Topic: WorldNetDaily
Scott Lively declares in a fallacy-filled Dec. 12 WorldNetDaily column:
Now that Uganda’s so-called “kill the gays” bill has been revised to drop the death penalty and reportedly add provisions for prevention and therapy for homosexuality, I think there may be room for tentative support in the Christian community in the West, even though it retains jail terms for offenders.
In fact, as we've noted, it's far from clear that the death penalty provision has been removed.
Lively goes on to rant about how good it is that Uganda wants to make homosexuality illegal:
Just because secular humanist America began to decriminalize sexual sins in civilian law starting in the early 1960s doesn’t mean criminal sanctions against homosexuality are “un-Christian.” Indeed, given the enormous damage to our culture from the so-called sexual revolution, it was obviously a big mistake for us to have done this. Knowing what we know now, it is arguably more “un-Christian” to support the status quo than to support a return to the legal framework of the 1940s and ’50s regarding sexual misbehavior.
But homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda; this proposed law merely ratchets up the penalties. Nevertheless, Lively claims:
Second, in all the media-driven hysteria about the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill, one glaring fact has been consistently omitted (despite my having pointed it out to nearly every “journalist” who has interviewed me). The fact is, Ugandan law is typical of most African law in that it tends to be very harsh in the letter, but very lenient in the application. I doubt very much that anyone arrested under the new law (if it passes) will receive anything close to the jail terms allowed for in the bill.
So, shouldn't Uganda enforce the laws they already have instead of expanding the penalties? Lively is silent about this.
He is not silent, however, about how much he hates gays and doesn't understand sexual behavior:
Third, and most importantly, there is one easy, guaranteed method of protecting oneself from ever being subject to the anti-homosexuality law in Uganda: Don’t commit sodomy! We all seem to forget, in the dense propaganda haze of American popular opinion, that homosexuality is defined by voluntary sexual acts. Homosexuals are no more compelled to commit sodomy with each other than a married man is compelled to cheat on his wife.
Lively concludes his column this way:
However, since I didn’t write the Ugandan bill and have no power to redraft it on my own terms, and since the alternative to passing this bill is to allow the continuing, rapid, foreigner-driven homosexualization of Ugandan culture, I am giving the revised anti-homosexuality bill my support.
What Lively doesn't mention is that he did, in fact, influence those who did write the bill by pushing his anti-gay activism inside Uganda.
