Anti-Gay Author Finds New Venue To Speak

Controversial anti-gay author Scott Lively has found a new venue to give a talk in California after being refused at an earlier site.

The Murrieta Temecula Republican Assembly had originally scheduled Lively to speak last week but the event's venue, the Temeku Hills clubhouse in Temecula, canceled over the threat of protest.

In the book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, Lively asserts that gays, particularly men, played a key role in elevating the Nazi Party in Germany.

He is also the founder of Abiding Truth Ministries, a group listed as a hate group by The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups in America. A claim Lively denies.

In his book, Lively links the modern gay rights movement to events that took place in Nazi Germany and argues that gay rights are “dangerous.”

“[T]he 'gay' movement I have seen and investigated is neither benign, nor are its members 'victims'. It is vicious, deceptive and enormously powerful. Its philosophy is Machiavellian and its tactics are (literally) Hitlerian,” Lively writes.

Assembly President Bob Kowell, who says people distort Lively's work, told The Press-Enterprise that the author is likely to speak at a different venue Friday, but refused to identity it.

The group is also planning to stream the talk live on the Internet.

“He's just causing a lot of damage to the community,” Maryann Johnson, president of the Temecula Valley chapter of Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a nationwide gay support group, told the paper.