Anti-LGBT Activist Targets ‘Gay Fascism’ Law in Springfield, Mo.

Scott Lively, the anti-gay activist behind Abiding Truth Ministries, has been engaged in a decades-long, international campaign to demonize the LGBT community. He has lobbied on behalf of a law in Uganda to make homosexuality punishable by death and has worked hard to propagate the myth that gay men caused the Holocaust.

Now, he’s turning his attention to Springfield, Mo., where he has labeled a proposed expansion of the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance a “Gay Fascism bill.”

If passed, the new law will add protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to the city’s standing law. According to local news reports, the Springfield City Council is scheduled to rule on it in August.

For Lively, who once prayed for the destruction of the Southern Poverty Law Center, such an expansion would represent a critical loss in the “war” against the “homosexual agenda.” What’s next, he asks, an all-out assault on Christianity?

“Framed as an ‘anti-discrimination’ measure it is in reality a ‘Gay Fascism’ Bill that will make disapproval of homosexuality illegal … and grant gays, lesbians and bisexuals and transgenders (GLBT) legal standing to sue their opponents, primarily Christians,” Lively wrote in a “Christian Red Alert” E-mail he sent last week. He added, “SPRINGFIELD IS NOT SAN FRANCISCO.”

Such vitriol is not surprising from Lively, who is best known for co-authoring The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, which claims “the Nazi party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.” (No serious historian agrees.) More recently, he has been involved in supporting the so-called “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda that would make homosexuality punishable by death.

Lively is traveling to Missouri tonight to address like-minded opponents of the ordinance at the Springfield library, where a group called Reclaiming Missouri for Christ has booked a room to hear his pitch. Incidentally, the group’s director, Mark Kiser, is a member of Chuck Baldwin’s “Black Regiment” – made up of gun-loving pastors whose views fall closely in line with the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

Lively’s interest in Springfield may seem arbitrary. But for many like him, the smallest efforts to afford LGBT people civil rights are met with virulent denunciations, often framed in apocalyptic terms. That much seemed true last week, when Lively appeared on the American Family Association’s radio show with Bryan Fischer.

“This is a war that we’re facing in our country,” Lively said to great praise from Fischer. “And the contest is between homosexuality and freedom. These two things are in direct contradiction to each other. And if you’re going to establish that you can’t discriminate against homosexuality, you are stating that you are going to discriminate against Christianity.”