Scott Lively on Friday argued against a
proposed gay protections ordinance to be debated next month in
Springfield, Missouri.
The City Council committee in June
approved the proposal which would make it illegal to deny someone a
job, housing or public services based on sexual orientation or gender
identity in Springfield. The Mayor's Commission on Human Rights and
Community Relations has endorsed the changes to existing city law and
the whole council is set to debate the issue next month.
“Don't let this anti-discrimination
ordinance go through,” Lively
told a crowd of nearly 70 people gathered at The Library Station.
“It's like chicken pox. It's in your system forever. You've got
to kill this thing before it goes in.”
Lively, the president of the
Springfield, Massachusetts-based Abiding Truth Ministries, is
currently being sued
by a gay rights group in Uganda. The group claims that Lively
“conspired with religious and political leaders in Uganda to whip
up anti-gay hysteria with warnings that gay people would sodomize
African children and corrupt their culture” and that his speech is
in part responsible for the persecution of gay people in Uganda.
Lively is also the author of The
Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, which attempts to
draw parallels between the modern gay rights movement and Nazism, and
calls gay rights dangerous.
At the podium, Lively decried the
notion of calling the rights of sexual minorities civil rights.
“Since when is sodomy a civil right?”
Lively rhetorically asked. “It's a ridiculous, preposterous
notion! There's absolutely no correlation between sodomy and skin
color.”
Lively came to Springfield at the
request of Mark Kiser, president of Reclaiming Missouri for Christ.
“I wanted him to bring some shock and
awe and wake up the Christian community,” Kiser told the
Springfield
News-Leader. “The Christian community here is asleep.”