Better Know A Hate Group: Scott Lively And Abiding Truth Ministries

Scott Lively, when it comes to leaders of certified anti-gay hate groups, is one of the more pernicious, having extended his reach around the world. Lively is the founder of Abiding Truth Ministries, and is strongly tied to Uganda’s “Kill The Gays” bill — but that’s just for starters. Lively is also currently being sued in U.S. federal court, accused of violating international law by inciting the persecution of gays.

Our friends at GLAAD note that Scott Lively has “called for the criminalization of ‘the public advocacy of homosexuality’,” “is directly linked to anti-gay legislation in Uganda, which makes simply being gay punishable by death,” and “said: ‘The gay movement is an evil institution that’s goal is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity in which there’s no restrictions on sexual conduct except the principle of mutual choice’.”

READ: ‘Kill The Gays’ Architect Scott Lively Pushes Claim ‘Obama May Be Gay And Previously Married To A Man’

Earlier this year, Lively was an invited speaker at a Tea Party rally in Boston, during which he called gays “anarchists” who use “fascist tactics” to “prevent you from being able to have civilization.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries an active anti-gay hate group. Here’s what the SPLC says about his Massachusetts-based organization:

Abiding Truth Ministries serves mainly as a launching pad for an international anti-gay campaign. Its founder, Scott Lively, is also responsible for a book, widely cited by gay-bashers, accusing homosexuals of running the Nazi Party.

Lively first emerged as an anti-gay activist when he became communications director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which was backing that state’s notorious Measure 9 vote in 1992. The measure, which failed, would have added language to the state constitution listing homosexuality, along with pedophilia and masochism, as “abnormal behavior.” Lively later served as California director of the American Family Association, another particularly hard-line anti-gay group (see below).

Lively is best known for co-authoring, with Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The book makes a series of claims that virtually no serious historian agrees with: that Hitler was gay, that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic homosexuals,” and that gays were especially selected for the SS because of their innate brutality. The claims are entirely false; in fact, the Nazis murdered significant numbers of gays and made homosexuality a death penalty offense in 1942. In the foreword, Abrams adds that homosexuality is “primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it. … They have no idea of how to act in the best interests of their country… . Their intention is to serve none but themselves.”

Lively has taken his message abroad to Eastern Europe (see Watchmen on the Walls, below), Africa and Russia. In a 2007 open letter to the Russian people, he asserted that “homosexuality is a personality disorder that involves various, often dangerous sexual addictions and aggressive, anti-social impulses.” In 2009, he went to Uganda to speak at a major conference on the evils of homosexuality, saying, among other things: “The gay movement is an evil institution. The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” He also met with Ugandan lawmakers. A month after Lively left the country, a bill was introduced that called for the death penalty for certain homosexual acts and prison for those who fail to disclose gays’ identities.

The SPLC explains their decision to include an organization on it’s active anti-gay hate groups list:

“Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.” Instead,… “the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling.”

The SPLC also recently took on World Net Daily, home to Scott Lively (read all the way to the end):

WorldNetDaily (WND) describes itself as “an independent news company dedicated to uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty.” The online newspaper, which this year celebrated its 15th year in operation, is one of the “very few sources” martial artist and action film hero Chuck Norris (who happens to be a columnist) trusts for news and an operation that megachurch pastor Greg Laurie (also a columnist) says does “a service to God and Country.”

WND is the brainchild of Joseph Farah, a self-described “radical” and longtime antigovernment propagandist and apologist for the Confederacy who believes “cultural Marxists” are plotting “to transform our political system, to change the way we think, to attack our values, to demean our faith in God, to reduce that shining city on the hill to the status of a drab public-housing project.”

Together with a coterie of antigovernment “Patriots,” anti-gay activists, white nationalists, Muslim-bashers, conspiracy theorists, end-times prophets and ultraconservative hardliners, Farah — who did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article — has built WND into a modest media empire including a book imprint, an online subscription-only “intelligence resource,” and a glossy, full-color monthly magazine. At press time, Alexa, which ranks websites, said WND was the 1,832nd most popular website in the world and the 423rd in the U.S. — just above the site for Nickelodeon and a few notches below Victoria’s Secret.

WND’s point of view is best described as a cross between the now-defunct supermarket tabloidWeekly World News, which was famous for reporting on Elvis sightings, and The New American, a monthly magazine published by the far-right, conspiracist John Birch Society. In its 15 years online, it has introduced readers to a smorgasbord of bizarre ideas, specializing in anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and anti-liberal propaganda; antigovernment conspiracy theories; and end-times prophecy.

It featured a six-part series claiming (falsely) that soybean consumption causes homosexuality and promoted Scott Lively’s vile opus The Pink Swastika, which says that gays were behind the Holocaust. It has identified the first “leftist” as Satan, and declared that Muslims have a “20-point plan for conquering the United States by 2020.” It has warned of secret plans to create a North American Union, advised readers to invest all their assets in gold, and promoted myriad, if conflicting, theories about when and how the world will end.

And why mention all this?

Scott Lively’s op-ed at World Net Daily yesterday: “The Strange, Strange Story of ‘Gay Fascism’ Deniers“:

There has been an article floating around the Internet for a long time by a self-described “gay left-wing man” named Johann Hari, a columnist for the London Independent. The article is titled “The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists,” and you can read it for yourself at the vehemently pro-”gay” Huffington Post website. It contains the remarkably forthright admission that homosexuality and fascism have always gone hand in hand. Hari writes:

“The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was – including the gay-gassing, homocidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past 30 years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is – in part, at least – a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.”

Yes, in Scott Lively’s world, anything you read at the Huffington Post is true.

Scott Lively runs an anti-gay hate group. That’s what you need to know.