‘Crime against humanity’ lawsuit will go to trial

In July 2012, the human rights groups Sexual Minorities Uganda filed a lawsuit against notorious anti-gay activist Scott Lively in the US District Court in Springfield, Mass. The suit alleges that Lively’s actions in Uganda, including encouraging development and passage of an anti-gay law condemning gays to punishments up to life imprisonment, is a “crime against humanity.”

Lively, represented by anti-gay legal group Liberty Counsel, has filed multiple motions over the past two years, seeking to get the case dismissed, or stayed. Most recently, he appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking to have the case dismissed. The court last week denied Lively’s petition, meaning he will have to stand trial in the Springfield Federal District Court.

The case was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, a US law which provides federal jurisdiction for “any civil action by an alien, for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treat of the United States.”

According to Wikipedia, “A tort, in common law jurisdictions, is a civil wrong that unfairly causes someone else to suffer loss or harm resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act, called a tortfeasor.”

According to the filing by the Ugandan rights group, the case “…is brought against defendant Scott Lively, a U.S.-based attorney, author, evangelical minister and self-described world-leading expert on the “gay movement,” for the decade-long campaign he has waged, in agreement and coordination with his Ugandan counterparts, to persecute persons on the basis of their gender and/or sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Deathandtaxesmag.com describes Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, popularly known as the “Kill the Gays” bill, as “largely the product of a workshop held in Uganda by Lively and two other American anti-gay activists, focused on ‘how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.’”

Lively is considered among the worst anti-gay activists in the US and continues to be active in Africa, and notably in Russia, promoting discriminatory and often life-threatening laws aimed at the LGBT communities in those countries.

By Rob Howard, Associate Editor

The Gayly – December 9, 2014 @ 1:20pm