Bartholomew's Notes

UK Christian Right lobby-group Christian Concern reports:

There have been reports that ‘Occupy’ activists in America have started targeting Christians, in a new development for the protest movement.

On 18 November ‘Occupy Springfield’ activists organised a demonstration outside a Christian coffee house, set up by Pastor Scott Lively as an inner-city Christian mission to Springfield, Massachusetts…

Although his focus is on helping people live by Christian principles, Dr Lively was targeted because of his pro-family activism. Occupy Springfield has publicly stated that one of their goals is to close down his mission completely. They put an advert in the local paper, the Springfield Republican, attacking the pastor and accusing him of ‘hate crimes’. The signatories included well-known homosexual activists.

The text is mostly sourced from Brian Camenker’s MassResistance (var. Mass Resistance), which organised a counter-protest to defend Lively, and which denounces Occupy as “anti-American, pro-Muslim, and particularly hostile to Christianity and traditional values”.

For some reason, Christian Concern is somewhat vague as to the nature Lively’s “pro-family activism”, but he most famous as the co-author of a book entitled The Pink Swastika. For the uninitiated, the Southern Poverty Law Center has some background:

Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler’s inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.

“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” write Lively and Abrams. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ — the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted — we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.'”

Lively is particularly popular in Latvia, and a Russian-language translation of the book has been promoted in Latvia by Pastor Alexey Ledyaev, the head of the anti-gay New Generation Church in Riga. Christian Concern’s director Andrea Williams met Ledyaev’s “administrator” and other New Generation figures at a church in Northampton in November 2010.

Lively is also sympathetic to the anti-gay crackdown in Uganda; back in February, he wrote a column for WorldNetDaily in which he explained that Uganda was “being murdered”:

The murderers are the lavender Marxists, the now-global network of sexual revolutionaries bent on remaking the entire world in their own perverted image, whose juggernaut has toppled even once-mighty Britain, crushing under their lavender boots after eight centuries the symbol of its Christian power: the Magna Carta, whose first principle had proclaimed “The English church must be free!”

…Uganda is the only country in the world with a national holiday commemorating its rejection of sexual perversion. Every June 3 it honors the 22 young men and boys who were tortured and roasted alive in 1886 by homosexual King Mwanga, because they refused to submit to sodomy. Is it any wonder, then, that Uganda has reacted violently against the army of agitators, led by George Soros, who now seek to re-homosexualize Ugandan culture?…

Despite railing against homosexual “murderers” who have understandably provoked a violent reaction in a country which has been “thriving in Christian revival”, Lively has since clarified that he doesn’t support the proposed Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which includes the death penalty for “serial offenders”.

Lively heads Abiding Truth Ministries, and his website is Defend the Family. That site is currently promoting an article by a certain Kevin DuJan on HillBuzz, who complains that the media has been unfairly targeting Herman Cain over allegations of sexual harassment while ignoring evidence that Barack Obama is gay:

During the 2008 election, I campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primaries. Repeatedly, I heard over and over here in Chicago that Barack Obama is gay and that his marriage to Michelle is one of mutual convenience.  In the black community, this is called “being on the down-low”, where a closeted gay male weds an often-times gruff and demanding woman (typically without other male suitors of her own) to take public scrutiny off them both and afford the pair a successful life they’d never achieve separately.

There are, apparently, a lot of such relationships forged at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago — where Barack Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, oversaw the coupling of down-low gay black men with sour and caustic black women.

…Apparently, he went most often to this Andersonville neighborhood bathhouse on Wednesdays, and while there he was rumored to seek oral sex from older white men.  According to the gossip, Barack Obama would never reciprocate in these encounters, but enjoyed being pleasured by older white guys. 

As I blogged a few days ago, Christian Concern has also recently made links with the Tennessee Freedom Coalition, which in turn supports the English Defence League.

However, Christian Concern has also been busy cultivating mainstream links: it co-organised a conference that took place just yesterday and today, featuring

[Phillip] Blond, the acknowledged driving force behind David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’… Lord Glasman, Professor John Milbank and Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali.

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