Blurring the line between church and state (video: The Rachel Maddow Show)

It’s good to see Jim Burroway, of Box Turtle Bulletin, get a mention on The Rachel Maddow Show for his incredible work on the situation in Uganda. Check out Burroway’s timeline, called Slouching Towards Kampala: Uganda’s Deadly Embrace of Hate, that begins with three American fundamentalists traveling to Uganda to preach against the country’s gay and lesbian population and devolves into a bill pending before the African nation’s parliament that would impose the death penalty for the crime of homosexuality, under certain circumstances including being HIV-positive.

Check out Box Turtle Bulletin’s Scott Lively videos at this link.

It’s also good to see a monster, posing as a Christian, like Scott Lively get his comeuppance on national television. So great is Scott Lively’s psychopathic obsession with homosexuality that he is associated with not one but three anti-gay hate groups.

Lively, in Buroway’s video, claims to know more about homosexuality “than almost anyone in the world.” Here’s his thinking on the subject: “In reality, homosexuality is nothing more than same-gender conduct among people who are innately and unchangeably heterosexual. Homosexuality is thus biologically (and to varying degrees morally) equivalent to pedophilia, sado-masochism, bestiality and many other forms of deviant behavior.”

Lively’s insane claim is discredited by every major psychological association on the planet.

Here’s more on Scott Lively from PublicEye.org:

Scott Lively is a prominent figure in the anti-gay movement and has assisted in founding organizations in the US and abroad dedicated to this cause. He is connected with multiple conservative Christian organizations in varying roles. Lively is president of Abiding Truth Ministries, which maintains the website Defend the Family, director of The Pro-Family Law Center and state director of the American Family Association of CA. The Pro Family Charitable Trust, which donates money to anti-gay organizations, is an offshoot of Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries. Lively has also been involved as a cofounder and American envoy for the virulently anti-gay, Eastern European hate group Watchmen on the Walls.

In early 2009, along with other prominent activists in the anti-gay movement, such as Don Schmierer of Exodus International 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. Lively currently resides in Springfield, MA which is also home to a branch of a Latvian anti-gay church run by Vadim Privedenyuk that attracts many of his followers.

[ ... ]

In 2007, Lively addressed a letter to the people of Russia warning them of the threat that the homosexual agenda poses as well as steps they should take to defend themselves from its encroachment. One possible action Lively advised entailed criminalizing “the public advocacy of homosexuality,” a recommendation that has been included in the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009.

Lively has more insidious connections to Eastern Europe for his role in founding Watchmen on the Walls. The Southern Poverty Law Center states that “in Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland.”

(emphasis: mine)

An Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center connects one of Lively’s hate groups, Watchmen on the Walls to the brutal murder of a gay man, Satender Singh, in Sacramento in 2007:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them “7-Eleven workers” and “Sodomites.” The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a “good church” like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.

[ ... ]

One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.

[ ... ]

Gay rights activists blame Singh’s death on what they call “The West Coast connection” or the “U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate,” a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh’s death, which they characterized as a hate crime.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

(emphasis: mine)

Scott Lively denies having any responsibility for the Sacramento hate crime, just as he denies responsibility for Uganda’s exterminate-the-gays law, although he refers to the lecture he delivered in Uganda as a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda.”

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My posts, back to 9 March 2009, on the situation in Uganda, including many videos from The Rachel Maddow Show, can be found here.