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Fightdirecto -> American "hate group" leader goes on trial in U.S. Court 1-7-2013 (1/7/2013 8:00:42 AM)
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Washington Post
quote:
From Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights:
Is there anything extremist right-wing preachers won’t blame on LGBT people? After the Newtown shooting, James Dobson listed tolerance of gay marriage as one of the reasons God’s punishment was directed at a bunch of first graders. And who can forget the classic Jerry Falwell moment, blaming 9/11 on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle….”
It’s easy to laugh at wingnuts, but they have millions of followers and their hate, in the name of some perverted concept of God, gives moral cover to the queer bashers and bullies everywhere.
On Monday (1-7-2013), we’re going to be face to face with one of them, Scott Lively, in a courtroom in Springfield, MA. If that name isn’t familiar to you like Falwell’s or Dobson’s, that’s because Lively’s unique contribution to this anti-gay agenda is his persecution consulting in other countries, most notably Uganda, where he brags he is known as the “father” of the anti-gay movements.
Many Americans have heard of the infamous “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda, which has been introduced in several parliamentary sessions since it arose out of an anti-gay conference that Scott Lively headlined in 2009. But the day-to-day reality for LGBT Ugandans is already violence, death threats, severe discrimination and oppression. Meetings of LGBT activists are raided and shut down, and advocates have been arrested for exercising their rights to speech, assembly and association. LGBT Ugandans’ advocacy, indeed their existence, is already criminalized.
No one has done more to orchestrate this situation than Scott Lively. Since 2002, he has worked systematically to strip away human rights protections from LGBT people in Uganda and elsewhere around the world, to silence them and make it impossible for them to organize and defend their rights. While he peddles the usual, age-old lie that LGBT people are pedophiles in order to deliberately provoke the rage that feeds the growing repression and violence, he combines that myth with a new twist, that gays were also responsible for the Holocaust and that Hitler’s Germany is what can happen when a gay movement grows unchecked.
But this case isn’t simply about Lively’s “hate preach.” He long ago moved beyond “mere” hatemongering when he became a kind of persecution consultant, strategizing with influential leaders and cohorts in other countries about ways to further silence and remove LGBT people from basic protections of the law, in particular by criminalizing their advocacy. PERSECUTION, DEFINED AS THE “SEVERE DEPRIVATION OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS” ON THE BASIS OF IDENTITY, IS A CRIME UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW; TO BE EXACT, IT’S A “CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.” This deprivation of fundamental rights of LGBT communities is exactly what Lively aims to bring about. UNDER U.S. LAW, FOREIGN CITIZENS WHO ARE THE VICTIMS OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY CAN SUE AMERICAN PERPETRATORS OF SUCH CRIMES. And so Sexual Minorities of Uganda is suing Scott Lively for persecuting them. Staff from Sexual Minorities of Uganda and other LGBT advocates who have suffered persecution - arrests, raids, and other severe deprivations of basic rights - will be there on Monday, when the Center for Constitutional Rights will have the honor of representing them in court.
New York Times
quote:
The Ugandan legislature considered a bill in 2009, proposed by one of Mr. Lively’s Ugandan contacts, that would have imposed the death sentence for the “offense of homosexuality.” That bill languished after an outcry from the United States and European nations that are among major aid donors to Uganda, but was reintroduced in February 2012...
Mr. Lively is the founder and president of Abiding Truth Ministries [which has been designated as a "hate group" SPLC]. He is also the author of “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party,” which says that Nazism was a movement inspired by homosexuals, and “Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child,” a guide to prevent what he calls “pro-homosexual indoctrination.”
The Alien Tort Statute, under which Scott Lively finds himself in U.S. Federal Court, was part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 [Wikipedia] and states:
quote:
The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.
Does an American's 1st Amendment right of "Freedom of Speech" include the "Freedom of Speech" right to go to a foreign country and lobby for a law in that foreign country that would criminalize homosexuality - to include the death penalty?
[image]local://upfiles/42188/FFA74408E10A4689AB5E80A7B6BD8341.jpg[/image]
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