Lively's Lies

He told the Ugandans about what he said are the various kinds of gays: the transsexuals, the transvestites, the effeminate gays, and the “normal” ones, who blend in. They are the hardest to spot, he said. Then there are the others: machos and, worst of all, he said, the “super machos.” It’s the latter two groups, Lively claimed, who founded the Nazi party and helped Hitler to come to power. “These are men who have very little restraint,” he said.

There’s some dispute about whether Mark Twain actually said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But there is no dispute that Scott Lively has thoroughly proven this truism. “The gay movement is an evil institution,” he told his spellbound Ugandan audience. “The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” His voice rising and his eyes flashing with anger, he continued, If you deny and reject the design of your own body, and you engage in conduct that is self-evidently wrong and harmful to you, then you’re going to receive in your body the penalty of your error which is appropriate. Can anyone say AIDS?

The Ugandan audience was unfamiliar with this American colloquialism. They didn’t understand that Lively’s question was rhetorical. “AIDS,” some obediently but quietly answered. They knew AIDS all too well, a disease which began making itself known in the Congo River Basin in neighboring Zaire as far back as the 1960s,¹ long before it appeared on Western medicine’s radar. By 1982, doctors became aware of a new disease in rural Uganda that the locals dubbed “slim,” because of the way people who had it wasted away.² It was (and is) a disease mainly of heterosexuals.

A Pushpin on the Hate Map

The peripatetic antigay activist has traveled the world, and everywhere he goes, wholesale lies about gay people fall about him like acorns in autumn. In 2007, Lively was particularly active, traveling to Riga, Latvia, in the spring; then to Novosibirsk, Russia; then back to Riga. “There is a war going on the world,” he told his Novosibirsk audience. “It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals.” The war, he said, is “the design of the devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family.”³

This kind of rhetoric landed Lively on the Hate Map developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC tracks more than 1,000 hate groups across the United States, but only seventeen of them are highlighted as specifically antigay. Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries is one of them, and Lively has connections with several others. In 2007, he helped to found the international Watchmen On The Walls, which quickly landed on the SPLC’s antigay list (The Watchmen are no longer active in the United States). He has spoken at fundraising banquets for MassResistance, written several articles for the Chalcedon Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist organization which endorses the revival of the Old Testament punishments of death for gay people. He has contributed money⁴ to anti-gay activist and former Washington Times reporter Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth about Homosexuality.⁵ He continued to contribute to discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron’s Family Research Institute long after Cameron called for the quarantining of HIV-positive gay men and expressed admiration for how the Nazis “dealt with homosexuality.”⁶ All of these groups are on that same, short SPLC antigay list.

The Oregon Years

Lively cut his teeth on antigay activism in Eugene, Oregon, where a February 1991 article in the Eugene Register-Guard described him as the assistant director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA).⁷ OCA had been formed just a few years earlier by Vietnam vet, ex-hippie, and born-again Christian Lon Mabon,⁸ with support from the Oregon branch of Pat Roberston’s Christian Coalition.⁹ (Lively and Mabon served on the Oregon Christian Coalition’s board of directors until 1993.) According to the article, Lively denounced a group of protesters against the first Gulf War as “burned-out hippies and professional malcontents.” His rhetoric wasn’t terribly original, but he was just getting started. The OCA would be his training ground.

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.¹⁰ She sued Lively and OCA. The jury determined that Lively was guilty of using unreasonable force and awarded Stauffer $20,000.¹¹

OCA’s ballot measures were far reaching. They would prohibit “promoting, encouraging or facilitating homosexuality”—restrictions that would determine such basic community issues as which books could be accepted into the local library and which groups could access city facilities, including streets and parks. They would institute a double standard: for example, OCA could hold meetings in city buildings, while Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays could not.

Lively took a particular interest in the contest in Springfield,¹² a suburb of Eugene. An antigay ballot measure passed there by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent,¹³ making Springfield the first city in the country to pass such an ordinance. But even there Lively’s intemperance once again got him in trouble. In a press release, he carelessly suggested that the former Springfield Human Rights Commissioner George Wickizer was “a practicing homosexual man.” Wickizer wasn’t, and he sued¹⁴: being falsely labeled a homosexual was considered libel at the time. But Lively lucked out. The court ruled that Wickizer was a public figure, making winning a libel case difficult.¹⁵ Sure enough, Wickizer lost.

The Springfield win propelled the OCA toward its fall statewide campaign for a proposed amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would bar the state from using “monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.” It required all levels of government, including school systems, to recognize “that these behaviors are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse and they are to be discouraged and avoided.” The proposal, known as Measure 9, was the most severe statewide antigay measure ever proposed in the United States, and the campaign was acrimonious. Lively described gay people as “living a voluntary lifestyle based on sodomy,” and alleged that child molestation by other homosexuals was the most likely cause of homosexuality.¹⁶ He also released a video purporting to demonstrate the kind of sexual activity in which gay men and lesbians commonly engaged. The video was loaded with false health information as well as testimony from two ex-gays—men who claimed to have rejected homosexuality to become straight.¹⁷

Payback Time: The Nazi Connection

Lively’s and the OCA’s campaign backfired. Measure 9 was defeated 56 percent to 44 percent,¹⁸ and the OCA took a drubbing as well. A statewide poll after the election found that 57 percent of all Oregonians had an unfavorable opinion of the alliance, while only 14 percent were favorable.¹⁹ Lively and OCA were undeterred. Two years later, they returned with Measure 13, a slightly watered-down version of Measure 9. Measure 13 was also defeated, but Lively used this campaign to try out a new rhetorical theme. Appearing on a public-access cable program in Salem, Oregon, he tied homosexuality to the Nazi Party. “It wasn’t just that homosexuals were involved in the Nazi Party,” Lively told the television audience.

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.

Where did this idea come from? OCA’s Lon Mabon remembered that back in 1991, when he had filed papers in Springfield for the local antigay measure, he had passed hecklers calling him “Nazi,” “Mr. Ayatollah,” and “hatemonger.” Mabon reportedly said that Lively had “gotten tired of being called Nazi.” He decided to do some digging and concluded that “many Nazi leaders were homosexuals and that the Nazi Party was closely tied to pre-Nazi Germany’s gay-rights movement.”²⁰ In other words, this was payback time.

As Lively was developing this theme, he may have come across an article written by Kevin Abrams, a Canadian Orthodox Jew who moved to Israel, that appeared in Peter LaBarbera’s Lambda Report in August 1994.²¹ “If history is to be told accurately,” Abrams wrote, the behavior of homosexuals under Hitler’s barbarous rule provides further evidence that homosexuality is a pathology… Ironically, the record shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi deviants and homosexuals than there ever was against homosexuals.

Lively and Abrams quickly joined forces, releasing a book in July 1995 titled, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The book, now in its fourth edition, solidified Lively’s career, not just as an antigay extremist but also as a Holocaust revisionist—although Lively denies that he blames gay people for the Holocaust. He reserves the actual blame for Satan; homosexuals, he says, were merely “instruments in its enactment.”²² The vast homosexual conspiracies detailed in The Pink Swastika were sweeping: that gay people are naturally violent,²³ predatory,²⁴ and hostile to all moral norms;²⁵ that the permissiveness of the Weimar Republic provided the opening necessary for gays to wield power;²⁶ that Nazi ideology was a modern revival of pagan “homo-occultism;”²⁷ that homosexuals specifically target the youth, both for political indoctrination as well as sexual induction;²⁸ that, yes, some gays were killed, but they were the effeminate ones targeted by the “butch” in their unquenchable thirst for absolute power;²⁹ that the Nazi Party’s stranglehold on German life was the direct result of this bloodlust;³⁰ and that the same fate awaits any nation that institutes equality for LGBT people.

The few historians who bothered to comment on Lively’s historical revisions dismissed them as farce,³¹ while Charles Schiffman, Executive Director of the Jewish Federation of Portland, expressed outrage over Lively’s “low effort to use a terrible tragedy for political purposes.”³² Lively and Abrams were unfazed. Lively, in particular, now had a mission: to sound the alarm that what had happened in Nazi Germany could happen here. “From the ashes of Nazi Germany,” he wrote, “the homofascist Phoenix has arisen again—this time in the United States.”³³ And not just in the United States. Lively has sounded this warning everywhere he goes.

Going Global

Some time in the late 1990s, Lively moved to Sacramento, California. There, he founded the Pro-Family Law Center and became involved in litigation on behalf of conservative Christian causes. For a while, he also served as director of the California American Family Association. Sacramento, it turns out, has a substantial Evangelical Christian, Russian-immigrant community, due largely to a popular shortwave radio station based there that used to broadcast to the Soviet Union. Although Lively soon moved to Temecula, near Los Angeles, his connections in Sacramento opened the doors to a new world of antigay activism. Russians and other Eastern Europeans had suffered terrible atrocities at the hands of the Nazis, and their children and grandchildren eagerly embraced The Pink Swastika’s litany of conspiracy theories.

Together with the Sacramento-based Russian radio host Vlad Kusakin, Seattle pastor Kenneth Hutcherson, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Lively founded the Watchmen On the Walls, which quickly became closely identified with violence, both rhetorical and real. When LGBT advocates tried to hold a gay rights march in the Latvian capital of Riga in 2006, a mob of parishioners from Ledyaev’s New Generation Church pelted them with eggs, rotten produce, and excrement as they tried to leave a gay-affirming Anglican church. In May 2007, Lively traveled to Riga and spoke at New Generation, where he called the gay rights movement “the most dangerous political movement in the world”³⁴ and commended Ledyaev’s work in Latvia.

Meanwhile, back in Sacramento, a group of Russian-speaking men killed Satendar Singh, a 26-year-old gay Fijian of Indian descent. One of the two men charged with the crime fled to Russia. A month later, Lively traveled to Novosibirsk for a Watchmen conference, where he spoke about Singh’s death to cheers and applause. Lively tried to quiet the celebration—“We don’t want homosexuals to be killed; we want them to be saved”—but only after complaining that the murder investigation and news coverage proved that “homosexuals have achieved very high power… They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.”³⁵

The Nuclear Option: Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

Lively’s demagoguery took an even more dangerous turn when, in 2009, he traveled to Uganda to deliver his now-infamous talk at the Triangle Hotel. Two other U.S. evangelicals—Exodus International board member Don Schmierer and International Healing Foundation’s Caleb Lee Brundidge—joined him to deliver what Lively later called his “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda.”³⁶ Lively threw everything he had into the talk: gays as child abusers, gays as insatiable sexual predators, gays bent on political domination, gays bent on the destruction of civilization, gays as Nazis. And a new one: gays as responsible for the Rwandan genocide.

The results were disastrous for the LGBT community in Uganda, a country that is already very conservative and deeply homophobic. In the wake of Lively’s talk, radio stations launched vigilante campaigns, reading out the names, addresses, and places of employment of gay Ugandans. Newspapers published their photos. LGBT people were attacked, arrested, and subjected to blackmail. A few weeks after the conference, mobs marched on the Ugandan Parliament at the behest of conservative Ugandan pastors, demanding new legislation to deal with the so-called homosexual problem.

Parliament was receptive to the idea. There had already been talk of imposing new restrictions on Uganda’s LGBT community, and that idea took on added urgency immediately following Lively’s explosive talk.³⁷ The morning after the Triangle Hotel conference, Lively met with fifty to one hundred members of Parliament for four hours to discuss ideas for a new law.³⁸

Among his suggestions was that the Ugandan government offer so-called restorative or reparative therapy, which promises to turn LGBT people into heterosexuals, as an alternative to life imprisonment—which, given the conditions of a typical Ugandan prison would not have been a difficult choice for most. Such therapies, however, have been widely discredited as not only ineffective but harmful, including by the American Psychological Association. Another suggestion, which he repeated often in his travels, was to impose a legal ban on all advocacy on behalf of LGBT people.³⁹

In October 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was introduced into the Ugandan Parliament. The bill would impose the death penalty on gays and lesbians under certain circumstances, including for “repeat offenders”— anyone who had had more than one relationship. The bill established a low bar for conviction, making mere “touching” for the perceived purpose of homosexual relations a criminal offense. It threatened teachers, doctors, friends, and family members with three years imprisonment if they didn’t report anyone they suspected of being gay to police within 24 hours. While Parliament ignored Lively’s call for forced therapy, they did include his recommendation to broadly criminalize all advocacy of homosexuality including, conceivably, the legal defense of accused gays. The bill even threatened landlords under a “brothel” provision if they knowingly rented to LGBT tenants.

Lively was proud of his “nuclear bomb,”⁴⁰ even though he disavowed any responsibility for its fallout. In fact, his first response was to claim that the bill was the LGBT community’s fault. Ugandans, he said, were merely reacting to “a lot of external interference from European and American gay activists attempting to do in Uganda what they’ve done around the world—homosexualize that society.”⁴¹

As for the bill itself, Lively called it “a step in the right direction,” although he said he opposed the death penalty.⁴² But even there, he struggled. He told one interviewer that given the alternative of seeing Uganda become more accommodating to gays and lesbians, he would rather the bill passed “as the lesser of two evils.”

“Even with the death penalty?” an interviewer asked him. After much hemming and hawing, Lively admitted that even as the “lesser of two evils,” he would oppose the bill’s passage if it included the death penalty.⁴³

Lively’s Latest Campaigns

Lively’s “nuclear bomb” earned him worldwide condemnation—about which he seemed ambivalent. Sometimes he appeared to relish the attention; other times he tried to flee from it. In July 2009, Lively announced his “final book on the homosexual issue.”⁴⁴ He bragged that this book, Redeeming the Rainbow, “is the product of twenty years of service as a front-lines opponent of the homosexual movement and encompasses all that I have learned through this long tour of duty.” And with that, he said would “no longer be monitoring the day-to-day developments of the culture war regarding homosexuality as closely, nor posting stories about it to this website.”⁴⁵ However, just a few weeks later, he was back to obsessing about homosexuality. He had moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 2008, and in August 2009 he traveled to Boston to testify against a transgender rights bill. (To him, gender identity and sexual orientation are indistinguishable.) After his testimony, he gave an interview that was posted on YouTube. “Frankly, I see things simply disintegrating very rapidly and I believe that we’re going to suffer some kind of infrastructure collapse in this society because of the failure of moral culture,” he said.⁴⁶

In Springfield, Lively initially worked at a church affiliated with Ledyaev’s New Generation Church. In January 2011, he reiterated to the Boston Globe that he was through with talking about homosexuality, and that he wanted to “re-Christianize Springfield.”⁴⁷ He explained, “If someone were looking for Scott Lively to stop being involved in the other stuff [antigay activity], this is it. Those people who criticize me, they should be happy.” He opened the Holy Grounds coffee shop, a drop-in center for Springfield youth. Springfield officials expressed concern that truants from a nearby high school were hanging out at the coffee shop. The shop’s manager, Michael Frediani, was arrested in January because he failed to register as a convicted child-molester. Lively banned the students during school hours, and defended his manager as someone who had changed by converting to Christianity.

The Rev. Kapya Kaoma is an Anglican priest from Zambia who attended Lively’s talk in Uganda. As a PRA researcher, Kaoma wrote the report, Globalizing the Culture Wars, about antigay organizing in Africa by U.S.-based conservative Christians. Kaoma doesn’t think Lively’s new focus is particularly credible. “Honestly, I wouldn’t believe a thing from Scott Lively,” he said. “I don’t even think he’s capable of toning down his antigay rhetoric.”⁴⁸ As it turns out, Kaoma was right. In March 2011, Lively traveled to the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia to denounce a proposed antidiscrimination law as the product of “a secret plan by the homosexual powers of the E.U.” He warned that its passage would result in an “outbreak of homosexuality.”⁴⁹ The Macedonian bill has been shelved for now.