Leading Homophobe Scott Lively Considers Run for Congress

Having failed to become governor of Massachusetts -- not that anyone really expected him to -- virulently antigay minister Scott Lively is "contemplating a run for Congress," he writes in a column published today on the right-wing site BarbWire.

Lively, who received only 19,000 votes as an independent candidate for governor last November, says he has switched his registration to Republican and is considering a run this year against U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, the Democrat who represents the First Congressional District of Massachusetts, located in the western part of the state.

One of his motivations, he writes, is to forge an alliance between the U.S. and Russia. He is concerned that President Obama and "Republican liberals" are "jointly waging a campaign of anti-Russian propaganda designed to deceive conservatives into supporting a hot war with Russia." The reason he wants to be friends with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin: they're antigay.

"American and Russian conservatives could today be cooperating together to roll back liberalism around the world," Lively writes. "Instead, the cultural Marxists of both major US political parties are trying to drive a wedge between us with the absurd lie that Russia is trying to revive the Soviet Union."

Russia and its leaders, he says, are imperfect, but the nation is a bastion "of Biblical Christianity and of ideological conservatism." He asks, "Is there any other 'first world' nation standing up against the homosexual agenda like Russia is doing?"

Lively, who says he hasn't firmly decided to run but is taking donations, has claimed to have helped inspire Russia's "gay propaganda" law, which forbids any positive mention of LGBT people and their interests in venues accessible to minors. He has also said that antigay violence in the nation isn't perpetrated by straight people responding to the homophobic climate fostered by the law; instead, it's "butch homosexuals who are beating up effeminate homosexuals."

Lively has exported his hatred elsewhere in the world as well. He is facing a lawsuit for his role in pushing Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act (struck down by a court on procedural grounds last year). He has been less eager to take credit for that law than for Russia's, claiming the Uganda measure was totally homegrown.

At any rate, Lively's congressional ambitions are likely to go nowhere fast. All the members of Massachusetts's congressional delegation are Democrats, and the 19,000 votes Lively received in the governor's race represented less than 1 percent of those cast.