Lively, like many others who make a living selling fear and hate, has a failed political background. He ran for Governor of Massachusetts twice, once in 2014 and again in 2018, and failed both times. Lively has made a career out of trying to criminalize homosexuality and take away civil rights from the LGBT community. He is most infamous for his role in the Ugandan “Kill the Gays” legislation.
His group, Abiding Truth Ministries, was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group and Lively himself named an extremist. According to the SPLC,
Scott D. Lively first came to light as an anti-LGBT activist in the early 1990s in Oregon, when he was involved with the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) in a variety of capacities: executive director, finance coordinator, finance director, and communications director. The OCA had (and still has) a reputation as a vitriolic and virulently anti-LGBT organization under the leadership of ex-hippie and Vietnam veteran Lon Mabon, who left his leftist roots and became a born-again Christian.
The OCA was supported by Oregon’s branch of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and constantly worked to put draconian and far-reaching anti-LGBT measures on the state ballot. The most notorious of those was Ballot Measure 9 (1992), which would have amended the state constitution to prohibit “all governments in Oregon” from using monies or properties to “promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.” These behaviors, the text of the measure said, “are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse, and they are to be discouraged and avoided.”
To support its stance, the OCA and its supporters disseminated inflammatory pamphlets and videos, like “The Gay Agenda,” which linked homosexuality to evil, sickness, and disease. The group took out radio and newspaper ads that often linked homosexuality to pedophilia, and claimed that LGBT people were seeking “special rights” and that homosexuality is a “public health menace.”
Scott Lively, along with Kevin Abrams, produced a piece of propaganda writing in their ongoing attempt to smear the LGBT community. In 1996, Lively and Abrams published The Pink Swastika.
The central claim was that the Nazi Stormtroopers and Hitler were homosexuals and thus responsible for the Holocaust. Even though the book has been thoroughly debunked multiple times and denounced by historians,(Links here, here, here, and here) the Religious Right continues to quote from Lively’s smear propaganda to “prove” the evil nature of the LGBT community. Bryan Fischer often cites the propaganda from this pernicious book. Listen to any Religious Right conspiracy nutter, and at some point, they will quote Lively as proof of the Gay agenda.
Lively is listed as a “profit of hate” because this is how he earns his living. He packages hate under the guise of history and solicits donations to fight against “evil homosexuals.” Instead of bringing out the best in people, he brings out their dark fallen nature but turning them against a minority group. As long as he can appeal to the worst in people, he will have plenty of profit.
“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” (2 Timothy 4:3) Lively doesn’t want to teach the sound doctrine of Jesus’ words that tell us to love our neighbor, including our gay neighbor. He declares the LGBT community an enemy. He apparently forgot that Jesus also taught us the sound doctrine to love our enemies. (Matthew 5:44) Instead, he teaches what fallen people want to hear; it’s OK to hate, discriminate, and harm those who are different from you. No wonder his discredited book still sells.
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