SPRINGFIELD, Mo — Scott Lively, a noted anti-LGBT extremist and the head of the Massachusetts-based Abiding Truth Ministries — a group listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group — told an audience of 70 people on Friday night that a culture war is currently being waged between those fighting for sexual anarchy and those fighting for family values.
Standing at a podium with a sign displaying the message, “Human Rights Commission is a Trojan horse for the gay agenda,” Lively told the audience that they needed to kill a proposed city ordinance extending civil rights protections to gay, lesbian and transgendered people in Springfield.
“Don’t let this anti-discrimination ordinance go through,” said Lively during his presentation at The Library Station on North Kansas Expressway. “It’s like chicken pox. It’s in your system forever. You’ve got to kill this thing before it goes in.”
The proposed ordinance is scheduled to be on the agenda of the city’s full council next month for a vote.
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According to local media, members of the audience listened intently to Lively’s speech, some nodding in agreement uttering an occasional “amen.” Others, however, shook their heads in disbelief later commenting that Lively was spreading paranoid misinformation and characterizing people fighting for the right to marry and have families as anti-family.
Lively, who said he paid his own way to Springfield to share his message, argued that homosexual activists have capitalized on what he called the black civil rights movement by bundling their rights with those he called “legitimate ethnic minorities” and riding their coattails to social legitimacy, reported the Springfield News-Leader.
“Since when is sodomy a civil right,” said Lively. “It’s a ridiculous, preposterous notion! There’s absolutely no correlation between sodomy and skin color.”
Lively said that anti-discrimination ordinances give “highly organized homosexual activists” the leverage they need to “violate the rights of Christians.”
Stephanie Perkins, Deputy director of PROMO, a statewide LGBT advocacy organization, said she was offended by Lively’s claims, which cast LGBT persons as “anti-family, and worse, unpatriotic.”
Mark Kiser, president of “Reclaiming Missouri for Christ” and host of the event, said Lively’s message was precisely what people needed to hear, and that he plans to present a “family first” proposal to the city council.
“I wanted him to bring some shock and awe and to wake up the Christian community,” Kiser said. “The Christian community here is asleep.”