Uganda’s “Death to Gays” bill has been brought back to the legislative forefront, but gay activists are hitting back in their own way: by filing a lawsuit against Scott Lively, a nasty anti-gay American Evangelical missionary.
Lively has cultivated homophobic sentiment by giving impassioned sermons against the LGBT community in the East African nation, and even advised Ugandan lawmakers on how to get the “Death to Gays” bill passed when it first came up in 2009.
The suit is being filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a non-profit umbrella organization for LGBT advocacy groups in Uganda. The CCR says:
The suit alleges that Lively’s involvement in anti-gay efforts in Uganda, including his active participation in the formulation of anti-gay legislation and policies aimed at revoking fundamental right from LGBT persons constitutes persecution. This is the first known Alien Tort Statute (ATS) case seeking accountability for persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Alien Tort Statute essentially allows U.S. courts to hear human-rights cases brought by foreign citizens for conduct committed outside the 50 states. Just as Lively could be held accountable for efforts to disenfranchise a minority group in America, so can he be tried for doing so in Uganda.
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Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, said back in December that he was afraid to leave his house for fear of being murdered by anti-gay thugs. Now the brave LGBT activist has decided to slam Lively with a lawsuit. Said Mugisha:
“U.S evangelical leaders like Scott Lively have actively and intensively worked to eradicate any trace of LGBT advocacy and identity. Particularly damaging has been his claim that children are at risk because of our existence. His influence has been incredibly harmful and destructive for LGBT Ugandans fighting for their rights. We have to stop people like Scott Lively from helping to codify and give legal cover to hatred.”
We’ll keep you updated on how the lawsuit progresses.
Bill Perdue
The Ugandans decision to sue is an excellent example of how we, as an international community, should approach these questions.
There can be no question about the ultimate intent of scum like Lively and Obama BBFs Warren and McClurkin in sponsoring and promoting violence against our brothers and sisters in Africa.
If the ‘Kill the Gays’ law passes there they’ll certainly try to export it to other countries, and ultimately import it back to the US, where it originated.
To back up what the Ugandans did we should continue to insist that Warren, Lively and McClurkin be prosecuted by Obama’s DoJ for interfering in the internal affairs of other nations to promote mass murder.
And we should continue to demand that Obama and Hillary Clinton open wide the doors of US embassies and consulates to those who feel threatened by anti-gay regimes like those in Uganda, Iraq and Iran.
Jeremy
Lock the fucking bastard for good. He’s indirectly responsible for the death of hundreds Ugandan gays and lesbians.
cwm
Ah, so the ostensible number-two man at the Oregon
ChristianCitizens’ Alliance (one of the earliest far-right organizations to make “special rights” a catchphrase) finally gets comeuppance. Took far too long.Nor is Uganda the only country in which Lively has been fomenting vicious, deadly homophobia. Also Latvia and Moldova.
Lively authored The Pink Swastika, a book arguing that the Nazis were an essentially gay political movement. Wonder how he explains the 50,000 or more wearing the pink triangle who were swept up in the Final Solution?
WillBFair
They should hire the guys who argued the Prop 8 case. They are the best we’ve got right now.
Bill Perdue
@WillBFair: Or SPLC, the ones who, legally of course, knocked the KKK to the ground and then kicked for a while.
Ogre Magi
I hate christians!
Joetx
And to think the fundie Christians warn us about Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on us, yet do the SAME THING in other countries.
Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Queer Supremacist
When every gentile on Earth is turned into a lampshade as a collective punishment for their 2,000 years of heresy and genocide, and their genocidal heretic cults are outlawed, then and only then will there be world peace.
Death to Christianity and Islam.
B
Readers might want to check out http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/14/scott-lively-us-pastor-anti-gay-uganda-_n_1345539.html which describes both sides of the story: Lively claims he advised the Ugandan parliament to concentrate on rehabilitation, not punishment, and that “inflamatory remarks” attributed to him were taken out of context from talks at a seminar. He’s “challenged” the plaintiffs to publish the full footage
of the seminar on the Internet.
You may or may not believe him. He’d probably demand that the jury see the whole seminar or none of it, but not selected parts of it. Putting the “full footage” “on the Internet” could be a ploy to bury anything really bad that he did in so much boring babble that people would tune out before seeing anything really incriminating (if there is anything incriminating) – it seems the seminar took up most of a day.
http://www.defendthefamily.com/pfrc/archives.php?id=2345952 has an article Lively wrote in 2009, well before the lawsuit was filed. In it, Lively stated the following: “By the way, the false accusation against me, now circulating in the US, is that I called on the Ugandan government to force homosexuals into therapy. What I actually said is that the law against homosexuality should be liberalized to give arrestees the choice of therapy instead of imprisonment, similar to the therapy option I chose after being arrested for drunk driving in 1985 (during which time I accepted the Lord and was healed and transformed into a Christian activist).” He also claimed that “the Ugandan response has been resoundingly positive.”