Scott Lively is an independent candidate for governor of Massachusetts. The following is an excerpt from an Advocate article by Trudy Ring:
Antigay American minister Scott Lively claims he’s not upset that Uganda’s Constitutional Court has struck down that nation’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, saying the decision shows that Ugandans were not his “puppets in a nefarious scheme to persecute homosexuals there.”
Lively, who is facing a lawsuit over his role in spreading homophobia in Uganda, says in a column published this week that he is “waiting for calls of apology” from media outlets that have connected him to the antigay law. He says the ruling also undermines the grounds for the lawsuit, in which LGBT group Sexual Minorities Uganda contends he violated international law by preaching hatred of gays, ultimately leading to the introduction of the legislation as well as widespread antigay violence.
“The SMUG lawsuit claims that my preaching against homosexuality in Uganda overpowered the weak-minded African natives and turned them into rampaging bloodthirsty savages bent on ‘gay’ genocide,” Lively writes in the piece, published on his own website as well as the right-wing site BarbWire. He accuses “the so-called mainstream media” of buying into these “paternalistic” and “racist” beliefs.
He also argues that there has been little antigay violence in Uganda and even says that gay activist David Kato’s murder in 2011 came at the hands of “his ‘gay’ lover” — an assertion not supported by accounts of the case. In the past he has said the murderer, now convicted, was a prostitute Kato failed to pay, another unsupported claim.