Anti-LGBT Activist Scott Lively Returns to Russia
Scott Lively, the virulently anti-LGBT activist currently being sued for human rights violations regarding his role in the notorious anti-gay bill in Uganda, is in Russia this week participating in a planning committee meeting of the World Congress of Families (WCF), which was held October 15-17 in Moscow.
Since 1997, the WCF has held a gathering of right-wing groups in major cities around the world every two years (though more recently, they’ve been meeting once a year). The WCF met this past May in Sydney, Australia. The group’s 2014 conference is scheduled for September in Moscow. Opening ceremonies are slated for the Kremlin.
This isn’t the first time Lively has gone to Russia. He did an extensive tour beginning in the fall of 2006, in which he claims he met with religious officials and scholars. In a recent interview, Lively took some credit for Russia’s passage of a bill that bans “homosexual propaganda.” Since the passage of the bill, violence against LGBT people in the country appears to have increased. In a September interview with the viciously anti-LGBT Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, Lively claimed that the passage of the Russian law was “one of the proudest achievements of my career.”
Lively blogged his latest travels Oct. 18 on his site, and also stated that he met with and did a television show with Russian Orthodox archpriest Dmitri Smirnov, who Lively referred to as head of the Patriarch’s Commission on the Family. The Patriarch, in Orthodox tradition, is equivalent to the Pope. The current Patriarch, Kirill I of Moscow, recently declared gay marriage a “dangerous apocalyptic symptom.”
Lively contended that Smirnov is “very receptive” to his latest plan, which he’s calling “The Rainbow Belongs to God Strategy.” Lively wants Russia to reclaim the rainbow for God by flying a rainbow flag over the 2014 Olympics in Sochi and allow rainbows to appear everywhere at the Games, thus somehow blunting their use as a symbol of LGBT pride and unity. “With a simple judo move,” Lively says, “the Russians could catch the ‘gays’ in their own trap, and at the same time rescue God’s rainbow from being dragged in the mud.”