Anti-LGBT Activists from 'Supernatural Ministry' Meet With Belizean Leaders

Two American anti-LGBT activists met with government, business, and media officials in Belize last Wednesday, most likely to advance the anti-gay political agenda that has in recent years led to hostility and violence against the tiny Caribbean nation’s LGBT population.

The activists, Extreme Prophetic Ministries head Patricia King and Scott Stirm, an affiliated missionary, were joined by a Canadian pastor, Wesley Campbell, who was once sanctioned for connections to a Ponzi scheme. Though their Facebook posts were short on detail, the activists said they had a “breakthrough day” and that “God is raising up a mighty group of Belizean leaders.”

Sources tell SPLC that Patrick Jason Andrews, a Belizean politician and conservative Christian media personality, was among those who met with the activists. Andrews will represent Belize's capital city, Belmopan, for Belize's main opposition party, the People's United Party, in the next general elections.

As we detailed in our report on the anti-LGBT movement in Belize, King and Stirm have extensive records of working to deny human rights to LGBT people. Together with Belizean anti-LGBT activists and the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a hardline Christian legal organization founded in 1994 as the Alliance Defense Fund, they have been fighting to keep intact Section 53 of Belize’s criminal code, which prescribes a 10-year sentence for “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any person or animal.”

King is a “prophetic personality” who claims the ability to “literally raise people from the dead like Jesus did” – watch her here in 2010. Stirm claims that gay tourists come to Belize for “a new exotic location in which to corrupt local youth” and warns that male-on-male rape will become legal if Belize’s anti-sodomy laws are repealed. Meanwhile Campbell was banned in 2006 from participating in British Columbia’s capital markets for two years after selling unregistered securities to church members who believed their investments had been approved by God.

King, Campbell and Stirm are adherents of the “Seven Mountains” movement, a Christian ideology whose proponents believe they are called to take back the “seven mountains of culture” – arts and entertainment, business, family, government, media, religion, and entertainment – from demonic forces that currently possess them.

In 2010, a Belizean LGBT rights activist named Caleb Orozco, backed by United Belizean Advocacy Movement (UNIBAM), filed suit in Belize’s highest national court, arguing that Section 53 violates provisions of the Constitution of Belize that recognize individual rights to human dignity, to be free from arbitrary or unlawful interference with one’s privacy, and to equal protection under the law.

As with Russia and Uganda, American anti-LGBT activists began working to win culture wars abroad that they had lost at home. The result in Belize has been increased hostility against the country’s  LGBT population: Orozco, as its most prominent spokesman, has personally been subjected to violence. Both he and his lawyer fear for his life.

Though King, Stirm, et al., have long been actively engaged in stirring up anti-LGBT sentiments in Belize, you’d never know it from their effervescent Facebook posts about their recent Caribbean adventures, which included stops in Cozumel and the Cayman Islands and a Super Bowl party on the high seas. Together with a group of fellow-travelers, they just wrapped up a Caribbean “ministry cruise” run by Campbell’s Eyes and Wings School of Supernatural Ministry, among whose goals is “empower the student to fulfill their God given commission: to heal the sick, raise the dead etc.”