California GOP Group Hosts Author Who Claims Gays Behind Holocaust

A chapter of a group once described by Ronald Reagan as the “conscience of the Republican Party” has announced plans to host a speech by the author of a book that falsely claims that homosexuals largely orchestrated the Holocaust. The Murrieta-Temecula Republican Assembly, a local chapter of the conservative GOP activist group California Republican Assembly, says it will hear on April 3 from Scott Lively — a man it boastfully describes as “The Pastor Vilified by the Newspapers as a Hater Because of his stand Against the Promotion of Homosexuality.”

Lively, who runs Abiding Truth Ministries, co-authored the notorious book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party and claims that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.” The book’s crude thesis, that gay men played instrumental roles in forming the Third Reich and carrying out the Holocaust, has been thoroughly discredited by real historians. (Lively’s speech to the Murrieta-Temecula group is entitled “The Pink Swastika.”) Lively is also co-founder of the anti-gay hate group Watchmen on the Walls.

The Murrieta-Temecula Republican Assembly’s leader did not return a message left by Hatewatch, but its website, adorned with the words “God Bless America,” does note that Lively “is called a ‘Hater’ by the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center.” (The SPLC lists Abiding Truth Ministries as a hate group because of its promotion of clearly false allegations about homosexuals.) CRA President Mike Spence said that local chapters like Murrieta-Temecula operate independently.

March has been a busy month for Lively. Just a few weeks ago, he flew to the Ugandan capital of Kampala for an anti-gay conference, where he argued that gays and lesbians should be forced into conversion therapy as an “alternative” to Uganda’s current criminal punishment for homosexuality: life in prison. Lively compared the lives of lesbians and gays to those of alcoholics, claiming that “to give arrestees the choice of therapy instead of imprisonment [is] similar to the therapy option I chose after being arrested for drunk driving in 1985 (during which time I accepted the Lord and was healed and transformed into a Christian activist).”

For years, Temecula was the home base of Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries.  But he has recently relocated his operations to Springfield, Mass. He also keeps up a busy speaking schedule in Russia and various former Soviet republics, promoting his book.