Globe-trotting antigay evangelical preacher Scott Lively has made several trips to Russia in the past decade, and so he's qualified to speak about the increase of violence against LGBT Russians.
At least, that's what Lively told fellow antigay right-winger Linda Harvey on Harvey's Mission America radio show Saturday, according to Right Wing Watch.
After Harvey denied the well-documented connection between the recent increase in anti-LGBT hate crimes in Russia and President Vladimir Putin's June signing of a nationwide ban on "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships" in forums accessible to minors, Lively claimed that the LGBT Russians being harassed, kidnapped, beaten, raped, arrested, and sometimes dying, are actually victims of angry butch gay people.
"The guys that are beating up gays in Russia -- and it's not any more prevalent than it ever has been, really, and it isn't all that prevalent at all," qualified Lively, "but the ones that are doing it are butch homosexuals who are beating up effeminate homosexuals, the same thing that happened in Germany; this is gay-on-gay crime, at least that is what it appears to be."
RWW notes that Lively's Germany reference is apparently an homage to a book he coauthored alleging that Adolf Hitler was gay. In The Pink Swastika, Lively contends that the Nazi Party was controlled by gay people who perpetrated the Holocaust to exact revenge on the Jewish religion's condemnation of homosexuality.
In his radio spot with Harvey, Lively admitted that he's been in consultation with Russian lawmakers and leaders of the Orthodox Church, reporting that he's hopeful right-wing, antigay Russians will "reclaim" the imagery of the rainbow, since "it doesn't belong to [LGBT people]."
Lamenting what he sees as the moral decline of the U.S. into "totalitarianism with a heavy gay emphasis," Lively applauded Russia's state-sanctioned homophobia as an example of a great Christian nation.
"I'm taking some credit for this," Lively said of his long-standing involvement in Russian antigay policies.
Lively is an expert at exporting American antigay bigotry, and it's already gotten him into legal trouble. The U.S. evangelist is currently facing charges of international persecution from LGBT activists in Uganda, who have filed a lawsuit aiming to hold Lively responsible for conspiring with religious and government leaders to persecute LGBT people in the nation, where parliament is still considering the so-called Kill the Gays bill that proposes capital punishment of homosexuality in certain instances. A federal judge recently rejected Lively's request to dismiss the case, clearing the way for the first-of-its-kind case to proceed.
Listen to the entire radio segment at Right Wing Watch.