Homophobe Scott Lively: Kevin Spacey Shows 'Pedophile Core' of Gay Culture

Activists and commentators have worried that the Kevin Spacey's sexual assault scandal would give anti-LGBT forces an excuse to conflate homosexuality and pedophilia, as they have often done -- and now the virulently homophobic pastor Scott Lively has gone there.

"Speaking as the only person ever charged for 'crimes against humanity' (not a joke) in significant part for discussing the pedophile core of 'gay' male culture - and one of the first people ever listed as a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Center (for documenting that culture at the core of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party) - I'd just like to say, in advance, 'I told you so,'" Lively wrote in a World Net Daily column published late Tuesday.

Spacey came out as gay after BuzzFeed published an article in which actor Anthony Rapp alleged that Spacey had sexually assaulted him when Rapp was 14. Spacey said he did not recall any such incident, "but if I did behave as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior."

Now Lively, who was charged with those crimes against humanity for spreading anti-LGBT hate in Uganda and has taken partial credit for Russia's "gay propaganda" law, is using the news to claim that preying upon teenage boys is an "all-too-common aspect of homosexual orientation." He says pedophilia, connoting abuse of children, is actually "too broad a term" to describe what he calls an obsession with young teen and preteen boys, and that the correct term would be "pederasty."

"To be clear, I'm not saying all or even most men who identify as 'gay' molest children," Lively wrote. "Even the word 'children' is misleading in this context, since 'children' connotes preschool and grammar school ages, while the target of pederasts are young teen and slightly pre-teen boys. And I'm not saying lesbians share this problem to the same extent that it exists in male homosexual culture (though lesbian abuse of girls is a problem, too)." Lively went on to list several prominent gay men who have been accused of sex with teen boys.

However, "the empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children," including teenagers, concluded a study from the University of California, Davis, which reviewed the research extensively. "This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterized as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children." The fact that an adult molests a child or teen of the same sex does not mean the adult is gay, the study noted.

Lively also mentioned, to justify his gay-Nazi connection, that Ernst Rohm, the head of Hitler's Brownshirts, a paramilitary organization, was gay. That is true -- but Rohm was murdered in 1934, in the "Night of the Long Knives" purge of Nazi Party members Hitler feared would turn against him.

"Even before Ernst Rohm was murdered, the Nazis had begun cracking down on homosexuality, banning organizations, burning books, and arresting the first of some 100,000," scholar Matthew Wills wrote on JSTOR, an academic research site, earlier this year. "Around 15,000 gay people were sent to concentration camps, where some were experimented upon in bizarre efforts to find a 'cure' for sexual orientation, a foreshadowing of American psychological and later fundamentalist efforts to try the same thing."

Linda Harvey, another prominent anti-LGBT activist, used the news about Spacey as a jumping-off point for a new column on the same site decrying the LGBT inclusivity of some Disney films and TV shows, and claiming that sexual abuse by an adult of the same sex turns kids gay. Again, scientifically unsound. "No specific psychosocial or family dynamic cause for homosexuality has been identified, including histories of childhood sexual abuse," says the American Psychiatric Association. "Sexual abuse does not appear to be more prevalent in children who grow up to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, than in children who identify as heterosexual."

They can try selling their hate, but we're not buying it.