Metro Weekly

Anti-LGBT activist hopes for Russian-style anti-LGBT laws under President Trump

Scott Lively hopes to capitalize on backlash against "political correctness" to institute anti-gay laws

Scott Lively - Photo: Tim Pierce, via Wikimedia.
Scott Lively – Photo: Tim Pierce, via Wikimedia.

“Frankly, if Trump wins in November, then he could turn out to be like Putin in Russia…and invite the church to come back in and guide the culture, like Putin did.”

–Anti-LGBT activist Scott Lively, in a radio interview earlier this month with Mike Heath of MaineResistance, speculating on what might happen should Republican nominee Donald Trump win the presidency this November.

Lively has traveled over the world and met with lawmakers in several countries, including Russia and Uganda, urging them to pass anti-LGBT laws.

In the interview with Heath, obtained by Right Wing Watch, Lively praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for cracking down on LGBT rights, and said he hoped Donald Trump — who is himself a fan of Putin’s leadership style — would institute similar laws in the United States. Lively expressed hope that Trump’s efforts to push back against “political correctness” would create a leadership vacuum that religious leaders and social conservatives could fill and begin “shaping the culture” by promoting anti-LGBT laws.

“The culture war has always been a battle between cultural Marxists and Christians, always, especially homosexuals among the cultural Marxists,” Lively said, “and [Trump is] pushing the cultural Marxists back and that’s his primary target, political correctness, you know, the whole slate of the hard left agenda, he’s just pushing back. And that’s going to create a vacuum that the church is naturally going to fill because we’re the ones who were guiding the culture before the Marxists took it away from us.”

Lively has previously called Russia’s “gay propaganda” law that punishes people suspected of promoting homosexuality “one of the proudest achievements of my career.”

“I wish we would be able to duplicate that all over the world,” Lively said of the “gay propaganda” law. “That would really solve the problem.”

Lively, who has dedicated much of his life to combating homosexuality, is currently locked in an ongoing court battle, where he’s being sued by a Ugandan LGBT organization for his role in collaborating with Ugandan government officials to persecute and deprive LGBT people of their human rights.

The lawsuit alleges that, because of these actions, which led lawmakers to approve Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, Lively is guilty of “crimes against humanity.”

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