Box Turtle Bulletin

Moldova To Consider Russia-Style “Homosexual Propaganda” Ban

The European Parliament’s Intergroup on LGBT Rights has warned that the parliament of Moldova is set to consider a Russian-style “homosexual propaganda ban.” Like Russia’s law passed in 2013, the Moldova law would impose fines for spreading “homosexual propaganda” to minors “through public meetings, the media, the Internet,” and other means. The Culture and Education Committee of the Moldovan Parliament green-lighted the bill last month. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty:

The latest salvo in Moldova’s long-running cultural conflict was fired by the Socialist Party, the parliament’s largest party. They brought the measure to committee on May 25, four years to the day after the country adopted a European Union-backed antidiscrimination law that social conservatives angrily opposed. Since that law was adopted, “homosexual propaganda in Moldova has become more aggressive,” the new bill’s sponsors wrote.

“What we are talking about is the public impact,” Socialist deputy Vlad Batrancea told RFE/RL. “We want to ban the propaganda of this phenomenon because there is the danger that children might fall victim to it in schools. This danger is real because so many parents are working abroad and the children left behind are vulnerable to such actions.”

Igor Dodon

Moldova’s parliament rejected an attempt to overturn the anti-discrimination law earlier this year. According to RFE/RL, Moldova’s parliament is nearly evenly split between the socially-conserviatve Socialists and Communists on one side, and three generally pro-European parties on the other. Observers believe the bill may be a bid to increase Socialist Party leader Igor Dodon’s popularity in the upcoming presidential elections. Dodon has called for closer political and economic relations with Moscow, and was a featured speaker at last month’s World Congress of Families in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Moldova passed a similar law in May of 2013, but it was quietly rescinded when it became clear that the legislation would threaten Moldova’s bid for Association status with the European Union. Moldova and the EU reached an initial agreement for Association status in 2014. That agreement must still be ratified by EU member countries.

Ulrike Lunacek, a Green party Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Austria and co-President of the EU’s Intergroup on LGBT Rights, called the recent developments “worrying.” “She added, “However, as a European state cherishing European values of freedom, equality and non-discrimination, I am confident Moldova and the majority of her lawmakers, will resist the Russian-inspired anti-propaganda bill.”

The Intergroup’s Vice President Tanja Falon, Social Democratic MEP from Slovenia, said, “Although the content of the bill worries us, I am glad to see that there are politicians speaking out against the bill. It is simply unacceptable that people could be punished for sharing objective information about LGBTI issues. As a fellow parliamentarian, I call on all Moldovan parliamentarians to join in speaking out against this bill, and stand up for the rights of the LGBTI community.” Falon is part of the EU-Moldova delegation.

American anti-gay extremists, including Scott Lively and Paul Cameron, had long seen Moldova as a key battleground against LGBT people.

Moldova Quietly Repeals “Homosexual Propaganda” Law

On May 23, Moldova’s parliament approved a so-called “homosexual propaganda” law modeled after the one that became law in Russia in June. In contrast to Russia, Moldova lawmakers passed theirs much more quietly. President  Nicolae Timofti signed it on July 5. Local activists didn’t learn of it until the law was officially published on July 12, the day it went into effect. The law however jeopardized Moldova’s bid to earn Association status with the European Union, so lawmakers quietly rescinded it last Friday:

The decision on October 11 was made by lawmakers while dozens of Orthodox priests and Communist lawmakers were blocking the entrance to the Palace of the Republic in Chisinau, trying to thwart the parliament session. The lawmakers entered the building through the back door.

The Orthodox faithful were protesting the parliament’s discussion of a European Union-backed law on nondiscrimination that would guarantee the rights of Moldova’s gay citizens.

NBC News Brings Scott Lively to Mainstream America

We’ve been following Scott Lively for six years now, through his activities in Novosibirsk, Riga, and Kampala. When Russia passed a so-called “anti-propaganda” law which effectively prohibits all advocacy and positive portrayals of gay people, Lively rushed to take credit for it. But with the exception for a brief period in 2009 after Uganda’s parliament proposed a law which would include the death penalty for gay people, Lively hasn’t made much of an impression in the mainstream media. Today, NBC News published a significant profile which gets the rest of America caught up to date with the impact that Lively has had around the world:

Lively has reason to be a bit cocky. America may have “fallen to the gays,” he says, but much of the world still fears them and Lively is working to keep it that way.

In Moldova in 2011, according to Human Rights Watch, he helped several cities declare themselves “gay-free zones” and organized an “emergency” campaign to block a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine and Belarus he met with politicians and pastors, fostering talk of new curbs on gay rights. Every place he goes, Lively says, his goal is to block the open expression of homosexuality, keep discrimination legal and make pro-gay advocacy a crime.

To whip up support for such policies, Lively simply shares his beliefs about gay people: They’re dangerous predators, even killers. And they caught this gay “disorder” through “an evil game of tag,” a chain of abuse in which gays recruit kids into sodomy just as they were once recruited. In this way homosexuality spreads like “a social cancer,” he claims, until nothing remains of the Christian world.

NBC has re-posed portions of video from Lively’s talks in Novosibirsk and Riga, videos which are no longer available at their original locations. Tony Dokoupil’s report provides more information about the extent of Lively’s 2007 tour, which turns out to be more extensive than I had originally thought. Dokoupil also draws a line from Lively’s virulent rhetoric to some of the violence which often follows:

In Oregon in 1992, a same-sex couple died when their house was firebombed during OCA’s campaign to declare homosexuality “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” In Sacramento in 2007, a gay man was called a “faggot” and punched to death by a stranger in a park. In Uganda in 2011, the country’s first openly gay man had his skull caved in. And right now in Russia and in the former Soviet states, there’s been a surge in homophobic vigilantism, including a torrent of shaming videos, some depicting gay teens being tortured by skinheads. Lively has not been linked to any of these crimes but we asked: Couldn’t his talk of predatory gays, “good and evil,” and “war” have played a role?

“Wow, that’s a leap,” said Lively, who sees his work as advocacy in the public interest, no different from campaigning against drunk drivers.

Lively is probably best known within the gay community for his 2009 conference in Uganda. Lively would later brag that the conference was his “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda,” and he immodestly dubbed himself the father of the anti-homosexuality movement in Uganda. Ugandan activists are currently suing Lively in U.S. Federal District Court, alleging that Lively engaged in a conspiracy to deny the LGBT community of their rights and safety under International Law, and that conspiracy resulted in harm to the LGBT community. Lively is being sued under the Alien Tort Statute, which provides federal jurisdiction for “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.”  Dokoupil adds this concerning the lawsuit:

Pamela Spees, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the group pursuing Lively for alleged “crimes against humanity” in Uganda, said she is prepared to file a second lawsuit related to his work in Russia and the surrounding countries, assuming there’s evidence that Lively was “an architect of the persecutory program” there.

And that’s why the case against Lively is so important, gay-rights activists say. As the Olympics draw nearer and the boycotts and homophobic backlash continue, Putin will be the guy paraded down the world’s front pages and social media feeds. But Lively may be the secret agent to watch.

If he loses his lawsuit he could be prohibited from spreading his message abroad, a terrible precedent for other anti-gay crusaders. However if he wins, he emerges stronger than ever, the self-described “hero” of an expanding fight to restore “godliness to society,” as he puts it – or else “pull as many people as possible into the lifeboat before the ship goes down.”

We’ve been following Scott Lively for several years, ever since he first popped up on our radar in 2007 when he was in Riga, Latvia in a stop on a far-flung tour of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union sponsored by a new international anti-gay organization, Watchmen On the Walls. (That organization now appears to be inactive.) Soon, video appeared of a talk Lively gave earlier in March in Riga. I was then alerted to video of a talk that Lively gave in Novosibirsk in August, where he warned:

There is a war that is going on in the world. There is a war that is waging across the entire face of the globe. It’s been waging in the United States for decades, and it’s been waging in Europe for decades. It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals. …And this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family.

Then in November, Lively was back in Riga for a multi-day Watchmen conference. On the first day, Lively complained that the United States was under the iron grip of the homosexual agenda, which he called the product of Satan, “the father of lies“:

You have to understand how this battle works. We follow the God of truth. The Holy Spirit, who is called the Spirit of Truth, lives inside of us. But our adversaries follow the father of lies. Scripture calls him the “father of lies.” They can’t tell the truth, and they won’t tell the truth because they don’t want people to listen to what we have to say. But we can’t say anything that would give them proof that what they teach is right… So we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We won’t stop telling the truth, and they won’t stop telling the lies. But this is a war.

In a later talk at the same conference, Lively disclosed what he called secrets that “homosexuality community doesn’t want you to know”: that homosexuality is a disorder, that homosexuality is like an addiction but also that homosexuality is voluntary, that homosexuals really don’t want to be homosexual, and that the only reason we remain homosexual is because the leaders of the homosexual movement have made us afraid of Christians. He also read aloud an open letter to the Russian people, in which he advocated:

…[C]riminalize the public advocacy of homosexuality. My philosophy is to leave homosexuals alone if they keep their lifestyle private, and not to force them into therapy if they don’t want it. However, homosexuality is destructive to individuals and to society and it should never publicly promoted. The easiest way to discourage “gay pride” parades and other homosexual advocacy is to make such activity illegal in the interest of public health and morality.

Russia has effectively done that, after President Vladimir Putin signed the so-called “anti-propaganda” into law last June.

Paul Cameron in Moldova

It’s a lengthy video and I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. But as we reported last weekend, anti-gay extremist and self-described Nazi admirer Paul Cameron is visiting Moldova to lobby against the adoption of an anti-discrimination law that includes sexual orientation. Today, he’s held a press conference where he presented his usual distorted and misrepresented “research.” It is those tactics which have earned him the condemnation of the American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, the American Sociological Assocation and, most recently, the Eastern Psychological Association.

Paul Cameron Headed to Moldova

Scott Long, former director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, has learned that American anti-gay extremist Paul Cameron is headed to Moldova to oppose proposed anti-discrimination legislation which would include sexual orientation. Long writes:

Moldova is a splinter of a country between Romania and Ukraine, a point of contention between Russians, Turks, and others for centuries, and one of the poorest states in Europe. An anti-discrimination bill that prohibits unequal treatment on grounds including sexual orientation is before its Parliament, due for debate at month’s end.

In the days before the debate starts, Paul Cameron is coming to town. An e-mail from the AlianÅ£a pentru Salvarea Familiilor din Moldova (Alliance to Save the Family in Moldova) announces that the “U.S. sociologist, founder and president of Family Research Institute” will stay from October 24-29, and “will share the U.S. experience in implementing anti-discrimination legislation.” There will be a roundtable with “representatives of various parliamentary committees, ministries and other institutions of the state,” plenty of lobby meetings with lawmakers — and, of course, media will be saturated with Cameron’s fake statistics.

As you can see, Cameron is already up to his famous tricks of lying through his teeth. Shortly after being expelled from the American Psychological Association for his gross misrepresentations of psychological research, he started calling himself a sociologist (as he does in the email from the Moldovan anti-gay organization). That led the American Sociological Association to denounce him — twice. The second time, in 1986, the ASA said, “The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research.” [Emphasis added.]

Cameron’s views on homosexuality are particularly venomous. He has written of his open admiration for how Germany “dealt with” gay people in the concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen. During the early years of the AIDS crisis, he called for the quarantining and extermination of gays with HIV, and continues to call for the re-criminalization and imprisonment of gay people.

Cameron will likely find a receptive audience in Moldova. The last time the gay community in the nation’s capital of Chisinau tried to hold a gay pride march in 2008, the marchers were surrounded and attacked by skinheads as police stood by and watched.

Long reminds us that this is Cameron’s second visit to Moldova:

In 2008, he came through to preach about the dangers of anti-discrimination laws.  An Orthodox priest who translated for him describes his message:

According to what Dr. Paul Cameron said, it is necessary for every woman of a nation to give birth to 2.1 children, so that that nation may perpetuate, while in the Republic of Moldova, every woman gives birth to 1.3 children. In this way, the population of Moldova will be halved in 35 years. Among the factors that have brought us to this demographic disaster, it is so-called “woman’s emancipation”, that gave such a position to a woman, that she prefers a career, studies, etc. to giving birth to children and being a mother. Among other factors are the spread of the imposed immorality and especially, the promotion of so-called “rights of sexual minorities”, i.e homosexuals, that don’t contribute in any way to the perpetuation of the nation or to the wellbeing of the society.

Here, for those who forgot to order a horror film from Netflix for Saturday night, is a video of one of his lectures in Chisinau.

Earlier this year, Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively traveled to Moldova to denounced the anti-discrimination law as “the seed that contains the entire tree of the homosexual agenda, with all of its poisonous fruit.” It looks like Moldova, like Uganda, may be becoming a special project of American extremists seeking to export they hatred to other parts of the world.

Scott Lively Warns of “Outbreak of Homosexuality” In Moldova, Part of a “Secret Plan By the Homosexual Powers of the EU”

Scott Lively (left) at a news conference in Moldova

According to this clunky Google translation of a Moldovan news report:

Public Association “Pentru Familie” / “For the family / states that adopted recently by the Government bill threatens the institution of family and social morality as homosexuality is pick up swing in the Republic of Moldova. Visiting Association, an international expert in the field of human rights Lively Scott, warned of “an outbreak of homosexuality” in Moldova, in case the parliament adopts the bill, reports Info-Prim Neo.

This is a bill to prevent and combat discrimination, government-approved on February 17. Chairman of the association “Pentru Familie” Vasile Filat said at a news conference on Monday that if this law is passed in parliament, this would entail the legalization of same-sex marriages, adoption of children couples gay acceptance of homosexual practice as the norm in schools.

…Foreign visitor Lively Scott stressed that this law has caused dire consequences in other countries where it was passed. “I guarantee you, if this bill passes, all the evil that struck the European Union, the collapse and to the Republic of Moldova”, – said the expert in the field of human rights.

Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively is up to his old tricks again, even though it was not even two months ago that he said he was through with anti-gay activism.  Shocking, I know.

I’m having a hard time finding any more info on what Lively’s doing or saying in Modova, but here’s something I found interesting coming from what looks like an email to supporters from Lively posted to a Canadian web site:

However, in God’s divine schedule I arrived just after the first move of a secret plan by the homosexual powers of the EU to push an anti-discrimination law based on sexual orientation through the Moldovan government.

I wish I had known at the beginning of my ministry in the early 1990s what I know now. We might have stopped the homosexual agenda in America. What I know now, and have taught the Moldovans, is that the anti-discrimination law is the seed that contains the entire tree of the homosexual agenda, with all of its poisonous fruit. It is the cornerstone of their legal and political strategy, putting the power of the governernment [sic] behind the legal premise that the practice of homosexuality deserves public approval and that opposition to homosexuality, including that which is rooted in the Biblical world view, must be discouraged. From that premise the conclusion is logically inevitable.

The Moldovan version of the bill however went much farther than usual and included a far reaching provision to give homosexual activists power in the national school system, teacher training and the preparation of instructional materials. They normally don’t include such power-grabbing measures at the beginning, which indicates to me that they had extreme confidence that this law would pass with very little scrutiny or opposition.

Lively is adding a new twist to his vast worldwide homosexual conspiracy. Again, from the Moldovan web site:

Lobbying for the legalization of homosexuality is made from outside the Republic of Moldova, by agents of millionaire George Soros, who is interested in the fact that homosexuals have become a force, said Lively, Scott.

I wish I had just a tenth of the the imagination it takes to to make this up.

The unfortunate thing however is that Moldova has a serious problem with severe anti-gay violence. In 2008, a gay pride march was in the Moldovan capital of Chisina was attacked and broken up by a mob of skinheads and Moldovan nationalists. Violence and calls to violence has a habit of following Lively around, which is just one of many reasons for his “ministry” being among the very few in the U.S. who is listed as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2009, he unleashed what he called a “Nuclear Bomb” in Kampala, Uganda. That sparked yet another round of anti-gay vigilantism and violence, culminating in the introduction of the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill in that nation’s Parliament.

Moldovan Pride Rally Attacked By Skinheads, Police Stand By And Watch

Yesterday’s scheduled Gay Pride parade in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau was attacked by a mob of skinheads and Moldovan nationalists before the parade could begin. Moldovan police stood by and refused to intervene as angry mobs, estimated at 200 to 400 people, surrounded a bus carrying 60 pride marchers, trapping them inside for 45 minutes. Skinheads also blocked the door to the offices of GenderDoc-M, the organizers of the weekend’s Pride activities, and trapped several people in the offices for several hours. GenderDoc-M made nine calls to police for help. Police refused to respond.

This latest violence follows a last-minute ban by Chisinau city officials a few days before the parade was scheduled to take place. Officials imposed the ban in defiance of a recent Moldovan Supreme Court ruling which guaranteed GenderDoc-M’s right to assemble.

Chisinau Mayor Bans Gay Pride Parade

It was just this morning when we reported that Moldova was about to witness its very first Gay Pride parade n Chisinau, the nation’s capital. Now we find that the mayor of Chisinau has banned the parade just two days before it was to take place.

GenderDoc-M, the group that is organizing the parade, says that the mayor has no power to ban the march under a new Moldovan law on public manifestations. According to GenderDoc-M, if the authorities have proof that there could be serious trouble at an event, then a court decision is needed to impose a ban. The mayor has no power to act unilaterally. Last year, the Moldova Supreme Court ruled that Chisinau city officials had violated the Moldovan constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights by banning a previous Gay Pride march.

GenderDoc-M is calling on city authorities to rescind the ban and for city police to provide adequate protection for Pride participants.

Moldova Begins Its First Public Gay Pride

For the past seven years running, authorities in the former Soviet republic of Moldova’s capital city of Chisinau had banned public Gay Pride celebrations. But a new law on public gatherings appears to have cleared the way for the this year’s “Rainbow over the Dniester” celebration to go forward.

Barring any unforeseen roadblocks, organizers expect to hold this year’s Pride parade on May 11. The parade, organized by GenderDoc-M, will go from the National Library and end at Chisinau’s central square. The theme for the parade is “All Different — All Equal.”

Moldova’s Pride celebrations kicked off yesterday with the laying of flowers to the monument to the victims of repressions, and a symbolic marriage ceremony later that evening. Other events include a concert of Moldovan pop stars, art shows and plays, a commemoration of GenderDoc-M’s tenth anniversary, and a tour of Moldovan historical sites. Celebrations will conclude on May 11 with a “Miss Flawless Queen 2008” contest.

Moldova became independent from the former Soviet Union in 1991.