World in View

by Gerry Emmett

U.S. preacher and bigot Scott Lively will have to face charges of human rights violations in a Massachusetts courtroom. The charges were brought under a little-used law called the Alien Tort Statute. Foreign survivors of human rights abuses can sue the perpetrators of the abuses in the U.S.

Lively is best known as promoter of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill. His homophobic preaching has led to persecution and death among African Gays. In this he is reminiscent of the U.S. “religious” figures who supported terrorist movements targeting Angola and Mozambique in the 1980s—forerunners of today’s fundamentalist terrorists.

The suit is being brought by Sexual Minorities Uganda, supported by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

Under Lively’s influence, Ugandan lawmakers crafted bills to criminalize the practice and advocacy of LGBT rights, and to paint Gays in particular as pedophiles. Not only were these bills introduced into Uganda’s Parliament, but harassment and assaults on LGBT people increased. Activist David Kato, of Sexual Minorities Uganda, was one of those killed.

Lively is a crazed homophobe who believes that Gays were responsible for the Holocaust (laid out in his book, The Pink Swastika) and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

While he has legal troubles in regard to Uganda, Lively has found a new favorite country in Russia. The current vicious anti-LGBT climate there suits him well, and perhaps owes a little to his 2006 50-city preaching tour. In the reactionary Russian churchmen cultivated under Putin’s rule, a crazed American fundamentalist can find lots of common interests.