Profile: Scott Lively

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Political Research Associates

scott_lively-250x300 On February 26, 2013, Boston Magazine published a lengthy article on “The Crusader: Anti-Gay Pastor Scott Lively Explores Run for Governor,” following Lively’s November 2012 announcement that he was considering a bid for Massachusetts governor. Who is Scott Lively?

Lively currently faces a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), for the persecution of LGBTQ persons in Uganda. In early 2009, along with other prominent antigay activists, such as Don Schmierer of Exodus International, an ex-gay organization, and Caleb Lee Brundidge of Extreme Prophetic Ministries, Lively presented at an anti-homosexuality conference in Uganda. Given the already tense relations in the country over issues of homosexuality, the event helped to ignite outbursts of violence and discrimination against individuals accused of being gay, including the 2009 introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality or “Kill the Gays” Bill introducing the death penalty for homosexual acts (which has now been resurrected). Lively says he is known as the “Father of the Ugandan Pro-Family Movement.”

Lively has assisted in founding organizations in the U.S. and abroad dedicated to furthering his extreme antigay agenda. Lively is founder and president of Abiding Truth Ministries, which maintains the website Defend the Family; founder of ATM’s Pro-Family Law Center; and former state director of the American Family Association of CA. The Pro Family Charitable Trust, which donates money to antigay organizations, is another ATM offshoot. Lively has also been a cofounder and American envoy for the virulently antigay Eastern European hate group Watchmen on the Walls. He resides and runs a Christian coffee house in Springfield, MA.

In October 2012, leading up to his gubernatorial announcement, Lively launched the King Josiah Project, “to begin challenging movements and ideologies in Massachusetts which he perceives as being most responsible for the moral and economic degeneration of Springfield and the state. These include in order of destructiveness: The abortion industry, the homosexual movement, the public education system, corrupt elements in state government, and a broken social welfare system that breeds dependency instead of rebuilding lives.” Read More →

Scott Lively Held to Account Back Home for Anti-Gay Persecution in Uganda

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Frederick Clarkson

Yesterday, I and about 40 others crammed into the Springfield, MA, office of Arise for Social Justice, fresh from the first oral hearing of the lawsuit brought by Ugandan gay rights activists against Scott Lively–the notorious holocaust revisionist who, as PRA broke in 2009, traveled to Uganda to promote the virulent homophobia that lead to the “kill the gays” bill. A delegation from Uganda, attorneys and staff from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and local supporters celebrated that whatever the suit’s outcome, Lively was being held to account.

The suit by Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG), filed last spring with the aid of CCR, hinges on the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign victims of crimes under international law access to American courts. In recent decades, the law has been used by human rights activists on behalf of victims of governments, multinational corporations, and other private actors; however, SMUG vs. Lively is unprecedented as the first case such case brought to protect LGBTQ rights.

Scott Lively, who lives in Springfield, is accused of the crime of “persecution” as defined under international law by systematically seeking to deprive people of their fundamental rights not only of life, but of equality under the law including equal rights of speech, assembly, and association. Persecution is defined here as the “severe deprivation of fundamental rights” on the basis of identity, a “crime against humanity.”

Lively’s teaching that LBGTQ people are, among other things, predatory pedophiles has fueled rage against people not because of what they have done, but because of who they are. Even though Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill has not yet (and may never be) passed, CCR argues that both government officials and private groups are acting as though it has. SMUG members and those they represent live in fear of their lives and possible arrest, receive death threats, and are excluded from HIV-related education and health services. Meetings are raided and leaders and attendees rounded-up and arrested. Read More →

Lively’s Lies: A Profile of Scott Lively

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Jim Burroway

Scott Lively.

The Uganda Speech

In March 2009, Scott Lively traveled more than 8,000 miles from his home in Springfield, Massachusetts, to talk to a small audience at the Triangle Hotel in Kampala, Uganda, about homosexuality. “My name is Scott Lively,” he began. “I’m married. I have four children. I am 51 years old, and I have been studying this issue for twenty years, and I want to tell you why I’m doing that.”[i]

Presenting his educational background, he explained that he is both a pastor who has studied scripture and an attorney “trained in secular reasoning.” He graduated magna cum laude with a doctorate from Trinity Law School in Santa Anna, California, and has a doctor of theology from the Pentecostal Assemblies of God.

In addition, he said, he holds “a certificate in human rights from the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.” “I stand before you a world traveler, having spoken on this topic in almost forty countries,” he said. “I’ve written several books.”