Scott Lively, Gays, and the Nazi Party

Jim Burroway

June 23rd, 2009

Anti-gay extremist and historical revisionist Scott Lively has been much in the news earlier this year when he participated in an anti-gay conference in Uganda alongside Exodus board president Don Schmierer. During his talk there, he quoted extensively from his book, The Pink Swastika, which posits that the Nazi movement was, at its core, a homosexual movement, and that the LGBT movement today is, in essence, a fascist movement. Despite the historical record to the contrary, Lively blames gays for the rise of Nazism and for the Holocaust itself, and claims that “the connection between homosexualism and fascism is not incidental.”

Photo by David Albers/Naples Daily News

Photo by David Albers/Naples Daily News

This claim might come as a surprise to the many participants of Springfield, Missouri’s recent PrideFest, which was targeted for protestby members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement. That claim would also come as quite a surprise for Naples, Florida resident and PFLAG member Ruth Dorfman, who found swastikas painted on her garage door after an article she wrote appeared in the local paper about a PFLAG event.

Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton has undertaken a remarkable series of posts which methodically dissects The Pink Swastikaand looks at the historical distortions behind it. Many LGBT people might find Throckmorton’s work in this area a pleasant surprise. As a conservative Christian psychologist, Throckmorton has supported the right of counselors and ministries to offer ex-gay therapies. Earlier in the decade, Throckmorton worked with PFOX in their efforts to oppose sex education curriculum in a suburban Washington, D.C. which was friendly to gay students, and he produced the video I Do Exist which promoted ex-gay therapy.

In recent years, he has moved away from those activities without disavowing them explicitly, although he has since become a harsh critic of PFOX and its founder, Richard Cohen. He has also become a critic of anti-gay groups like the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) when they distort the scientific record. And he criticized Exodus over their board member’s participation in the Uganda anti-gay conference.

Throckmorton’s series of posts examining The Pink Swastika, as I said, are quite remarkable and thorough. For two of those posts, he brought in Jon David Wyneken, Associate History Professor at Grove City College, who described several instances of blatant distortion of the source material Lively and his co-author, Kevin Abrams, used in their book. In his latest post, Throckmorton examine Lively and Abrams’ linkage between Friedrich Nietzsche and Nazism and finds it lacking. He promises to offer a similar examination of other historical figures in future posts.

Throckmorton hasn’t been content to publish this material on his web site and leave it there. He has also written articles on the subject for Opposing Views and the conservative Christian Post, bringing his important work before a wider audience. Scott Lively, whose Abiding Truth Ministries is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-gay hate groups, was annoyed to discover one of those posts on one of his “favorite Christian websites” and decided it could only mean one thing: Throckmorton has gone to the ‘dark side’.”

Here is Throckmorton’s complete coverage of Lively’s work so far:

May 28: Scott Lively Wants Off SPLC Hate Group List
May 31: Eliminating Homosexuality: Modern Uganda and Nazi Germany
June 3: Before The Pink Swastika
June 4: Kevin Abrams: The Other Side of The Pink Swastika
June 8: A Historian’s Analysis of The Pink Swastika, Part 1
June 9: A Historian’s Analysis of The Pink Swastika, Part 2
June 11: American Nazi Movement and Homosexuality: How Pink Is Their Swastika?
June 15: Nazi Movement Rallies Against Gays In Springfield, MO
June 17: Does Homosexuality Lead To Fascism?
June 23: The Pink Swastika and Friedrich Nietzsche
June 29: The Pink Swastika and The Hidden Holocaust?
July 6: The Pink Swastika and Hate 2 Hope

Priya Lynn

June 23rd, 2009

I had an email exchange with Lively, in addition to repeating his lies about the Nazis being gays he claimed that he “cared” about gays. He was totally disingenous, refusing to answer my pointed questions, instead preferring to attempt to change the subject away from the things he couldn’t answer and to his lies about gay Nazis.

AJD

June 23rd, 2009

I had an exchange with him several years ago and got similar results. He also suggested that I go to Exodus’s Web site.

William

June 23rd, 2009

Scott Lively’s account of the Theosophical Society in “The Pink Swastika” provides a good example of his worthless “scholarship”. Lively seems to think that this piece of Victorian eccentricity was some kind of outfit for “promoting” homosexuality. His evidence is:

(1) Madame Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, MIGHT have been a lesbian.

(2) Blavatsky’s friendship with Mrs Annie Besant, who became the leader of the Theosophical movement after Blavatsky’s death, MIGHT have been of a lesbian nature.

(3) Charles Webster Leadbeater, a renegade Church of England curate who abandoned his ministry, joined the TS, was later irregularly consecrated a bishop by another schismatic bishop and formed his own “Liberal Catholic Church”, was almost certainly a pederast. (He’s right on this one.)

Needless to say, Lively ignores any facts that might cast doubt on (1) and (2), which rest on an extremely flimsy foundation to start with, and suppresses the fact that Leadbeater was pressured into resigning from the Society as soon as his hanky-panky was discovered and was allowed to resume his place in the Society later only after Mrs Besant (no doubt gullibly) had been persuaded that he had mended his ways.

I see from Warren’s web-site that Lively, in his book “The Poisoned Stream”, claims also to have discovered “gay fingerprints” on “the Spanish Inquisition, the French ‘Reign of Terror’, the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American slavery”. (I wonder what else. The Mafia? The Camorra? The Bermuda Triangle?)

It’s all rather reminiscent of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”, which at least wasn’t presented as more than a novel, even if its author did make spurious claims about the alleged historical facts on which it was based. As a journalist remarked at the time, “Everyone except the Abominable Snowman seems to be in on this.”

Lively’s method is basically a simple one, and we can all do it if we have the necessary time, energy and degree of fanaticism. You start by taking any organization or movement that your readers are likely to disapprove of. Then you look for people associated with it who were homosexual; since a proportion of the world’s population have always been homosexual, you’re almost certain to find some – even if only closeted ones, and even in homophobic movements. If you find yourself short of definites, settle for possibles. Add an immense amount of fanciful conjecture and ignore or distort any facts that conflict with your thesis. Stir it all together and Bob’s your uncle.

Frankly, I suspect that Scott Lively is a monomaniac.

Priya Lynn

June 23rd, 2009

Very interesting William. It almost makes me laugh that he’s trying to blame all those things on gays – the guy is clearly a nutcase.

AJD

June 23rd, 2009

It would make me laugh too, if not for the fact that he’s obviously a liar as well (and people have a tendency to believe lies after repeating them for a long enough time) and is perpetuating these lies in order to incite hostility and violence against gays.

jim

June 23rd, 2009

I once saw a gay porno with nazis. Is that what Nicely calls documentation?

TJ McFisty

June 23rd, 2009

“Mr. Lively, please show me on the person where the doll touched you.”

Brad

June 23rd, 2009

Today’s post, and its reference to Lively’s participation in the anti-gay conference in Uganda, made me realize I have not seen a post on the Gay Uganda blog in three weeks. Do you have any contact there? Is he ok?

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