US Preacher Sued For Incitement
Acronyms are critically important, right? I remember when the name ‘City University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne’ was dropped because of the acronym. Yet when Richard Nixon ran for re-election in 1972, the organising body was called the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and it used the acronym CREEP. On purpose. The Ugandan LGBT rights group Sexual Minorities Uganda uses the acronym SMUG. And I hope they shall be.
The Ugandan government has declared war on LGBT people – first it wanted to introduce the death penalty for homosexuality, and when that didn’t work it settled for life imprisonment. There’s been a raft of US preachers supporting the Ugandan government’s cause and now SMUG has filed a case against evangelical Christian preacher Scott Lively on the grounds that he has incited the persecution of homosexuals.
Lively has said that he preached nothing but the Gospel when he was in Uganda. Nevertheless, he is being sued under the “Alien Tort Statute”. This enables non-US citizens to sue Americans in US courts if they are accused of breaking international laws.
Lively is part of the ex-gay movement and believes, of course, that homosexuality is a choice, and something of which the sinner can be “cured”. He works for Abiding Truth Ministries, which is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is also the author of, among other fruity titles, a book called The Pink Swastika (1996). This argues that a certain amount of Nazis were gay, and that the gay man is a natural fascist who would take away your rights if you give him half a chance, that sort of thing. Actual historians have dismissed it as nothing more than hot air. Nevertheless, Lively aims to take away LGBT rights before the gay man takes away everyone else’s. Or something like that.
Lively is accused of conspiring with religious and political leaders in Uganda to promote anti-gay hysteria based on the ideas put forward in his writings. It is an important case because it sends a signal about how to legally oppose the increasing amount of US Right Wing Christians who are taking their sideshow on the road and poisoning the rest of the world.
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Oh lovely. Get him on the witness stand and have him tell his lies under oath. It’s my understanding that was the biggest reason Prop 8 was defeated is no one could tell their lies on the stand and risk perjury.
I find it hilarious that he wrote a book proclaiming gay men to be fascist and that we would take away rights from people if given the chance; Yet he is the one who is fighting to take the rights of the supposedly “Free” American people away. Does this theory of his work backwards as well? Wouldn’t that in fact make him gay? I love how anti lgbt people proclaim to be doing the “lords” work yet in reality it seems they are trying to hide their own common flaws.
Lol Some nazis were gay?? Gays were one of the people persecuted by the Nazis. Nazis were, however, Catholic, so that’s a strange argument to try to use.
Where does he think the Pink Triangle comes from? It was the badge worn by gays in the Nazi prison camps!
I’m not sure he does think all that much! And he’s left logic behind somewhere …
Nazis were not Catholic. Catholics were persecuted to a lesser extent but still persecuted by the regime.
The latter is true, but on the other hand, Adolf Hitler supposedly never left the Catholic Church. The relationship between Nazism and Catholicism is a complex one.
For the record, I expect there were some gay Nazis, much as there are gay Catholics and gay Muslims. Doubt they were out, but still.
Absolutely. And they were probably as hypocritical as Mr Lively (whose name, to my shame, makes it hard for me to take him seriously!)
True fact. If you truly consider all people equally, you have to allow that not all LGBTQetc. people are nice or honourable people, just like anyone else.
Completely agree. I was just about to post a comment saying there were very likely gay Nazis, gay Catholics, etc but you beat me to it. There was even an article in The Advocate about 6 years ago about gay Senators/Representatives some are totally open and some who are not that shamefully vote against bills that would help the GLBTQ movement.
For the record, there were openly gay Nazis – (see Ernst Röhm). I do hope Lively is convicted. Anyone who incites others to violence needs to be held accountable.
Yeah, and Ernst Röhm and several other members of the SA were killed during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 by members of the secret police Gestapo (led by Hermann Göring at that time), the Nazi bodyguard SS (led by Heinrich Himmler, who like Göring wanted to increase his power) and the Nazi political intelligence service SD (led by Himmler’s right hand, Reinhard Heydrich). After that, persecution of homosexual persons increased much in Germany.
Also, Röhm wasn’t quite “open” with his sexuality, it was more like it was an “open secret”.
“…a certain amount of Nazis were gay, and that the gay man is a natural fascist who would take away your rights if you give him half a chance”
It would seem that the majority of the Nazis were straight, that should therefore mean that heterosexuals are also ‘natural fascist and would also take away rights if given half the chance’. This clearly isn’t the case. This is an immaculate example trying to pass off a correlation as a cause (if we grant that some nazis were in fact gay), a hasty generalisation and not to mention special pleading.
I don’t think he’s concerned with logic in his arguments. Or history. He just wants to stir people up and he’ll use ‘false facts’ to do so.