Scott Lively in the new Russian film "Sodom"YouTube
Even though he’s running to be the governor of Massachusetts, Scott Lively makes no secret of his extreme anti-gay views. The evangelical pastor, who’s being sued by gay-rights groups for his involvement in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, has gotten flack on the campaign trail for his beliefs, even encountering some raucous booing at a gubernatorial forum earlier in the year.
Lively knows that his focus on traditional values makes him an unpopular choice in the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. “The only way Scott Lively is going to become governor of Massachusetts is by a miracle of God,” he told MassLive last month.
While Lively’s views can’t find much domestic audience, they play well in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Lively’s anti-gay zeal is on display in Sodom, a new documentary that aired on Russian television last month, to much acclaim. The film was produced by famously anti-gay TV host Arkady Mamontov, who once implied that the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion was caused by the gay rights movement. The film aired on Rossiya-1, Russia’s main government-funded TV channel.
“For American homosexuals, this man, Scott Lively, is public enemy number one,” intones the film’s narrator. On camera, Lively speaks about the gay “agenda,” which seeks “anti-discrimination policy” in the name of ultimate “societal conquest.” Lively insists that “The average American is not in favor of homosexuality. But they are afraid to speak publicly about it, because the gays have so much power and they can do harm to those people.”
Lively brings the film’s producers to the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC. Set against a dramatic soundtrack, Lively paces outside. “This organization, instead of focusing on the true needs of people around the world, they are trying to declare that homosexuality is a human right,” Lively says. “They spend vast amounts of money to promote this agenda around the world instead of defending genuine human rights.”
This is just the latest entry on Lively’s anti-gay résumé, as my colleague Mariah Blake has reported. In 1995, Lively coauthored The Pink Swastika, a book that argues that gay Nazis inspired the Holocaust because Judaism forbids homosexuality. In 2007, Lively went on a 50-city tour of Russia and other ex-Soviet republics to warn of the “homosexual agenda.” In 2009, he gave a five-hour presentation on Ugandan national television calling homosexuality a disease and claiming that gays aggressively recruit children.
It’s unclear if Lively’s segment in this film was shot before he declared his candidacy for governor in September 2013. Yet it’s a revealing comment on the state of American (and Russian) politics that a candidate can find more traction for his extreme anti-gay views in Moscow than Mattapan.
Take a look at the video below. (The Lively segment starts at 8:17; he arrives at HRC at 12:00.)
