WITH APOLOGIES FROM OREGON

This Oregonian us sincerely sorry that the architect of so many anti gay laws in the third world was born and raised in Oregon. He once headed the Oregon Citizen's Alliance. The architect of a since overturned anti gay initiative here in Oregon. His name is Scott Liveley and he still lives in Springfield. Only it's now in Massachusetts. Thank heaven. He's managed to spread his poison in several countries including Russia, Latvia and Uganda. 

 This editorial was in the Eugene Register Guard today. No copy right infringement is intended, just wanted to share 

Uganda’s ugly law

Former OCA leader helped stoke anti-gay sentiment

As Americans have become more accepting of homosexuality in recent years, the opposite is true in Africa, where more than three dozen countries have enacted laws banning same-sex relations.

On Monday, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed into law a reprehensible bill that took Africa’s anti-gay movement to a despicable new level, imposing harsh sentences for homosexual acts, including life imprisonment in some cases.

It’s a cruel irony that the groundwork for Uganda’s new Anti-­Homosexuality Law was laid in part by American Christian fundamentalist groups that have actively fuel­ed anti-gay sentiment. Prominent among them has been former Oregon Citizens Alliance communications director Scott Lively, an anti-gay activist who attended a 2009 conference in Uganda where he called the gay rights movement an “evil institution [whose] goal is to defeat the marriage-­based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Many Oregonians would just as soon forget about Lively, who played a central role in promoting divisive anti-gay initiatives in Oregon in the 1990s. Lively got his first taste of inter­national attention in 1992 when the OCA tried, and thankfully failed, to pass an initiative — Measure 9 — that called upon the state to discourage homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.”

More than a decade later, Lively and his anti-gay vitriol resurfaced in Uganda where he and other U.S. fundamentalists gave presentations to thousands of people on what they called “the whole hidden and dark” gay agenda and the dire threat they said gays and lesbians posed to African children and families.

A few weeks after the conference, a Ugandan politician introduced the Anti-Homosexuality bill of 2009, which would have imposed a death sentence for homosexual behavior. After an international outcry, the death penalty provision was downgraded in later versions to life imprisonment for some offenses.

African and Western gay rights activists had hoped that Museveni would veto the bill after it was approved late last year. Instead, Museveni signed one of the most draconian anti-gay laws in Africa — more severe even than a similar law recently signed into law by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. Nigeria’s law imposes 14-year prison terms upon people who commit homosexual acts. Lively, who now lives in Springfield, Mass., is the target of a lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court by Ugandan gay activists. The lawsuit charges that Lively’s attacks on gays in Uganda violated international law.

It was perhaps with that lawsuit in mind that Lively told The Associated Press that Uganda’s new law is overly harsh. He said he would have preferred that Ugandans followed the lead of Russia, which recently enacted a law banning “homosexual propaganda.” Lively has boasted that he helped lay the groundwork for the law in his 2007 tour of Russia.

It says much about Lively that he admires and claims credit for a Russian law that supports the persecution of gays and supporters of gay tolerance. Such laws, whether they’re in Russia or Uganda, violate fundamental human rights. The countries that enact them are moving in a perilous and destructive direction