A controversial evangelical currently on trial for crimes against humanity has written a new online column in which he claims that same-sex marriage and LGBT equality will signal the end of human rights.
Scott Lively, a U.S. evangelist and outspoken supporter of Uganda's extreme political persecution of gays and lesbians, published his article entitled "The Death of Human Rights" on Jan. 21 for Defend the Family International, a site closely affiliated with Lively.
The essay begins with a shot at "left wing activists" using International Human Rights Day as a way to "attack Christianity and champion sexual perversion." Religious freedoms and family values have been protected for 4,000 years, according to Lively, while "the 'right' of homosexuality is an invention of modern liberalism."
Lively then goes to cite the Magna Carta, the early 13th century English document said to have influenced the Founding Fathers. The self-proclaimed "human rights attorney" blamed the rise of the gay movement and its "right to sodomy" for the collapse of the principles outlined in the British treaties:
This principle [or religious freedom], established in the bedrock of British jurisprudence in 1215, stood unshakable for nearly 800 years until the rise of the "gay" movement which has in just the past decade achieved the power to redefine religious liberty as "homophobia" and to crush it under the heels of its pink jackboots.
The only thing standing between human rights and the homosexual agenda, Lively writes, is the First Amendment, "the last bastion of freedom for Christians:"
If the First Amendment falls to the “gays” like the Magna Charta did, true human rights will be finished in America (and by extension the rest of the western world).
Lively appeared in Massachusetts federal court on Jan. 9 in a pre-trial hearing. The Sexual Minorities of Uganda and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have filed suit against Lively, alleging that the evangelist "waged a decade-long campaign to persecute gays in Uganda," according to the Associated Press. Lively's activities in 2009 are said to have led to the drafting of a bill -- often referred to as the "Kill the Gays" bill -- that imposes harsh penalties on "the offense of homosexuality," The New York Times notes.
A day after his hearing, Lively gave an interview with the American Family Association, in which he claimed the cataclysmic Noah's flood from the Old Testament was punishment from God for the "writing of wedding songs to homosexual marriage."
Read Lively's full essay here.