A group calling itself Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), aided by a George Soros-funded activist litigation non-profit, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), brought a lawsuit in Massachusetts against anti-homosexual activist Scott Lively, complaining of Lively's role in allegedly advising the Ugandan government regarding anti-homosexual legislation passed in that country. Lively’s Motion for Summary Judgment—which, if successful, would end the litigation against him--is set for a hearing on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, at the Springfield Federal Court House, 300 State Street, Springfield, MA, at 9:00 A.M. Mr. Lively is represented by Larry Mihet of Liberty Counsel.
CCR has spread the word to hard left street activists to pack the courtroom. They don’t want a single supporter of Biblical values to get a seat in the courtroom. Accordingly, we encourage any Christians in the Springfield area to attend this hearing wearing something that identifies them as Christians, to prevent the impression that only the gay activists care what happens in this case.
A motion for summary judgment is the second and final chance to get a lawsuit dismissed before trial (the first being a demurrer or a Rule 12(b)(6) motion). A court should grant summary judgment when there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact, and the applicable law shows that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Lively explains the legal technicalities in lay language here, on his blog page. Lively's Motion for Summary Judgment, all 198 pages of it, can be perused here.
The SMUG suit complains of Lively’s alleged role in encouraging the parliament of Uganda to adopt what would become known as the Uganda Anti-homosexuality Act of 2014. The original version of the bill as proposed in 2009 contained the death penalty, and was called the “kill the gays bill” in hostile Western media.
In March, 2009, Lively, along with two other Christian activists participated in a workshop in Kampala, Uganda, organized by the Family Life Network entitled "Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals' Agenda." In April 2009, the Ugandan Parliament passed a resolution allowing an MP named David Bahati to submit a private member's bill to strengthen laws against homosexuality (which was already illegal in Uganda and had been since colonial days). Bahati submitted the bill in October, 2009, it was debated for several years, the death penalty was removed, the bill was passed in December 2013, and signed into law by the president in 2014.
It is very difficult to imagine that anything Scott Lively said at a seminar in 2009 could be deemed the proximate cause of the passage of a bill that was debated for four years, or that the enactment of a law by a foreign, sovereign nation can be deemed the wrongful act of an American citizen who did not vote in said foreign parliament and who is not accused of bribing any members of said parliament. (Indeed, had he been a member of Uganda's parliament, his votes and activities therein would be absolutely privileged from suit based upon a line of legal precedents dating back to 1397.)
Yet the gay activists found a pliant federal judge in Massachusetts willing to drag Scott Lively through litigation over what amounts to exercising freedom of speech and freedom of religion. As anyone who has even the tiniest modicum of legal sophistication can attest, in American courts, the process is the punishment. It doesn’t matter whether you win at the end of a 3 to 7-year process; the overwhelming likelihood is that you’ll never be compensated for the hundreds of hours of time lost and the mid-six figure sum you’ll have spent on attorneys fees. Lively has publicly stated that the litigation is ruining him and his ministry, a fact over which gay activists gloat here.
Scott Lively is certainly not a perfect vessel. According to his Wikipedia page, he has argued that gay advocacy groups should have no legal right to speak, publish and lobby in favor of their cause. If that is true, there is some irony, some condign punishment, in the fact that he is being legally persecuted for speaking and lobbying in favor of his cause. And yet, in this interview with a lesbian activist, Lively comes across as very reasonable. He agrees with the homosexual goal of the 1950s--to be left alone--and opposes only the later goal of mainstreaming homosexual culture and essentially destroying the mainstream heterosexual culture.
But this isn’t about Scott Lively. Adventists have sat out the culture wars thinking that we didn’t have a dog in the fight, that the whole culture could go to hell around us, and we wouldn’t be hurt because we’re God’s special church. It is now obvious that this was an extraordinarily foolish position. It is now obvious that we cannot live in a pagan, anti-Christian culture without facing persecution.
For months and months, a bill was pending in the California legislature that would have essentially outlawed colleges that want to maintain Christian standards of sexual deportment. It was finally defeated not because the Democrat-controlled California legislature has any respect for, or sees any value in, religious freedom, but because the proposed legislation was deemed to be bad for minority students.
Eric Walsh was no anti-homosexual advocate, no Scott Lively by any wild flight of fancy. He just wanted to pursue his chosen profession of public health administration while at the same pursuing his gift for preaching the word of God as a part-time associate pastor in a black church. Through an entirely accidental turn of events, Dr. Walsh found himself cross-ways with the Rainbow Nazis, who proceeded to hound him out of his job in Pasadena and block him from a similar position in rural Georgia, essentially barring him from the profession that he trained for and loved. Again, it needs to be stressed that Dr. Walsh was no anti-homosexual advocate. But it didn’t matter. The gay mob has gone beyond destroying those who openly oppose their legal and cultural agenda. If you even privately cling to a biblical worldview on sexuality, they will destroy you if they can.
Adventists need to wake up to the reality that we had better oppose the cultural and moral degradation of our society while we still can. We cannot live above the fray. A nation can have only one dominant morality, and that morality will eventually be reflected in the nation's laws. The new sexual morality—pursuant to which sexual perversion is not wrong, but opposing sexual perversion is bigoted, hateful, phobic, anti-social, and irrational—will soon be enshrined in law, just as the old sexual morality was. It will soon be illegal to hold a biblical worldview on sexual issues. The U.S. commissioner on Civil Rights came right out and said, "religious liberty is a code word for intolerance.”
The Left is playing for keeps in its remorseless sexual re-fashioning of the Western world (which, as I show here, is leading to the self-extermination of the Western world), and if you get in their way you will be crushed. The gay mob is not concerned about facts, legal niceties, or what legislation actually says; they just want to flex their new political muscles.
But this is not just a cultural/legal issue. This goes to the heart of the changing face of Seventh-day Adventism. How is the Adventist Church going to retain its young people when they have already imbibed and internalized the new morality? If our young people are now shocked and horrified by the biblical patriarchy reflected in the policy that only males may be ordained, they will also be shocked and horrified by the biblical patriarchy reflected in the church’s policy against openly homosexual members and clergy. The new morality is not just about “the world” but about the church and whether there will still be a recognizably Adventist Church in the not-too-distant future in those parts of the world were the new morality has displaced the old.
UPDATE:
Lively reports the the courthouse was packed last Wednesday, November the 9th. Pictures of both pro-family and pro gay activists can be found here.