While Russia is experiencing an increase in violence directed at gay people and enacting new laws criminalizing pro-gay speech, US Religious Right activists Scott Lively and Linda Harvey are simply denying the prevalence of anti-gay violence. In fact, Lively is blaming other gay people for the uptick in hates crimes.
On her Saturday “Mission America” radio show, Harvey said that anti-gay violence in Russia has nothing to do with the country’s anti-gay laws, while Lively explained that actually the only violence occurring is “gay-on-gay crime.”
“Russia does have nationalists, these are Nazis, the same as I wrote in the book ‘The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality and the Nazi Party,’ that’s the same thing,” Lively said. “The guys that are beating up gays in Russia—and it’s not any more prevalent than it ever has been really and it isn’t all that prevalent at all—but the ones that are doing it are butch homosexuals who are beating up effeminate homosexuals, the same thing that happened in Germany; this is gay-on-gay crime, at least that is what it appears to be.”
Lively believes that gay people controlled Nazi Germany and launched the Holocaust in order to take revenge on Jews for viewing homosexuality as a sin.
Much like in “The Pink Swastika,” Lively offers no credible evidence to back up his claims that gays in Russia are facing violence from other gay people…other than his belief that anyone who is a Nazi must be gay.
Lively also said that he met with Russian Orthodox Church’s leadership to “pitch the idea of the Russians adopting the rainbow as a Russian symbol, a Christian symbol, reclaiming the rainbow and to do the Russian Olympics under the banner of the rainbow that says ‘the rainbow belongs to God.’”
“It looks like they are going to do that,” Lively continued. “Get all the pro-family organizations to come along to declare 2014 ‘The Year of God’s Rainbow’ and all of us adopt it—I’m wearing a pin right now that says ‘Reclaim The Rainbow: Ezekiel 1:28’—I think all of us should just start taking the rainbow, putting it on our webpages, wearing it and just take it away from them, it doesn’t belong to them.”
“Fabulous, fabulous, neither does the word gay,” Harvey added.
Lively said that while the “United States is becoming a gay Soviet Union” and “collapsing into totalitarianism with a heavy gay emphasis,” Russia is emerging as a great Christian country thanks to their laws suppressing gay rights.
“I’m taking some credit for this,” he said while describing his record of anti-gay activism in Russia.
