Scott Lively Ministries

Regardless of one’s theology or beliefs about what is summarized below there is no question that humanity is at a point of extreme crisis on numerous fronts, and that many people – based (rightly or wrongly) on their personal beliefs about these things — will make decisions in the next few weeks that will influence the course of history, perhaps profoundly. And since we Christians are under a Biblical mandate to always pray and repent, this seems an especially appropriate time to do so corporately. I will be making a special effort to focus my own spiritual life on prayer and repentance for 40 days and I invite you to join me.

On Monday there will be a total eclipse of the sun exclusively over America, just as the Hebrew calendar enters a 40 day period of repentance corresponding to the period when God forgave the Hebrews for the sin of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. That begins with the first day of the thirty-day month of Elul and ends with a period called the Ten Days of Awe, the first through the tenth day of the month of Tishri. In Hebrew tradition, it is in this ten day period that God decides whether one’s name is written in the Book of Life or the Book of Death.

Many people are aware of the Biblical significance of a term of 40 days or years as a period of testing and preparation: Moses’ repentance and prayer for the Hebrews before they entered the Holy Land (Deuteronomy 9:18-29), Elijah’s spiritual preparation on the road to Mt. Horeb to meet God (1 Kings 19:7-18), Goliath’s testing of the armies of God before David arrived to slay him (1 Samuel 17:4-26), Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness before launching His ministry (Matthew 4:1-17) are a few examples.

Less commonly recognized is the Biblical significance of the term of ten days, which has the same connotation regarding testing and preparation but adds a special emphasis on the judgement of the decider: Daniel’s test of faithfulness in refusing to be defiled by King Nebuchadnezzar’s “delicacies” was of ten days (Daniel 1:1-16), God’s conditional decision to spare the remnant of the Jews not exiled to Babylon was revealed to Jeremiah at the end of ten days (Jeremiah 42:1-22), and, most significantly, God’s warning and conditional promise to Christians in Revelation 2:10 states: “Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Look, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison to test you, and you will suffer tribulation for ten days. Be faithful even unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.”
It is believed by some that this verse is a reference to the Ten Days of Awe.

Importantly, the Ten Days of Awe begins with the Feast of Trumpets and ends with the Day of Atonement. Anyone familiar with the recently popular teachings in Christendom on the Seven Feasts of the Lord (Leviticus 23) will recognize that the fall feasts of Trumpets and Atonement are associated with the second coming of Christ (just as the spring feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits and Pentecost are associated with His first coming). The symbolism of the Feast of Trumpets (Yom Teru’ah) is associated with resurrection and rapture, while the symbolism of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) is associated with the victory of Christ (who is both the King of Kings and High Priest) over His enemies and His atonement for the sins of His people. These teaching originated with the “Messianic Jewish” movement in Christianity. Messianic Jews are those who have accepted Jesus Christ as the Messiah and point Gentile Christians to the Old Testament roots of New Testament teachings.

To be clear, I am not aware that anyone is claiming that the second coming is about to occur and that is not the purpose of summarizing these views. If anything, given all the buzz about the present alignment of the constellations signaling a possible fulfilment of Revelation 12, the timing would seem to be more in line with the “beginning of sorrows” of Matthew 24:3-8 and Revelation 6:1-7 but this is all purely speculative. And, once again, one does not need to accept these teachings to recognize their potentially profound influence in the unfolding events of our world. It is enough that many people do believe them and will act accordingly, as might others seeking to exploit opportunities presented during these impending events.

As it happens, I will be leading a group to Israel during the Ten Days of Awe. I do happen to believe that the last days are upon us and Christ’s return is imminent – meaning years rather than decades. I think it is possible that coming events of 2017 will in retrospect be seen as the beginning of sorrows, but I am not making predictions, only being attentive as we are warned to be in 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11. If it turns out that the coming weeks are pivotal, I can’t think of a better place from which to observe them than in Israel. But whether or not they are, my duty as a Christian remains the same: to love and serve my King to the best of my ability all the days of my life.

The Bible says to count it all joy when you face various trials and testing (James 1), and for that reason the entire world – especially Christians – should be grateful today. The looming threat of nuclear war, conventional war, civil war, terrorism, political chaos, awakening volcanoes and super-volcanoes, resurgent diseases with untreatable forms, reckless experimentation with genetic mutation and artificial intelligence, planet-killer asteroids, and many other fearsome things, are simply reminders that this world is temporary but God is eternal, and our hope and trust must be in Him. Trouble and tribulation are designed to remind us to be in but not of this world (John 17:6-19). Just as the threshing sledge (tribulum) was used to separate the wheat from the chaff, tribulation is used by God to separate us, as eternal spiritual beings, from our attachment to the things of this world.

I am blessed to have recently won a five year lawsuit that was part of a continuing eight year international campaign by the global LGBT movement to destroy me for speaking the truth of the Bible against the “gay” agenda around the world. But the far greater blessing is the spiritual maturity I experienced in the crucible of suffering for the Gospel. Persecution, which believers everywhere will eventually suffer on a large scale, is the refiner’s fire. Because of it, I am not afraid of what might occur in the near or more distant future related either to prophecy or just the growing evil of this world.

On Monday I will begin a Forty Day personal prayer and repentance campaign. I will repent for my sins and those of my nation. I will pray for our president and the healing of our land. I will pray for the Gospel to reach every unsaved person in this world, including my enemies. I will pray for every other thing the Holy Spirit brings to my mind. I will do this as statement of faith in God and my desire to be more closely conformed to the character of Christ. In all of this things I will pray to the Father, with Christ, “Thy will not my will be done.” Again, I invite you to join me, and to encourage others to do the same.

Under normal circumstances the first question most people ask after a fight has broken out is “Who started it?” because we all know that while “it takes two to tango,” there’s almost always an instigator and it isn’t necessarily the person who threw the first punch. When it comes to mob psychology and the phenomenon of rioting or war, identifying the instigator is a little trickier because there’s often an unseen hand stirring the pot of social unrest. In the “white nationalist” incident in Charlottesville, VA, I suspect the instigator is the same network of Bush, Clinton and Obama deep-state intelligence agents, politicians and street activists that’s been working since the election to remove President Trump.

Importantly, this is a network of one-world statists with a common cultural-Marxist worldview. The tools of their trade are ideological polarization to create social and political factions, inflammatory propaganda to breed emotionalism and “group-think” in those opposing factions, and staged street activism to incite conflict between them (conflict usually of a political nature but sometimes of the physical sort). Tactically, they almost always lead with the left because leftists are easier to manipulate, and they use them as provocateurs to get a counter-reaction from the right. Their strategy today is to sucker conservatives into following extreme hard right populists into a war for the streets just as occurred in Germany after WWI. I’ve been warning of this since 2009: http://www.scottlively.net/2016/03/17/there-will-be-blood/ , though my prediction of violence was a bit premature.

The Black Lives Matter movement is a big component of the strategy, complete with Soros-funded rent-a-mobs and roving “community organizers” looking for the next opportunity to stage a “spontaneous” riot against the police. But there’s a much larger target than the police in this strategy: it is the entire “right wing.” The purpose of leftist social agitation is not “social justice” (as many of BLM’s “useful idiot” foot soldiers believe), it is to inflame the right. They want war, in whatever form they can get it, because it’s in the chaos of war that the elites make their greatest gains toward a global socialist government. The pattern is similar to how our intelligence agencies have conducted “regime-change” operations in foreign nations for decades (making them all the greater hypocrites for their breathless “Russian collusion” narrative) and now we see a version of it here it home.

I’ve stated publicly that I think the takedown of Bill Cosby, just as BLM was about to be launched, was a part of this project. “America’s Dad,” with his vast reservoir of good-will among white Americans, and a history of rebuking leftist pop-culture stupidity in the Black community (like telling wanna-be gang-bangers to pull up their pants) was the biggest potential threat to their plan. Reviving quarter-century-old allegations of sexual impropriety against Mr. Cosby was a preemptive strike, like taking out an anti-aircraft battery before flying in the bombers. http://www.scottlively.net/2014/12/24/bad-moon-on-the-rise-bill-cosby-ferguson-and-obama/

The Bill Cosby incident is, in my view, directly related to the Charlotte incident, because they are part of the same conspiracy to create race war – or any kind of civil war they can get — in America. You have to think like a “war gamer” to understand how this works and remember that the war gamers of the deep state have almost unlimited resources to play their games with, a broad, birds-eye view of the entire battlefield, and a very long view of history.

I’m a 5th generation Yankee from Massachusetts with relatives who died in the civil war, so I have no particular love for the confederate flag. However, I have no sympathy for the people trying to ban it, in part because I recognize that Southerners’ respect for the confederate flag is not a defense of slavery or racism. But mostly I recognize the present attack on the flag as deliberate provocation for war. The attack is not motivated by idealism but cynical political opportunism. Messing with somebody’s flag is about the surest way to start a fight there has ever been in the history of the world. It’s especially effective for drawing out zealots and crazies.

That having been said, the organizers of the Charlotte march are either completely stupid not to have realized they were walking into a trap, or they were in on the conspiracy. Likely it was a bit of both, since it defies reason that these groups aren’t infiltrated by undercover government agents. If you’re a war gamer, there’s no better asset on the field than your own agent posing as an enemy extremist. I always suspected, without proof, that the Westboro Baptist Church “God Hates Fags” group was their asset in the “gay marriage” battle. What better way to hurt the pro-family movement than to have a supposedly “anti-gay” group stage obscene protests at the funerals of combat veterans in front of network television cameras. What better way to discredit conservative populists than TV footage of rallies where conservatives mix with Nazis (real or planted) carrying racist and antisemitic signs.

I was once a leftist and hung out with the very type of people being described as “counter-protesters” at Charlottesville. I had hair half-way down my back and sometimes wore a ratty denim jacket with a button that read “Smash the State.” I was hanging with that crowd in 1977 when “gay” Nazi Frank Collins organized the infamous Nazi march on Skokie, Illinois (which actually took place in Chicago). Http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-neo-nazi-skokie-march-flashback-perspec-0312-20170310-story.html

My fellow leftist travelers were simply giddy at the prospect of going to Illinois “to throw rocks at the Nazis” (which some of them did). There wasn’t a hint of “social justice” in their hearts, only eagerness to indulge in rioting with virtual impunity. Being a rather naive young man, I was a little shocked at their cynicism, but I’ve learned over the years it’s the true nature of a great many on the left. I’ve since observed with my own eyes – as a conservative leader being protested by them – that nothing has changed about leftist street activism over the years. There’s a large core of semi-transient twenty and thirty somethings (a subset of whom are hard-core anarchists) and a smattering of grey haired holdovers from the 60s, and they all show up whenever there’s a rally or protest on the issue of the day: abortion, “gay rights,” environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, whatever.

That’s who the majority of Charlottesville counter-protesters were, notwithstanding media efforts to portray them all as local concerned citizens. Almost certainly a few were posing as alt-rightists, carrying the most offensive signs.

I’ve been writing about the phenomenon of social polarization as a tactic of the elites for years and recently shown how this strategy operates in the Obama/Clinton/Bush/Soros “Purple Revolution” against President Trump, predicting growing street violence in 2017. http://www.scottlively.net/2017/06/22/progress-report-on-the-purple-revolution/

The left wants war and chaos, and they want conservatism to be equated with Nazism. They got a two-fer in Charlottesville. We must defeat both of those goals without descending to their level to do it. That means re-grounding conservatism in Biblical values and countering propaganda-driven emotionalism with clear-headed rationalism and a focus on healthy, positive goals.

The “gay” agenda is as old as the LGBT or “gay” movement itself. Every movement has an agenda, of course, which is simply the purpose for which it was founded. The ultimate goal of the “gay” movement has always been the elimination of the restrictions on sexual “freedom” imposed by Judeo-Christian civilization. Others have desired this result, but homosexuals have always pursued it hardest because their sexual appetites deviate furthest from the Biblical “one flesh” norm of lifetime heterosexual monogamy, thus engendering the greatest degree of condemnation. For example, male homosexuality was a capital offense under the Mosaic Law, while a limited form of polygamy was discouraged but tolerated. In other words, “gays” have the most to lose under a Biblically-influenced legal and social system and thus the greatest motivation to overthrow it.

The prototherian aspiration of the “gay” movement was articulated by the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism is named. Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795) called for the decriminalization of sexual crimes, including specifically pederasty (man/boy sex) and sodomy, on the grounds that they were not actually “against nature” as the common law asserted. Sade was an extreme libertine whose sexual practices included torture and murder, and was sentenced to death (in absentia) in 1772 for sodomizing his manservant and for poisoning prostitutes. While in his time he was recognized as a reprobate driven by insanity and/or demonic possession, his concept of “sexual freedom” thrives today in popular culture.

The LGBT movement was formally organized in the mid 1800s in Germany by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, founder of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee with the stated goal of decriminalizing sodomy. The term “homosexual” was coined at that time to cast sodomy as a medical condition rather than a moral weakness, and Ulrichs pioneered the “born that way” argument with his “Third Sex” theory of homosexuality. His successor, Magnus Hirschfeld, coined the term “transvestite.” “Gay rights” first went mainstream in Germany in the 1920s and 30s where it was championed by the Society for Human Rights (SHR) whose most notorious member was Ernst Roehm, head of the dreaded Nazi Sturmabteilung or “Storm Troopers.”

The earliest, but short-lived, American “gay rights” entity was a chapter of the SHR launched in Chicago in 1924 by a German-American soldier named Henry Gerber. More instrumental to the cause was Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfort School (which birthed Cultural Marxism) and his strategy of defeating Judeo-Christian civilization by “elimination of the monogamic…and patriarchal family.” From the US, the movement went global in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, the groundwork for which was laid in the late 1940s by the “Father of Gay Rights” Harry Hay, and in-the-closet “gay” activist Alfred Kinsey. In the Stonewall Riot of 1969, the movement abandoned its pretext of seeking only “tolerance” and began aggressively pursuing total political control. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the “Father of Gay Cultural Supremacy,” assured that outcome by writing all five of the majority opinions of the court that enshrined LGBT political goals in constitutional law.

The fifth and final of these rulings, establishing “gay marriage” by judicial fiat in the Obergefell v Hodges case, has been perceived by many as the final blow to Biblical sexual values, with the transgender fight seen as simply a “mop-up” operation. However, the order in which LGBT “rights” were championed gives a clue as to what comes next, and it is actually the biggest and most consequential fight in the so-called culture war.

The fight to decriminalize sodomy was first and represented a challenge to notions of sexual conduct in law. Concurrent with that effort was 1) the promotion of heterosexual promiscuity, and 2) a change in the legal definition of sodomy from it’s common-law grounding in Leviticus 18:22-23 which forbids male homosexuality and sex with animals by either gender. (Classically, sodomy thus has two forms: sex between two people of the same gender and sex with animals.) From that very specific relationship-focus, modern statutory law shifted to banning oral and anal sexual relations by either gender. This drew the increasingly promiscuous heterosexual population into the fight and ensured sodomy’s eventual decriminalization. To show just how contemporary that fight really is, consider that the 2012 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the United States military first required the legalization of sex with animals, because sodomy was still defined according to the common law.

Next came the battle for “gay marriage” which attacks the “one flesh” model for marriage and the natural family, the cornerstone of civilization.

The supposedly “last” and current fight is over transgenderism which goes much deeper and attacks the very bedrock on which civilization’s cornerstone rests. It challenges what it means to be human by attacking the fundamental order of creation – the binary nature of gender – which is a reflection of the very image of God in humanity (Genesis 1:27).

Ultimately, the “gay” agenda is simply a sub-plot of the larger Satanic agenda and now that LGBT goals appear nearly fully realized, the hidden hands behind them (both human and demonic) are coming into view. The puppet-masters who have made “gay” supremacy possible have been working backward from the branch to the root to bring chaos out of order — the ultimate satanic goal: first confusion of sexuality as conduct, then confusion of marriage and family, then confusion of gender, and next confusion of what the Bible calls “kinds.” It is not just the deconstruction of civilization but the dissolution of all boundaries between human and animal and machine, to produce creatures that are a blend of all three.

We are witnessing the end-game before our very eyes but few recognize what they are seeing. What is next in the LGBT agenda is transhumanism, the redefinition of humanness and emergence of human/animal/machine chimeral forms.  Satan is fashioning a final comprehensive counterfeit alternative to the creation over which Man finally assumes that he has accessed the Tree of Life and is persuaded that he is God, destroying himself and “goodness” itself in the process.

What we call the pro-family movement is a component of the larger conservative movement and deals with matters of sexuality and the natural family. Its American roots are in the cultural backlash to the Marxist revolution of the 1960s that turned family-centered society on its head and swapped the Judeo-Christian morality of our founding for Soviet-style “political correctness.”

Before the 1960s there wasn’t any need for a “pro-family” movement because family values had been the overwhelming consensus of the western world for centuries. Indeed, so surprised were Americans about the cultural revolution that it took nearly twenty years for the conservatives to mount a truly effective response to it. That came under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The 60’s revolution was not grounded in the Marxist orthodoxy of Lenin and Stalin, but the Cultural Marxism of Herbert Marcuse’s Frankfort School, which envisioned sexual anarchy, not a “workers revolt,” as the key to dismantling Judeo-Christian civilization. The natural core constituency for this ideology was the underground “gay” movement whose dream of social acceptance was not possible without a complete transformation of American sexual morality. Thus, beginning in the late 1940s, Marxist organizer Harry Hay, so-called “father of the American gay movement” was also “father” of the (then hidden) army of “gay” activists most responsible for the “culture war” that exploded in the 60’s and continues today.

America’s Marxist revolution was therefore a “sexual revolution” whose overwhelming success vindicated Marcuse’s destructive vision and became the primary tool of the one-world government elites for softening resistance to their domination by breaking the family-centered society which is every nation’s greatest source of strength, stability and self-sufficiency.

Importantly, though primarily driven behind the scenes by “gays,” the first goal was not legitimization of homosexual sodomy but the normalization of heterosexual promiscuity. This was the motive and strategy that drove “closeted” 1940s and 50s homosexual activist Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent “science” attacking the marriage-based sexual ethic as “repressive” and socially harmful. It also drove the launch of the modern porn industry, beginning with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine (Hefner called himself “Kinsey’s pamphleteer”). It drove and defined the battles in the courts where sexual morality was systematically “reformed” by Cultural Marxist elites on the US Supreme Court: contraception on demand to facilitate “fornication without consequences” (Griswold v Connecticut 1966), abortion on demand as the backup system to failed contraception (Roe v Wade 1973), and finally legalization of homosexual sodomy (Lawrence v Texas 2003).

Note the thirty year gap between Roe v Wade and Lawrence v Texas. That major delay in the Marxist agenda was achieved by the election of Ronald Reagan, under whom the pro-family movement became a major political force. That gap also highlights a critical fact: that “street activism” may be essential to any political cause but the real key to the culture war is the Supreme Court. By 1981 when Ronald Reagan took power the Marxists had nearly succeeded in collapsing the nation’s family and economic infrastructure and the LGBT juggernaut had come completely out of the shadows and taken its place at the head of the cultural blitzkrieg it had been steering from the beginning. Reagan stopped that juggernaut by putting Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, the lion of constitutional originalism and ally of Justice Byron White who wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v Hardwick (1986) which affirmed (not created) the constitutional right of states to criminalize homosexual sodomy and other harmful sexual conduct in the public interest.

Reagan and Scalia stopped the sexual revolution in its tracks and made it possible for the pro-family movement to begin restoring family values in society, which we strove diligently to do. I got my start in Christian social activism in those heady days and served as State Communications Director for the No Special Rights Act in Oregon in 1992 which forbade the granting of civil rights minority status based on sexual conduct. We fell short in Oregon but a Colorado version of our bill passed the same year. We had in essence won the culture war with that victory given that the Supreme Court had previously ruled that minority status designation required three things: a history of discrimination, political powerlessness, and immutable (unchangeable) status (such as skin color). We had a slam-dunk win on at least two of the three criteria and it would have been just a matter of time before we passed the No Special Rights law from coast to coast.

However, Reagan had been prevented by the elites from putting a second Scalia on the court in the person of Robert Bork, and was forced by the unprecedented political “borking” of Mr. Bork to accept their man Anthony Kennedy to fill the seat instead. Just ten years later, Kennedy served his function by writing the majority opinion killing the Colorado law in Romer v Evans (1996), audaciously declaring that the court didn’t need to apply its three-part constitution test to the No Special Rights Act because it was motivated by “animus” (hate) and thus did not represent a legitimate exercise of the state’s regulatory authority. The ruling was all the more outrageous given that it was only possibly through a blatant abuse of the court’s own judicial authority. Kennedy’s “disapproval = hate” lie set the tone for the political left from that point forward.

In Lawrence v Texas, Kennedy delivered the coup-de-grace to Justice Scalia by striking down Bowers v Hardwick and brazenly ruling that “public morality” cannot be the basis for law. Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority in all five SCOTUS opinions that have, in essence, established homosexual cultural supremacy in America, including the infamous and utterly unconstitutional Obergefell v Hodges (2015) “gay marriage” decision. He is, in my opinion, the worst and most culturally destructive jurist in the history of the court: the culprit (among many villainous candidates) most responsible for the current dysfunctional state of the family in America.

So where’s the “bright future” amidst this lamentation? It’s in the promise made and so-far kept by President Donald Trump to appoint only constitutional originalists to the supreme court. It is in the pleasantly surprising discovery that his first pick, Neil Gorsuch, seems from his first comments as a “supreme” to be a perfect choice to fill the “Scalia seat” on the court. It is in the hopeful rumors that Anthony Kennedy is about to retire, and the simple fact that ultra-hard leftist Ruth Bader Ginsberg and leftist Steven Breyer are of an age that their seats could at any time be vacated by voluntary or involuntary retirement.

In short, the bright future of the pro-family movement is in the hands of the man we hired to drain the swamp in Washington DC, and who hasn’t yet backed down in that fight despite the remarkable scorched-earth campaign of destruction and discreditation being waged against him by the establishment elites of both parties, Hollywood and the media.

I must admit that after Obergefell I began to think that the pro-family movement had lost the culture war, but I now believe there is real hope, not just for reclaiming some lost ground, but possibly of reversing all of the “gains” of the hard left over the past half century. A solid majority of true constitutional originalists could actually restore the legal primacy of the natural family in America fairly quickly, and our cultural healing could quickly follow.

As the leftist elites and street activists continue their all-hands-on-deck attempted “borking” of President Trump, let’s not forget why they’re doing it. His political survival means the end of theirs. I can’t think of a brighter future than that for our nation.

Demublican and Republicrat elites portray Donald Trump as a clueless boob and many seem to believe their own propaganda. As a Christian I don’t endorse some of his boorish actions, but there is no question that Trump the President is the same “think outside the box” political genius as Trump the Candidate, continuing to win the populist majority by disdaining the political correctness that makes nearly all other politicians slaves of the leftist media.

Never in our nation’s history has a president faced such a massive array of opponents united across partisan lines on so many simultaneous battle fronts. Not even Ronald Reagan suffered this level of hostility, misrepresentation and sabotage: partly because the elites had already forced him to accept their man George H.W. Bush as Vice President, and partly because Reagan’s anti-Soviet focus did not overly conflict with their own geopolitical agenda on such things as US hegemony in banking and oil. They basically tolerated President Reagan’s conservative domestic agenda (with some legislative foot-dragging by “Moderates”), knowing they could reverse it once Bush took over: and they were only forced to “go to the mattresses” once – to stop him from putting a second Scalia on the Supreme Court in the form of Judge Robert Bork (and to instead nominate the Quistling Anthony Kennedy, father of “gay” cultural supremacy).

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, is their worst nightmare. He not only won the election despite all their best – and highly public – efforts to defeat him, but he did so with the backing of a huge army of patriotic populists cognizant (fully so by the election if not before) of the existence, nature and tactics of the global elites. This is the audience for his Tweets, which explains both their tone and why he will never stop sending them. (Populists love a bare-knuckle street fighter.)

Compounding the globalist nightmare is Mr. Trump’s ideological, though not yet transactional ally, Vladimir Putin who is backed by an even larger percentage of patriotic populists in the Russian Federation. The elites are simply apoplectic at the thought that the American and Russian populists will eventually recognize the astonishing similarity of their moral and fiscal conservatism and unify against the globalist agenda. This is the real reason that Obama and McCain worked so desperately to trigger a hot war with Russia before Trump could be inaugurated, and why both the leftist and neo-conservative media have continuously perpetuated the false premise that US/Russian “collusion” is the real crime behind the “Russian election tampering” (fake news) scandal. Since the fall of Communism in 1991, the increasingly Christian Russians are NOT our enemy. Unfortunately, “Big Lie” repetition works, which is why Adolf Hitler perfected it during the Third Reich.

This is so very devious, especially by the neo-con media, who are now singing to the conservative choir that Obama should be investigated and punished for “collusion” with Russia. It’s akin to the continuing manipulation of conservatives regarding Syria, tricking them into backing illegal military strikes there by portraying Obama as “weak” for not enforcing his “red line,” though we all learned at the time that the supposed Assad use of chemical weapons was almost certainly a false flag, as was the recent US strike on the same “chemical weapon” pretext – unverified by any independent monitors.

To this latter point, I suggested at the time that ok-ing the latest Syria strike was probably the elites’ price for finally confirming President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, now Justice Neil Gorsuch. That’s just an educated guess, but what’s not guesswork is the larger strategy they had in play to neutralize the president: impeachment (or forced resignation ala Nixon).

The key to the impeachment strategy was James Comey, the long-serving Clinton Family fixer whom they moved like a Queen on the D.C. chessboard, finally elevating him to FBI Director. Republican Comey was perfect for the bipartisan Trump takedown desired by the entire left, and the GOP establishment in leadership of both chambers of congress. But, the unpredictable political genius Donald Trump bided his time, letting the flood of leaks and the frenzy of media impeachment hysteria make him appear impotent, and then completely turned the tables on his adversaries in one fell swoop. He fired Comey without notice while Comey was in California and (allegedly) a team from Trump’s newly secured Justice Department (under Trump loyalist Jeff Sessions) was in D.C. scooping up all of Comey’s records, files, notes, video recordings and whatever else may have been there.

(That was the assertion of this article http://usdefensewatch.com/2017/05/the-inside-story-on-how-trump-dropped-the-hammer-on-james-comey/, which fact I cannot independently verify, but appears consistent with the way subsequent events played out, and may be the real reason Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation – so as to retain his legal right to hands-on control of the FBI in that matter.)

Importantly, President Trump did not have full control of any part of the US government when he took office, not even the Executive Branch. Nearly all of the career government workers in Washington in all three branches of government were appointed or hired by the elite political class, going all the way back to President George H.W. Bush in 1989, followed by Clinton, W. Bush, and then Obama. Most were either Bush or Clinton/Obama loyalists, and thus presumably enemies of Mr. Trump.

It took most of his first 100 Days just to get his own people into the strategic seats of power. Meanwhile, both parties engaged in sometimes open warfare with him on every act or issue in which it was possible to delay or deny him a victory. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell forced him to dance the bipartisan two-step on every policy goal, and repeatedly pulled the rug out from under him – willingly suffering political damage to themselves in order to hurt the president. That continues.

However, once President Trump had fired James Comey, the impeachment strategy was gutted. Comey did an almost full reversal under congressional questioning a couple of weeks later (likely to save his own butt) and the Special Prosecutor process was forced to unfold without its intended defendant.

Three things happened at this point. First, the elites in both parties realized they’d not only been blindsided by Mr. Trump, but that he was now in tentative de-facto if not legal control of the Special Prosecutor’s office by virtue of his moral victory and (presumably) Session’s possession of documents and intelligence harmful to the anti-Trump conspirators. Second, the Democrats realized that it was no longer as much to the Republicans political advantage to continue working with them against Trump, but worse, that a broader Special Prosecutor investigation of the 2016 election could, and likely will, go badly for them. This is why they suddenly shifted into reverse on Russia and began telling all their people to back off the election hacking narrative. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see admissions on the left that Trump is innocent and suggestions that the Special Prosecutor is now unnecessary). Third, the largest impediment to President Trump’s full control over of the Executive Branch was now removed.

In my view, President Trump’s first “100 Days” really started with the Comey firing. I expect to see a steady increase in his ability to enforce his agenda, and a concurrent steady shift back to the positions he held during the campaign, hopefully including enhanced relations with Russia. The Left will fall back to Marxist v Fascist street-revolution mode as their power in government and the courts slips. The GOP establishment will continue to generate as much heat as they can on the president but increasingly fall back to deal-making mode to maximize their personal power and minimize conservative wrath in the mid-term primaries.

The real Trump presidency has now begun.

During the 2016 election, I wrote a series of articles explaining how Barack Obama’s global fast-tracking of the “progressive” agenda had caused the the traditional left/right division of western society to morph into a war of Nationalism vs Communism, essentially recreating the hyper-polarization that Germany experienced in the 1920s and early 30s. This was a phenomenon I predicted in 2009 with the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, and saw come to fruition in 2016 in a 25-nation personal fact-finding tour. http://www.scottlively.net/2016/07/01/my-2009-prediction-of-the-trump-campaign/

Just after the election, news emerged of a planned “Purple Revolution” in the United States, to be orchestrated by George Soros and the Clintons along the lines of Soros’ “color revolutions” in various countries of the former Soviet Union.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/11/11/clintons-and-soros-launch-america-purple-revolution.html

I then predicted the following, some of which has already occurred, sooner than I expected:

“1) An army of faceless anarchists engaged in civil disobedience and property destruction on an “anti-fascism” theme (imagine the explosion of street violence in the late 1960s but employing “social justice” rather than anti-war rhetoric – like Black Lives Matter but bigger and broader). This is designed to terrorize the public but also to deliberately provoke police reactions that can be documented on film and edited to misrepresent the police as Brownshirt-style fascists.

2) A coordinated propaganda campaign by all the usual suspects on the left in media, academia, Hollywood, and the non-profit/foundations sector, branding the Trump administration as a fascist regime akin to the Third Reich. This will build slowly but inexorably as the left gathers and weaves together its case like a crooked prosecutor in the courtroom of international opinion.

3) Obstruction of conservative policy through guerrilla litigation tactics by groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights and Southern Poverty Law Center, and their silent partners in the federal judiciary.”
http://www.scottlively.net/2016/11/17/world-war-d-part-2/

In the weeks leading to the Trump inauguration, Barack Obama jumped into the “resistance” movement with both feet and conducted a campaign of sabotage of our government designed to deny President Trump an ability to effectively govern. I compared Obama’s actions to Adolf Hitler’s sabotage of Cherbourg, France as the Germans withdrew from Brittany, and predicted an American leftist version of the German post-D-Day counter-offensive known as the Battle of Bloody Gulch.
http://www.scottlively.net/2017/01/03/obamas-hitlerian-departure/

Obama also attempted to trigger a hot war with Russia in his final days in office, a move that might well have worked save for the remarkable restraint of Vladimir Putin. To the US provocation of withdrawing its diplomatic staff from Russia in manner historically taken only on the threshold of military action, Putin responded with grace and humor, diffusing the crisis. US military maneuvers in Europe that had been set in motion by Obama in anticipation of a hot war footing were forced to play out in an entirely unilateral and unjustifiable context.
http://www.scottlively.net/2017/01/04/obamas-desperate-war-with-russia-gambit/

From Day One of the Trump administration, Trump-hating leftists and elitists from both parties, including the leadership of the GOP establishment, have worked to undermine every aspect of his administration and policy agenda and to lay the groundwork for his impeachment or forced resignation. It was only through superior strategic thinking that Trump outmaneuvered these “deep state” operatives and removed the linchpin of their strategy: James Comey. http://usdefensewatch.com/2017/05/the-inside-story-on-how-trump-dropped-the-hammer-on-james-comey/ (This is really a must-read analysis).

The “Impeach Trump” strategy was essentially gutted at that point, though those who set the Special Prosecutor process in motion to accomplish the goal were left building a gallows in the public square without a “culprit” to hang.

Like the malicious schemer Haman in the Biblical story of Esther, I predict that some of the very people that set up President Trump are going to dangle from their own noose.

But that’s a sideshow, now. The main event is the full-throated blood-in-the-streets Communist/Anarchist revolt that the political left has always dreamed of. They came close to achieving it in the 1960s. And they got a little taste this decade with the carefully orchestrated Black Live Matter rioting, and more recently with the Steve Scalise shooting. However, now that the “mainstream” media and Hollywood appear fully on board, and Bernie Sanders has given the order to his army to “resist” by any means necessary, and (after Ossoff) the “centrist” Democrats realize that they can’t seem to win through the legitimate political process any more, the perfect storm of political rage and opportunity appear to be shaping up for the summer of 2017.

I was a bit early in my prediction of widespread violence, stating in March of 2016 that I expected it to erupt before the November election http://www.scottlively.net/2016/03/17/there-will-be-blood/

However, as I pointed out then, the original agitators that started the war in the streets of pre-Nazi Germany were not the Nationalists, but the Communists. Nationalism was the reaction, not the cause. It’s very unfortunate that the closest blueprint for what’s unfolding in America is Germany, since the Nationalists here are by no means Nazis, nor is overwhelmingly pro-Israel Trump in any way another Hitler. However, Communists are Communists wherever you find them, as predictable as voter fraud in a Democrat-controlled city: they WILL initiate serious violence and blame it on “fascism,” its only a question of when and to what extreme.

Mark my words, the “Purple Revolution” will run red.

###

Update: Just a few days after posting this story comes news from Portland, OR:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/how-liberal-portland-became-americas-most-politically-violent-city-215322

In 2007 I was with the late, great Pastor Ken Hutcherson in Riga, Latvia, working with a broad coalition of Christian denominations to defend Biblical marriage and family values against the global LGBT agenda. When we discovered that the campaign was being advanced by the U.S. Embassy we paid a visit there to ask why the George W. Bush administration was working against the will of more than 90% of the Latvian people within their own borders. We got a lot of double-talk by a third tier diplomat, and the next day Hutch was publicly attacked and stripped of his credentials as a representative of the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiative. A few weeks later, diplomats from the US and Sweden led a minuscule “Gay Pride” parade behind a double wall of 6′ steel fences and guarded by an enormous army of riot police with full body armor and machine guns – proof that they truly understood just how offensive this championship of perversion was to the Latvian people, and just how determined they were to shove it down their throats.

In 2011, my scheduled late-February seminar on pro-family activism in Chisnau, Moldova was preempted by a sudden, secretive attempt by the Moldovan government to push through an “anti-discrimination” law on “sexual orientation” — in anticipation of presenting it as a gift to Obama via an upcoming visit to the country by Vice President Joe Biden. Instead of holding that seminar, I helped a coalition of denominational leaders direct a successful 4-day nationwide citizens lobbying effort to kill that bill, explaining in numerous media interviews that such “sexual orientation regulations” (SORs) are the seed that contains the entire tree of the LGBT agenda, with all of its poisonous fruit. This was the same Obama administration that in December of that year – by Executive Order – directed all US agencies to push the “gay” agenda globally: http://thegroundtruthproject.org/obama-administration-pushes-global-lgbt-rights-into-the-limelight/

In 2016, I traveled to Kyrgyzstan where I lent my support to a successful campaign to amend the national constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Again, it was Obama’s US State Department, and various George-Soros affiliated non-governmental organizations (NGOs), leading the effort to push the LGBT agenda on an overwhelmingly conservative nation.

This month, June, 2017, President Donald Trump’s State and Defense Departments, reaffirmed their support for the LGBT agenda. The White House itself did not, thankfully, but thus far, President Trump has NOT reversed Obama’s Executive Order that still commands the entire executive branch to actively undermine Biblical values on sex and marriage as a international priority.

I love my country, and am deeply grieved that in the area of sexual morality we indeed seem almost to have become, as the Iranians love to chant, the “Great Satan” of the world. When I read Chapters 17 and 18 of the Book of Revelation in my Bible, I cannot help but recognize a parallel between America and “Mystery Babylon,” whether or not they are actually the one and the same. “For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed acts of immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich by the wealth of her sensuality” (Rev 18:3).

What the world sees today is NOT the America established as a Shining City on a Hill, as proclaimed by the Pilgrim Governor John Winthrop, citing the Sermon on the Mount. Nor is it the “Christian nation” vigorously affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892), nor the “One nation under God” without which “democracy will not and cannot long endure,” as affirmed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Christian America has been suppressed and its power usurped.

Because of our apathy and fear of “politics,” today’s America is the plaything of the Secular Humanists of the “Deep State” – which really isn’t “deep” any more, because it’s defiance of Biblical morality and abuse of every lever of political power is now blatant and undisguised. True, this demonic shadow government has long existed, and served its own interests in countless undeclared wars, “regime changes,” domestic policy manipulations and judicial subversions of our constitution, but heretofore mostly from behind the curtain. Thanks to the Internet, and an awakened and activist populist movement, the hidden hand of the global “elite” is now visible to those willing to see. Yet so many Christians remain unwilling to look.

American exceptionalism was a manifestation of her Christian heritage and culture, represented by such things as the sending of missionaries throughout the world to build churches, schools and hospitals, and sometimes sending our young men to fight and die to defend the fundamental values of Judeo-Christian civilization. “Freedom” meant the right to raise your family without government control and “Security” meant a limited government that rewarded virtue and discouraged vice through education, law and it’s own internal rules. National Socialism and Communism were the greatest enemies in our history and the Marxist ideology that underlay both of them was the antithesis of what we held dear.

For what do we now send our young men and women to die in foreign lands? The right to kill unborn babies in the wombs of their mothers by the millions? The “freedom” to indulge in every form of sexual deviance with their attendant diseases and dysfunctions? The “security” of public policy and culture that decimates families and breeds social chaos and violence? “Freedom” that promotes vice and punishes virtue? “Security” that bleeds every working family of its earnings to redistribute to an ever expanding welfare class and the bloated bureaucracy that administers it?
Where is the exceptionalism we were once so right to hail? It has been replaced by various forms of National Socialism and Communism, recharacterized as “political correctness.” Yet many Christians still cheer as if nothing has really changed all that much.

I visited 25 countries in 2016 to assess and assist the populist movement wherever it advanced under a tacitly Christian banner. Today, its two biggest victories, the Brexit vote I celebrated in London, and the Trump presidency I flew home to cast my vote for, are both steadily being undermined by the “elites.” This international “Deep State” network is the actual “Great Satan.” It’s agents in this country, from those many still hidden, to the Paul Ryans, Mitch McConnells and John McCains are united in a grand conspiracy – pretending to serve the people while serving only their globalist goals – intentionally failing to accomplish that to which they pay only lip service, while stabbing President Trump in the back at every turn.

The President is not our savior, just a tough man willing to endure rats, snakes and leeches to drain a swamp. Our Savior is Christ and we are His hands and feet in this nation. It is only the Christian nation within the nation that has the power to defeat the “Great Satan.” Let us recognize that end as our duty.

After prayer and careful consideration, I, and my courageous wife, have decided, with the help of our stalwart legal team at Liberty Counsel, to take the unusual step of appealing the dismissal of the SMUG v Lively lawsuit to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. We believe that action is necessary to purge the prejudicial ruling of Judge Ponsor’s false and subjective assertion that the incidents in Uganda on which the suit is based (incidents by parties unknown to me that the record shows I had no part in) constitute crimes against humanity, lowering the standard for asserting such claims almost to nothing. While within US jurisprudence his statements might hopefully be recognized as mere editorializing and not legally binding, the same is not necessarily true in foreign and international courts where the ostensibly true (but actually false) statement “The United Stated Federal Court has ruled…” would severely undermine all Christian and morally conservative defendants charged with committing or even “inspiring” the type of garden variety civil rights abuses Judge Ponsor has said are now crimes against humanity.

His ruling:

 http://lc.org/060617350LivelyOrderGrantingSummaryJudgment.pdf

To be clear, Judge Ponsor considers me guilty of the worst category of international crime for simply preaching the Biblical view against homosexuality and teaching about the history and tactics of the LGBT movement – because other people I never met or communicated with, including officials of an independent sovereign nation where homosexuality has always been illegal, might possibly have been indirectly influenced to be hostile toward homosexuals based on my comments, and then to commit, over a period of ten years, a handful of relatively minor civil rights abuses which I have publicly condemned. To be sure, Judge Ponsor’s false narrative harms not only my name, but also potentially subjects me to further harassment and litigation in state, federal or international courts. But, beyond the harms perpetrated against me, Judge Ponsor’s “ruling” can be used by SMUG and CCR to intimidate and punish fellow Christians who dare speak up for Biblical values. I cannot in good conscience countenance these harms.

In a Daily Beast interview, SMUG’s lead attorney Pam Spees confessed that this is indeed their plan to use Judge Ponsor’s ruling to punish me and others for speaking out against the “gay” agenda around the world.

“The precedent set in the ruling was significant, Spees said, in sending a deterrent message to Lively and other anti-LGBT activists like him… persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a crime against humanity under international law…one of most serious crimes in international law. In looking at the evidence produced, it showed that Lively aided and abetted persecution, and was trying to do so elsewhere around the world. It’s just that he can’t be held accountable here because of the ruling limiting the Court’s jurisdiction–not that he didn’t do it.”

“Spees said Lively, and others like him, could face prosecution in other countries where laws to prosecute him already existed. These factual findings go a long way in helping advocates in other countries build support for these kinds of claims….[T]his case and these findings have contributed something very significant to the understanding of international law.”

The US federal judiciary is still the world’s most respected legal authority and with this devious strategic maneuver Judge Ponsor – ideologically though not necessarily transactionally aligned with Spees’ so-called Center for Constitutional Rights — had audaciously hijacked that credibility to serve the global “gay” agenda with devastating implications for the cause of Christ around the world. The only way that can be stopped is for me to voluntarily return to the lion’s den and appeal the very ruling that released me from the lawsuit. We now do so willingly, placing our trust in God that he will vindicate us.

Now for some background for those not familiar with the case and its dismissal

On June 5th Judge Michael Ponsor finally pulled the plug on the federal lawsuit under which I have chaffed for five years and two months. Accused of “Crimes Against Humanity” for simply preaching against homosexuality – rationally and compassionately — in Uganda in 2009, I was continually pilloried, harassed and maligned by leftist media and activist organizations around the world and characterized as a global agent of genocidal malice and intent. In 2014, the world’s largest and most powerful homosexual advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, designated me as public enemy #1 of the “gay” agenda around the world – a move I believe was designed to bolster the SMUG v Lively lawsuit.

My Motion for Summary Judgment killing the suit was finally granted on the grounds that the Supreme Court had severely restricted the obscure 1790s law under which it was filed, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). That occurred four years earlier in 2013, and I recall that in open court that year Judge Ponsor advised the parties that he would not rule on my then-pending Motion to Dismiss until SCOTUS had ruled in that case, strongly implying that SMUG v Lively would be moot if they curbed the reach of the ATS. Yet, after the ATS was gutted, Judge Ponsor not only denied my motion in a terribly hostile and blatantly flawed opinion, but also opposed my subsequent effort to ask the First Circuit Court of Appeals to review his decision.

Because of that, I was forced to endure another four years of pain and suffering at the hands of my leftist persecutors, whom Judge Ponsor had granted a fishing expedition into all of my files, writings and other ministry activities to look for ways to harm me. That “discovery process” placed a huge financial burden on my ministry, but even more so on Liberty Counsel, which had taken on my defense pro-bono.

The emotional burden was worse. I was grilled for two days under oath in Manhattan by a hired-gun Boston trial attorney, and forced to spend weeks responding to document demands and written interrogatories, and had year after year to assist my attorneys in preparing and reviewing countless legal filings. I lived throughout the entire half-decade of legal persecution with the knowledge that the long process – if not stopped by the judge – would end with a jury trial in Massachusetts, the most pro-homosexual state in the union, where the potential jury pool had all been subjected to years of propaganda casting me as a social pariah. The specter of a media-driven show trial and the likelihood of a politically motivated adverse ruling, with potentially large compensatory and punitive damages plus millions in attorney fees – followed by decades of harassment as SMUG’s debtor – always loomed before me.

This was all on top of the regular burden of hate-mail, slander and dirty tricks that anyone faces who opposes the “gay” agenda with any degree of effectiveness. Think “cake-bakers, printers and florists” and magnify the abuse they faced by several degrees of magnitude. My load of such things may be the heaviest of anyone in the U.S., though I’m pretty much used to it by now.

As a Christian pastor with deep trust in Jesus Christ, I willingly suffered all these things, praying always “Thy will, not my will, be done,” and recognized that I became a better man through that “refiner’s fire” of persecution. Still, pain of any kind is never easy to endure.

Then came June 5th. The case was dismissed and I was able to separate the sliver of good that I perceived Judge Ponsor did in finally following the law, from the great preponderance of malfeasance he perpetrated by NOT following the law four years ago and by issuing a ruling filled with animus toward me personally and legally indefensible conclusions about the law and facts of the case. I wrote to the journalist who interviewed me for the “Daily Beast” article:

“Like so many who embrace the “gay” cause as their own, Judge Ponsor lacks any sense of objectivity or fairness and has degraded himself and the federal judiciary with his sophomoric rhetoric and willingness to mischaracterize the facts to comport with a false political narrative.”

Over the past few days, my sense of relief from the dismissal has been replaced with the urgency of the danger posed by Judge Ponsor’s ruling to me and to Christian advocates around the world. As I began thinking of the implications of this ruling for me and all the courageous pro-family Christians around the world standing for Biblical truth against great opposition, I realized that our struggle is not yet over, and we must continue to defend the United States Constitution and our shared Biblical values. Therefore, I am voluntarily returning to the lions den. Please keep us in your prayer.

Abiding Truth Ministries
PO Box 2373, Springfield, MA 01101, www.defendthefamily.com, www.scottlively.net
June 6, 2017

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Contact: Pastor Scott Lively
413-250-0984
sdllaw@gmail.com

Judge Dismisses Bogus SMUG v Lively
“Crimes Against Humanity” Federal Lawsuit

Ruling: http://www.scottlively.net/2017/06/06/smug-v-lively-dismissed/

Statement by Pastor Lively:

After five long years, the case of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) v Scott Lively has been dismissed. I thank God for His deliverance from this outrageous and malicious litigation, designed solely to silence my voice for Biblical truth on LGBT issues and to cause me pain and suffering for daring to speak against the “gay” agenda. I also thank Mat Staver and my Christian attorneys at Liberty Counsel, especially Harry Mihet and Roger Gannam, who took on and defeated SMUG’s team of 14 lawyers with exemplary skill and fortitude.

I thank Judge Michael Ponsor, as well, for overcoming his clear ideological bias enough to acknowledge the legal deficiency of SMUG’s case and bring it to a close – even though he had the option four years ago to dismiss this case following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that slammed the door shut on SMUG’S specious legal reasoning.

To be clear, the SMUG case was utterly fraudulent in law and in fact – from the premise that a handful of minor civil rights violations by government officials over a decade in Uganda constituted a “Crime Against Humanity” akin to Hitler’s atrocities, to the ridiculous claim that I masterminded the Ugandan officials actions, unsupported by even a shred of evidence. What I did was tell the documented truth about the history and tactics of the “gay” political movement, and urge a compassionate Biblical response, emphasizing rehabilitation and prevention for LGBT sufferers. That is all I have ever done in almost 30 years as a missionary to the global pro-family movement. No hatred. No advocacy of violence. No invasions of personal privacy. Just an insistence that homosexuality be denied normalization in the mainstream of society in favor of the natural family.

The enormity of Judge Ponsor’s decision to now grant my Motion for Summary Judgment is reflected in the excessive and inflammatory language he used to condemn my beliefs and writings in his ruling. I forgive him for that, especially since he knows it is merely conclusory rhetoric, without any supporting analysis or binding legal authority. There wasn’t any of the systematic prove-up of a serious District Court ruling. Instead he gave the left fodder for propaganda as a consolation prize – the sort of red-meat hyperbole one finds in a college newspaper editorial by a “gay” student activist — but he gave me the legal victory.

Indeed, given the expectation of his fellow travelers that he would put the “gay” agenda above the law, the vast amount of money and legal man-hours they invested to ensnare and harass me, and the extent to which they punish those whom they perceive as traitors to their cause, Judge Ponsor’s decision to finally release me from their trap may bear a personal cost at the hands of his LGBT “friends.” Granted, he could have avoided all the pain and pressure by simply recusing himself from the case at the outset by acknowledging that he has long been a vocal supporter of the “gay” cause, a past financial supporter of an organization that funds the plaintiff’s legal team, and that his former law clerk was a key part of that legal team. Still, what matters most is that he did the right thing in the end, and I am grateful.

Lastly, I thank the many thousands of friends and allies who have been praying for me and sending supportive messages since this bogus lawsuit began. My pledge to you is to redouble my efforts to speak the truth in love and to support and equip the pro-family movement around the world. Our vision for a family-centered society that tolerates but does not condone or normalize homosexuality and related disorders is a little clearer and brighter today.

###

Press Release by the attorneys of Liberty Counsel, whose extraordinarily generous investment of time and money made this victory possible:

http://www.lc.org/newsroom/details/060617-victory-for-american-pastor-falsely-accused-of-crimes-against-humanity

Victory for American Pastor Falsely Accused of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’
Jun 6, 2017

SPRINGFIELD, MA – Late yesterday, Liberty Counsel client and American pastor Scott Lively won summary judgment against the foreign LGBT activists, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), which sued Lively for sharing his biblical views on homosexuality during three visits to Uganda in 2002 and 2009. The summary judgment order, entered by U.S. District Judge Michael A. Ponsor, puts an end to SMUG’s attempt to silence Lively and others who speak internationally about the LGBT agenda.

SMUG is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has received funding from George Soros. CCR is located at 666 Broadway in New York, an apt address for such an organization that attempts to use international law to silence people of faith and attack Israeli government officials.

In a direct challenge to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, SMUG tried to create new and dangerous precedent using international “crimes against humanity”—akin to genocide and war crimes—by relying on the obscure Alien Tort Statute (ATS). In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the deathblow to SMUG’s lawsuit by ruling that the ATS was never intended to allow a foreign citizen to sue a U.S. citizen in America alleging violation of some supposed international law. Scores of pending cases around the country were dismissed following the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Kiobel, but the one not dismissed was the SMUG case. Judge Ponsor has a long history of support for the LGBT agenda and said he considers judges “the unappointed legislators of mankind.” Instead of dismissing the case in 2013, as it should have been, Ponsor opened the door for extensive and needless discovery.

Although Judge Ponsor’s order dismissed the case in 2017, for the same reasons he should have dismissed it in 2013 based on the Supreme Court precedent, he let his personal bias against pro-family values and support of the LGBT agenda slip into what should otherwise have been a straight legal opinion. Legally, Judge Ponsor had no choice on the law. The Supreme Court had clearly spoken. But what he did in his opinion is unbecoming by hurling names at Pastor Lively. None of the evidence supports any of the allegations.

After Judge Ponsor refused to dismiss the case in 2013, thousands of hours later, including 100 hours of depositions, and 40,000 pages of documents, SMUG failed to produce a shred of evidence of any conspiracy or persecution by Lively. Rather, the evidence showed that Lively, in a country where homosexuality has been illegal for decades, urged treatment of LGBT people with respect and dignity, and the liberalization of Uganda’s laws against homosexuality, even as he spoke in favor of biblical sexual morality and against the LGBT political agenda.

“This is a victory for the Constitution and the rule of law,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, “and all Christians should celebrate the end of a lawsuit intended only to intimidate an innocent pastor into silence. But the court’s open display of activism in deriding Lively’s beliefs reminds us of the threats American Christians continue to face from a judiciary that is increasingly hostile to any expression of biblical truth to a decaying culture,” said Staver.

“Once Judge Ponsor properly concluded that he had no jurisdiction over SMUG’s concocted claims, his only duty was to dismiss the case and send SMUG back to Uganda the same way it came—empty- handed,” added Horatio Mihet, Liberty Counsel’s Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Litigation Counsel. “Judge Ponsor was without any authority—constitutional, legal, or otherwise—to showcase his contempt for the family values advocated by Scott Lively. Judge Ponsor’s misinformed opinions about Scott Lively are not worth the paper they are written on,” said Mihet.

Pastor Lively commented: “I thank God for His deliverance from this outrageous and malicious litigation, designed solely to silence my voice for biblical truth on LGBT issues and to cause me pain and suffering for daring to speak against the ‘gay’ agenda. I also thank Mat Staver and my Christian attorneys at Liberty Counsel, especially Horatio Mihet and Roger Gannam, who took on and defeated SMUG’s team of 14 lawyers with exemplary skill and fortitude.” And, he continued, “I thank Judge Michael Ponsor, as well, for overcoming his clear ideological bias enough to acknowledge the legal deficiency of SMUG’s case and bring it to a close – even though he had the option four years ago to dismiss this case following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that slammed the door shut on SMUG’S specious legal reasoning.”

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.