In 2012 when I was first served with a federal lawsuit for “Crimes Against Humanity” by a Marxist law firm headquartered (literally) at 666 Broadway in Manhattan, I thought it was a Sasha Baron Cohen-style joke. It was even delivered by a parade of costumed clowns dressed in funeral clothes and white-face, carrying a life-size cardboard coffin.
SMUG leaders Val Kelende (left) and David Kato
But the far left Social Justice Warriors at the grossly mis-named “Center for Constitutional Rights” (CCR) were deadly serious. They recruited the “gay” activist group Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) to serve as plaintiffs in their politically-motivated strategic SMUG v Lively lawsuit designed to punish me for promoting and defending the Biblical view of homosexuality and drive me from the public debate.
The cornerstone of the baseless and frivolous lawsuit was the claim that SMUG leader David Kato’s gruesome murder in Kampala in 2011 was somehow caused by my Bible-based Christian messages about LGBT issues in Uganda two years prior in 2009. (It was Kato’s picture that adorned the coffin being carried by their ridiculous “process servers”).
CCR pushed that absurd theory of causation even further into the realm of delusion by calling my messages “Crimes Against Humanity:” basically equating reasonable, compassionate Christian preaching with the Nazi Holocaust.
However, even then they knew that David Kato was actually murdered by a young “gay” prostitute whom Kato had bailed out of jail to be his live-in lover and house-boy. In short, the Kato murder arose from a garden-variety “gay-on-gay” domestic dispute that had nothing to do with me, nor even with politics. 22-year-old Sidney Nsubunga Enoch had confessed to beating Kato to death with a hammer in 2011 after a lover’s quarrel and started serving his 30-year sentence in a Ugandan prison long before the anti-Lively lawsuit was filed.
Former Ponsor law clerk Luke Ryan was key to the CCR legal team. He is seen here appearing in an unrelated case, representing convicted lesbian “wife” murderer Cara Rinalta.
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However, CCR’s team of 14 lawyers didn’t worry about those inconvenient facts because they had a friend who shared their far-left anti-family ideology: federal judge Michael Ponsor, whose former law clerk, Northampton attorney Luke Ryan, was a key member of the CCR team. Even after my attorneys exposed CCR’s attempt to deceive the court (by implying Kato’s murder was my fault — and omitting any mention of his confessed killer), Ponsor not only failed to punish CCR, but treated the facts as insignificant. Judge Ponsor’s extreme bias was then exposed in an article by Mass Resistance.
Very early in the case Judge Ponsor had stated in open court that SMUG v Lively would be moot if a case then pending before the Supreme Court gutted the “Alien Tort Statute” (ATS) under which CCR’s case had been filed.
Yet, after the ATS was in fact gutted by the Supremes, and every other ATS case in the nation was quickly dismissed, Ponsor refused to dismiss SMUG v Lively so CCR could put me through another four years of brutal litigation involving extremely invasive “discovery” procedures and constant public humiliation by the leftist media.
Much later In 2017, through a legal maneuver by my excellent attorney Harry Mihet and his team at Liberty Counsel, Judge Ponsor was finally forced to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction — the exact same lack of jurisdiction he knew he had at the beginning of the case.
However, rather than issue a simple order as is customary, Ponsor larded his order with vitriolic and unprofessional personal comments deceitfully framed like a binding legal opinion — essentially claiming I was guilty as charged, despite a total lack of any supporting evidence from five years of digging. And then CCR publicly promised to use Ponsor’s “ruling” in future litigation around the world as if it had actual binding authority. I had no choice but to take the extraordinary step of appealing my win to ask the higher court to force Ponsor to rewrite the order without the phony “ruling.”
However, the appeals court solved the problem much more efficiently by simply ruling that Judge Ponsor’s comments were mere personal opinion with no legal authority or underlying legal analysis. I got the result I wanted without the necessity of further legal proceedings. The case is now finished after six long years…
BUT IT GETS BETTER
Just a few days prior to the final ruling by the Federal First Circuit Court of Appeals that ended the case, SMUG leader Val Kalende accepted Christ and turned from lesbianism. She then reached out to my attorney with the following message:
