, cutting his teeth with the “Oregon Citizens Alliance”:

Lively quickly gained a reputation for being a loose canon. In October 1991, the photographer Catherine Stauffer attended a church meeting where the OCA was previewing a videotape it had cobbled together in preparation for a campaign in support of a series of local antigay ballot measures across the state. Lively ejected Stauffer from the meeting forcefully, by throwing her against the wall and dragging her across the floor.[x] She sued Lively and OCA. The jury determined that Lively was guilty of using unreasonable force and awarded Stauffer $20,000.[xi]

Awful story, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. It’s just something in his eyes, I think.

It was apparently not long after that that Lively started losing battles at the ballot box, and perhaps sensing that the culture was beginning a long shift toward acceptance for LGBT peple, he created his greatest lie of all — that gays had created the Nazi party. Here was, perhaps, the first time he said it publicly, on television in Oregon:

Homosexuals created the Nazi Party, and everything that we think about when we think about Nazis actually comes from the minds and perverted ideas of homosexuals. When you think of the Nazi Party… you cannot help but understand that this organization was a machine constructed by militant, sadomasochistic, pedophilic homosexuals. … They built the Nazi machine. They were the people that ran it, and that put it together. Most people understand that there were some homosexuals involved in the Nazi Party—no, it wasn’t that. They were the foundation of the Nazi Party.

And thus his career was born, I suppose. There is so much more in the piece, and Jim is to be commended for taking the time to put it all together. It’s quite a disturbing mosaic, so read it all when you have time.

Awww, a conflicted conscience:

He gained international attention after he was accused of stoking violence against gays in Uganda. One of his books, “Pink Swastika,’’ argues that Hitler and other Nazi leaders were gay. Another provides seven steps to “recruit-proof’’ your child from gay activists.

But Scott Lively says he is toning down his antigay rhetoric and shifting his focus to helping the downtrodden. And he’s found a home and a receptive audience in this struggling city where many, but not all, have embraced his mission to “re-Christianize Springfield.’’

Every day, patrons stream to the Christian folk shows and Bible classes at Holy Grounds Coffee House, the café he opened about two months ago on a block not far from downtown. A thousand people turned out for the March for Jesus he led from the café to the steps of City Hall on the day before Easter. And dozens of children and parents flocked to a city park for his annual Family Day celebration, featuring a water slide, face painting, and grilled food. Even the mayor stopped by that event.

“You can’t walk down the street without being greeted by somebody saying, ‘Hey, Rev. Scott!’ ’’ said Lively, an evangelical pastor who moved to Springfield from California in January 2008. “It’s very satisfying.’’

But some in the city are wary. Gay rights and civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have labeled Lively’s longtime organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, a hate group.

I’m sure it’s satisfying, since he’s such a pariah to anyone who knows the first thing about him. Don’t worry, though, he still hates him some gay people. This is the crux of the issue, according to Zambian priest Kapya Kaoma, who witnessed Lively’s activity in Uganda firsthand:

“When they are in Africa, they preach hatred; when they come to America, because they know Americans are going to hold them accountable, they become moderates,’’ he said. “Honestly, I wouldn’t believe a thing from Scott Lively. I don’t even think he’s capable of toning down his antigay rhetoric.’’

This is exactly what I’ve been saying about extremist Christians: they will get away with whatever they can get away with, depending on their audience. A man like Scott Lively garners very little respect in the United States, especially in New England. So of course, in order to maintain some sense of relevancy, he’s Doing Something Nice In His Hometown.

Dear Springfield’s poor and downtrodden: take whatever food he gives you, but be wary of every word that comes out of the man’s mouth. Until he stands up and says “Ya know? That book I wrote blaming gays for the Holocaust? That was complete BS, and I was lying the whole time, as everyone with Google can easily tell, and I feel very guilty for that,” he’s still the same old Scott Lively.

[h/t Kyle]

The other day, I posted video of Bryan Fischer using an extremely revisionist, anti-semitic, homophobic version of history to claim that the Nazis were a movement of gay men. I pointed out that, though he didn’t mention Scott Lively by name, that that man’s lying paws were all over Fischer’s statements.

Well, told you so. Fischer’s “explanation” for his comments leaves much to be desired:

Scott Lively’s well-documented book, “The Pink Swastika,” exposes…

No, Bryan, you idiot. Scott Lively’s book is a joke. The man is not a scholar, but rather a psychologically disturbed, rank bigot who is at least partially responsible for inspiring the gay genocide legislation in Uganda, and who is associated with several known hate groups, one of which is connected to anti-gay violence and murder in California.

Actual historians and scholars fairly universally repudiate the book as a work of malevolent fantasy.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the book:

Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler’s inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.

“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” write Lively and Abrams. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ ‚Äî the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted ‚Äî we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.’”

Historians agree that this “reality” is utterly false. But many anti-gay crusaders have used the “gay Nazi” myth as proof that gay people are immoral and destructive.

(…)

The myth that Nazis condoned or promoted homosexuality sprang up as a slander against Nazi leaders by their socialist opponents in the 1930s. Only one of the half-dozen leaders in Hitler’s inner circle, Ernest Rohm, is believed by credible historians to have been gay.

The “gay Nazi” slander stuck, though, partly because German laws against homosexuals remained in place for a quarter of a century after World War II ended. That effectively silenced many homosexual victims of the Holocaust from telling their stories. A landmark survivor’s memoir, The Men With the Pink Triangle, began to break that silence in 1972.

There is no question that the Nazis saw homosexuality as one aspect of the “degeneracy” they were determined to extinguish. When it came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party moved quickly to strengthen Germany’s existing penalties against homosexuality. On Oct. 11, 1936, Hitler’s security chief, Heinrich Himmler, went further, announcing that homosexuality was to be “eliminated” in Germany, along with miscegenation between the races.

In 1942, the death penalty was instituted for homosexuality. Offenders in the German military were routinely shot. “That wasn’t a punishment,” Himmler explained, “but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them.”

Now, let me suggest something further. If (and I do mean “if”) there is any credible scholarship suggesting that Hitler had male lovers, while simultaneously including homosexuals among the groups that needed to be eradicated from the earth, then this is not a story Religious Right men like Bryan Fischer should want to be telling, because it wouldn’t reflect poorly on normal, well-adjusted LGBT people. It would reflect poorly on right-wing, closet cases like many of the men who are leaders of the Religious Right. Have you ever heard of George Rekers? His methods of eradicating homosexuality certainly aren’t to the level of Hitler, but that’s mostly because it’s hard to pull that kind of action off when you need to hire supple young male buttcheeks to lift your luggage. But he’s a shining example of a man who’s spent his life trying to eradicate in others the thing he hates most in himself.

If you’re interested in reading a long, detailed refutation of Lively’s and his co-writer Kevin Abrams’ work, click here. In that essay, the writer calls the historical revisionism, contortions, lies, and damned lies employed by Abrams and Lively “emotional and ignorant,” and she even details exactly where Abrams completely changed the words to his source text in order to keep his bigoted train of thought on track.

Toward the end of Bryan Fischer’s piece (it’s not worth quoting at length, because all he does is vomit back what Lively first vomited into his brain), there’s this curious line:

Even today in America, it is chic in some homosexual circles for individuals to wear replicas of Nazi Germany uniforms, complete with iron crosses, storm trooper outfits, military boots and even swastikas.

Raise your hand if you have any idea what the hell he’s talking about. Because I’m fairly familiar with most of the different sides of the LGBT community, and I have never seen anything resembling this. Unlike Bryan Fischer and Scott Lively, though, I only hang out with gays who are out of the closet, so it’s possible that Fischer and Lively have anti-semitic closeted gay friends that I don’t know about.

Anyway. Keep digging that hole, Bryan Fischer.