Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Scott Lively – why you should care, why you should go!
By Cathy Kristofferson, December 23, 2012.
On Monday January 7th 2013 in Federal Court Springfield, opening oral arguments will be heard for the motion to dismiss the case of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) v. Scott Lively. This is not the defendant’s first attempt at dismissal of this case brought against him by The Center for Constitutional reform under the Alien Tort Act.
Lively is of course claiming his First Amendment right of Freedom of Speech and Religion. This historic case against Lively is for crimes against humanity, for persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It is a first case of its kind anywhere in the world and it is happening here in Massachusetts now that Scott Lively and his Abiding Truth Ministries – Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group – reside here in the Commonwealth.
For many years Scott Lively has travelled not just our country but the entire world spewing his own special form of hate and persecution imparting his own unique ‘knowledge’ of the ‘Gay Agenda’. He claims he “knows more than almost anyone else in the world” about homosexuality.
In 2009, he brought his theory and his purposeful anti-LGBTI agenda to a Uganda workshop and a month or so later the Ugandan Parliament suddenly saw the introduction of what is now known as the ‘Kill The Gays Bill’, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, with harsh penalties that currently includes the death penalty.
Scott Lively bragged that he had created a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Oh, and don’t believe the rumors from the BBC or the AP or even Lively’s latest posted missive about the death penalty being removed as the bill cannot actually be modified until it is officially debated in the Ugandan Parliament.
Why should we care about what is happening in Uganda thanks to American Evangelicals? Because if you’ve listened to the crowing of Lively, Perkins, Fischer, and others of that ilk following the bill’s reappearance on the Ugandan Parliament’s agenda in November you’ll have heard that it is exactly what they envision for the US too!
Not as likely to happen here as it seems in Uganda where it enjoys a 96% favorability rating thanks to the decades of lies spread throughout the African continent about how the American and European gays are coming for their children to recruit them into homosexuality, and how pray-away-the-gay really works, no really, and a whole host of other ridiculous unfounded claims easy to dispel if you have access to facts.
Here in the US, Scott Lively recently traveled to Springfield Missouri to lend his hand to derail that city’s proposed sexual orientation nondiscrimination ordinance, which he called a “Gay Fascism Bill” for which he now brags that he should be called in whenever a ‘Trojan Horse for the Gay Agenda’ like that crops up because surely he is the only one who can extinguish them as he claims to have done there.
So our LGBT brothers and sisters in Missouri will continue to be fired, evicted, and denied their civil rights thanks to our Commonwealth’s resident.
Keeping in mind the more they succeed, the more emboldened they become everywhere. Here in the Commonwealth, we remember how public accommodations were removed from the Trans Civil Rights Bill. Are you good with all that? Are you okay with death and life imprisonment penalties for gays and their allies? If not, please consider attending the court hearing to show support that this demonization of the gay and trans communities must stop everywhere.
What: Oral argument on Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss in SMUG v. Lively
Where: Hampden Courtroom, Federal Courthouse, 300 State St., Springfield, MA
When: Monday, January 7, 2013 at 11:00 a.m.
Please visit the CCR website for background and all filings in the case itself: http://www.ccrjustice.org/get-involved/calendar/pack-courtroom-support-sexual-minorities-uganda
By Cathy Kristofferson
GetEQUAL/MA and Stop The Hate and Homophobia Coalition Springfield
Contact Editor: [email protected]
*All quotes can readily be found on the internet via Google or simply at http://scottlively.net
SEE ALSO
Scott Lively’s Year of the Smear 2012
By Melanie Nathan, December 23, 2012.
Scott Lively, the fervently homophobic anti-gay Pastor, currently being sued by the CCR for his direct involvement on persecuting the Ugandan LGBT community. is playing the victim card, yet again. In a post on his blog which he entitles “Year of the Smear,” Lively reveals his wounds. Yes indeed he became the open target of those seeking reparation for the harm he has caused and yes he became the target of protests for his act of extreme unkindness, dare I say HATE, and all in the name of (his version) of Christianity. – http://oblogdeeoblogda.me/2012/12/23/scott-livelys-year-of-the-smear-2012/
AND other Related articles:
- Ugandan President Museveni and Scott Lively Play Gay (oblogdeeoblogda.me)
- Ugandan Award Winning Activist Frank Mugisha Joins U.S. Protests (oblogdeeoblogda.me)
- Targeting United States Senators complicit with Evangelicals in the export of hate to Uganda to Kill the Gays (oblogdeeoblogda.me)
- Scott Lively’s Year of the Smear 2012 (oblogdeeoblogda.me)
Melanie I am afraid that you need to do Anthropological research to know more about Africa and why we have a 5000 year old tradition and values which find sodomy an abominable and barbaric culture. You are either ignorant or grotesquely misled to claim that Europeans taught us that sodomy is evil in the last few decades. This paragraph below shows that your sources are biased fringe sodomites who are ranting for you what you want to hear. I invite you to come and spend some time with our Tribal and Clan elders so you can understand. We can travell to Karamoja where sodomy, adultery and beastiality is punished instantly, West Nile, Bunyoro, Toro, Buganda, Busoga or the sons of Bamasaba who circumcise. You will get a better view of who we are not the San Francisco view. You may even get a real Mugishu man to marry you and cure you of having to resort to bananas or vibrators for conjugal relations.
“Not as likely to happen here as it seems in Uganda where it enjoys a 96% favorability rating thanks to the decades of lies spread throughout the African continent about how the American and European gays are coming for their children to recruit them into homosexuality, and how pray-away-the-gay really works, no really, and a whole host of other ridiculous unfounded claims easy to dispel if you have access to facts.”
Martin Ssempa – I am presuming you are the Pastor Ssempa that:
1. has co-authored Uganda’s 2004 “Abstinence and Being Faithful” AIDS policy and so while purporting to be a general in the fight vs AIDS is probably responsible for it on many levels
2. in October 2012, Ssempa and five other individuals were convicted in Buganda Road Court of conspiring to tarnish a rival pastor’s reputation by falsely accusing him of engaging in homosexuality. The guilty verdict stemmed from a May 2009 incident in which Ssempa and the others engaged in a conspiracy to coerce a male church member at Robert Kayanja’s Rubaga Miracle Center Cathedral to claim that he had sexual relations with Kayanja. The six individuals, including Ssempa, were sentenced to a fine of one million shillings each (about US$390) and one hundred hours of community service;
3. Ssempa is the Pastor who a source informed me may have gone through reparative therapy to try and cure his own homosexuality – but continues to be obsessed with sodomy, of course this remains unverifiable,
OH and let me remind you,
1.I was born in Africa and grew up amongst the Xhosa people, I saw Makweta, I know Shaka Zulu allowed his men msm so that they could bond in war, my mother is buried in the Chieftains grave of the Tswana people in Africa there is nothing you can teach me ; I studied anthropology at an African University …I could go on;
2. I was born a lesbian and nothing can change that and your idea that male rape would cure G-d’s appointed choice of sexuality is indicative of your ignorance – the idea that anyone can pray the gay away indicates your desire to continue to live in your cave –
Cure for gay or change of sexuality is not possible as proven by scientists. “PRAY the gay away” is quackery. Even your good friend Rick Warren has come to realize that.
I have been married to a man and nothing about men can turn me straight – that is for sure.
3. Recruitment into homosexuality is an absolute impossible and complete junk and you know it. That is why you almost went to jail setting someone up with your lies.
I dont know where you got that quote from – sources are different to commentators.Your quote is a commentator who can be any random person. People can comment on my site just like u are doing, but you are not a source.
Please Ssempa, you can surely come up with something a little more profound than this drivel. Maybe its not really you! I thought you would have something much more meaningful and coherent to say.
Cathy, great article! Melanie, awesome written body slam! Oh, and somebody please let me know when are these hypercritical hypocrites going to STFU and go away and leave atheists, agnostics, Buddhists (like myself) and other who do not subscribe to their bastardized psuedo-religiosity ALONE? Clogging our courts with their selfish, prickish actions for alleged damages when they in fact are the one inflicting the damage. In the U.S., free speech seems to mean you can criticize others for failing to believe as you do. Well, I am certainly not going to criticize any woman for loving women at times the very same ways I do; after all, their beauty is nearly always brighter and far less flawed than that of men, IMHO, and their bodies a veritabe wonderland of treasures. Whereas men do not offer such bounty, pretty much just mechanics and strength. A woman’s loving of women does me no harm, does not diminish me in any way, and gives me joy because it means that one less of my sisters will be treated badly by one of my errant, careless and/or selfish brothers. I am so damn sick and tired of men carrying a torch for some B.S. opinion just so they can occupy a bully pulpit to somehow fortify their failure as men, in a vain and wasted attempt to resolve their emasculation issues. PFT! As men we must work harder to be good than women need to, and we should honor our sisters for their basic goodness, gentleness, kindness and incredible tolerance. Of the women in prison around the world, the vast majority of them are locked up because of a man’s decision more than their own evil acts; the rest have become animalistic like the men in their lives, and truly are hardened criminals. Funny, though, I don’t find the world’s men raising billions of loving children who grow into loving, tolerant adults. It’s the WOMEN who manage that amazing feat. Men, we need to STFU and do what is right, and be glad for the privilege of being amongst creatures whose truth, love and respect we must struggle to be worthy of while resisting urges to damage their dignity for the sake of our ego’s. Oh, and RESPECTING the beauty by asking to paint, photograph, or write about it occasionally might be a soothing balm, and a good way to tame the beast inside us, which is generally only a destroyer, not a builder. The best men I have ever known DISCIPLINED the Beast and were RESPECTED by women for that. COME ON! We can be better than we think, and better than we have been.
So when your President Museveni told the BBC that “homosexuality has long been practiced in Africa from long before the arrival of the Europeans” he was lying? You claim to be stating 5000 years of history but I think you are just viewing African history through your colonialism lens again? And why is that homosexuality is seen as a neocolonial imposition while evangelical Christianity is not.
And recommending ‘corrective’ rape as a cure when nothing is wrong? What is the cure for your serial falsehoods I wonder when Proverbs 12:22 says Lying lips are abomination to the Lord…