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Evangelicals Are Winning

the Gay Marriage Fight—
in Africa and Russia
Evangelical advocates, having failed here, are finding friendlier audiences all
over the world.

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AFP/Getty
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Alex Seitz Wald

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} Jan. 23, 2014, 4 p.m.

L ong before President Obama selected three gay athletes to lead the
American delegation to the Sochi Olympics, long before President
Vladimir Putin declared Russia to be the world’s new “moral compass,” and long
before practically anyone in the West had even heard of that country’s new
“homosexual propaganda” law, one American had thought deeply about it —
because he’d helped invent it. “My greatest success, in terms of my own personal
strategy, is Russia,” Scott Lively says from his native Massachusetts, where he
launched a quixotic bid for governor this year.

Lively, who is being sued in U.S. federal court by a gay-rights group for alleged
crimes against humanity over his work fighting “the gay agenda” in Uganda, led
a 50-city tour through the former Soviet Union several years ago to warn its
citizens about the international gay conspiracy. His message and his proposed
solution — to criminalize LGBT advocacy — were received with open arms in
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town-hall meetings, local legislatures, and St. Petersburg, which sent an open
letter to the Russian people and later became one of the first cities in the country
to outlaw “homosexual propaganda,” paving the way for the national legislation.

“I was an alcoholic and a drug addict until I got saved in 1986, and since that
time my focus has been to restore a biblical focus with regards to marriage and
sexuality,” he says. Lively became a lawyer, author, and advocate in pursuit of
the cause, but he gave up on the United States almost a decade ago, when one of
his cases (challenging an antidiscrimination law)failed. “I began shifting my
emphasis, which is going to the other countries in the world that are still
culturally conservative to warn them about how the Left has advanced its agenda
in the U.S., Canada, and Europe — and to help put barriers in place. And the goal
is to build a consensus of moral countries to actually roll back the leftist agenda
in my country,” he explains matter-of-factly.

For Lively and the rest of a small but incredibly influential band of American
activists who spend their time crisscrossing the globe to meet with foreign
lawmakers, deliver speeches, make allies, cut checks, and otherwise foment a
backlash against the so-called international gay-rights agenda, this is nothing
less than a war for the fate of human civilization.

And in a large part of the world, they’re winning. In the last month of 2013 alone,
India’s Supreme Court re-criminalized homosexuality, Nigeria outlawed LGBT
advocacy (gay sex was already punishable by up to 14 years in prison), and
Uganda passed a watered-down version of its infamous “kill the gays” bill, which
allows for life prison terms — if not the death penalty — for “aggravated
homosexuality.” Homosexual relations are illegal in at least 77 countries; same-
sex marriage is legal in only 16.
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As the push for gay rights has made remarkable strides in the West, the story is
very different in much of the developing world. Middle Eastern governments
continue to threaten gays with the death penalty. And while parts of Latin
America and East Asia have seen progress, from Eastern Europe to Africa, India
to the Caribbean, gays are losing, not gaining, rights. In almost all of these
countries, American veterans of the culture wars have been working behind the
scenes. “When you scratch the surface on a lot of the backsliding that’s going on
in a lot of countries where it’s getting harder to be LGBT, you find a lot of
Americans,” says Ty Cobb, director of global engagement at the Human Rights
Campaign, which is just now ramping up efforts to combat those efforts abroad.

Mainstream American conservative groups keep their distance from Lively and
his compatriots, having abandoned their support for criminalizing gay relations
after the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision striking down Texan sodomy laws.
“There’s the very conservative groups that are fighting the gay-rights agenda in
this country, and then there’s the farther right groups that are fighting the
agenda elsewhere,” says Warren Throckmorton, a professor at the evangelical
Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the
international agenda.

But even these far-right groups are hardly as fringe as, say, the Westboro Baptist
Church. In his trial, Lively has enjoyed legal representation from the Liberty
Counsel, a group affiliated with Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell.
“This lawsuit against Rev. Scott Lively is a gross attempt to use a vague
international law to silence, and eventually criminalize, speech by U.S. citizens
on homosexuality and moral issues,” said Mathew Staver, the Liberty Counsel’s
founder and chairman. Right-wing sites like Accuracy in the Media and WND
have published Lively’s columns, and the American Family Association’s Bryan
Fischer has cited his work.
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And Lively is hardly alone. “It’s not necessarily that he’s more extreme; he’s just
more obvious about it,” says Pam Spees, a lawyer for the New York-based Center
for Constitutional Rights, which brought the case against Lively on behalf of a
Ugandan LGBT group. At least a half-dozen American organizations specialize in
international LGBT issues, defending sodomy laws abroad or advocating for the
criminalization of gay advocacy. Even some domestic groups also dabble in
international work. Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for
Marriage, the most prominent group fighting same-sex marriage in the U.S.,
spoke this summer to the committee in the Russian Duma responsible for the
gay-propaganda law, just days after it passed the full parliament. “I think that
this visit, the invitation to visit Russia, will enable the development of this
movement around the world,” he told the lawmakers. He came to support an
anti-LGBT adoption law, which passed five days later.One of the biggest groups
in this space is the Alliance Defending Freedom. From its base in Arizona, ADF
says it works in 31 countries, with an annual budget of $30 million and a staff of
44 lawyers and 2,200 allied attorneys.

More-mainstream groups like the American Center for Law and Justice, founded
by televangelist Pat Robertson as a counter to the American Civil Liberties
Union, have set up offices in Africa and Eastern Europe that, among other
efforts, combat LGBT equality. And the Family Research Council spent $25,000
lobbying Congress “to remove sweeping and inaccurate assertions that
homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human
right” in a bipartisan resolution condemning Uganda’s antigay law. FRC made it
clear it does not support the law or the death penalty for gays, but in a radio
message (later deleted from the website), FRC President Tony Perkins criticized
President Obama’s condemnation of Uganda’s legislation. “Mr. President, as
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long as you characterize efforts to uphold moral conduct that protects others and
in particular the most vulnerable, as attacking people, civility will continue to
evade us,” said Perkins, who did not answer requests to comment for this story.

In places where discrimination and sometimes violence against gays is not just
tolerated, but celebrated, audiences have lapped up the Americans’ messages,
and the Americans are eager to dish it out — along with the cash raised from
their congregations back home.

One hundred years ago, there were only about 10 million Christians in Africa.
Today, there are 500 million.

For years, evangelical missionaries have been deeply invested in Uganda — even
more so since President Yoweri Museveni declared the country to be in the
service of God and the first lady started worshiping at the evangelical church run
by Robert Kayanja, who compares homosexuality to murder. “Whatever you see
here is the fruit of American labor,” Kayanja tells Roger Ross Williams in the
filmmaker’s new documentary, God Loves Uganda, as they sit in a well-
appointed church built with American money. (Kayanja is one of the richest men
in Uganda.)

Kapya Kaoma is an Anglican priest from Zambia, and when he started attending
evangelical conferences and visiting Christian bookstores across Africa as part of
his Ph.D. dissertation research, he found something surprising. “Their language
sounded more like they were American, not like African Christianity,” Kaoma
says. “You go to Zambia, you go to Zimbabwe, you go to Uganda, Nigeria.”¦
Wherever you go, where conservatives are winning, they’re using the same
talking points that are used in America.”
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David Bahati, the parliamentarian who authored Uganda’s infamous anti-

homosexuality law, told The New York Times he got the idea for the bill from
conversations with members of the Fellowship — a powerful Arlington, Va.-
based group that puts on the National Prayer Breakfast and owns the C Street
house where several members of Congress live (the organization has since
distanced itself from Bahati).

Lively has been deeply involved in Uganda as well, and an LGBT-rights group
there is suing him under the U.S. Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign victims
of human-rights abuses to seek compensation in U.S. courts. During the debate
over the bill, a Ugandan tabloid outed 100 gay Ugandans, with a banner that
read “HANG THEM.” A few weeks after David Kato, known as “Uganda’s first
openly gay man,” won a defamation lawsuit against the paper, he was killed in
his home. Kayanja’s rival, pastor Martin Ssempa, once gave the editor of a local
magazine a copy of Lively’s book about gay Nazis, according to a U.S. diplomatic
cable published by WikiLeaks.

Lively dismisses the suit against him as “frivolous” and the notion that he, a
white American, is responsible for a Ugandan law “racist.” Still, the case is
moving forward; in a 79-page decision last August, U.S. District Court Judge
Michael Ponsor ruled that the plaintiffs had provided “detailed factual
allegations supporting” the claim that Lively “bears individual liability for aiding
and abetting the commission of a crime against humanity.”

Spees says she hopes the decision will set a precedent to hold others accountable.
“It’s not just someone going in and spouting off about their ideas and what the
Bible is. It’s someone who has a very clear agenda of how to strip away basic
rights,” she explains. “And if he was doing it domestically, he would be subject to
civil claims.”
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American social conservatives are also heavily involved in one of the most high-
profile cases in the world, defending the right of Belize’s government to preserve
its sodomy laws. The tiny Anglophone country carries outsize importance
because both sides see it as a means to toppling laws in the rest of the Caribbean
(one of the most repressive regions on the planet for LGBT people) and other
former British colonies. Eighty percent of the countries in the 53 Commonwealth
of Nations outlaw gay sex, and because their legal systems and criminal codes
are all similar, reform in one could set a precedent elsewhere. The legal systems
of tiny Caribbean nations are unusually intertwined, and 12 members of the
Caribbean Community share a common court of last resort in the Caribbean
Court of Justice.

“The single-biggest thing people need to understand is the link between taking
down sodomy laws and same-sex marriage,” says Bradley Abramson, senior
counsel at the conservative ADF. “It’s a doorway to same-sex marriage. If they
can knock down sodomy laws, it’s a very short step — inches — to same-sex
marriage.”

On the other side of that fight is Caleb Orozco, the founder of the main LGBT
group in Belize. He’s suing to overturn the sodomy laws and has faced so many
threats that his lawyers worry he will be assassinated before the case can go to
trial. No one else has been willing to come forward, and just a few weeks ago a
gay man got beaten up at a party and had his ear bitten off. When the man went
to the police station, bloodied and dazed, they laughed at him, Orozco says. “You
won’t see local evangelicals doing this, but it is evangelical Americans funding
this stuff,” he says over the phone from Belize. “They’ve chosen small countries
with weak human-rights investment to galvanize support. They’ve been doing it
very strategically.”
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In 2011, Pew surveyed more than 2,200 evangelical leaders from around the
world gathered at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, and found a wide
gulf between the developed and developing world when it comes to optimism
about their faith. Most leaders from the Global North said evangelicals were
losing influence in their home countries — Americans were particularly bearish:
82 percent said their influence was waning — while 58 percent of leaders from
the Global South said they were gaining strength, and almost three-quarters
predicted they’d be even stronger in five years.

It’s hardly that Americans invented homophobia in the developing world. In

Nigeria, for instance, 98 percent of those surveyed by Pew disapprove of
homosexuality; that figure stands at 99 percent in Kenya. Life was never easy for
gay people in these places, regardless of whether the Americans had come to
town.

But the Americans offer a rationale for cracking down by tapping into a deep
nationalistic nerve that may not have been exposed naturally. Much of the
developing world sees homosexuality as a foreign problem — a Western problem
— and its legitimization as an insidious form of cultural neo-imperialism.
Citizens in these countries look around and see no gay people, because laws and
cultural norms keep gays hidden, so their only exposure to homosexuality is
often from abroad. “Africans resonate with the denunciation of homosexuality as
a postcolonial plot; their homophobia is as much an expression of resistance to
the West as a statement about human sexuality,” Kaoma wrote in a report for
Political Research Associates, a liberal Massachusetts-based group that has been
at the forefront of tracking American conservatives’ work on LGBT issues
abroad.
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It’s not hard to see why they believe this. The first gay-pride event in Kenya was
held at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, as the Obama administration has made the
advancement of LGBT rights “central … to the realization of our foreign policy
goals,” an embassy spokesman said. When Obama promoted gay rights during a
visit to Senegal last year, African leaders lined up in opposition. “Those who
believe in other things, that is their business. We believe in God,” responded
Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto. The Catholic archbishop of Nairobi said
Obama should “forget and forget and forget” about decriminalizing
homosexuality on the continent, scoffing at the notion that Americans should
“become our teachers to tell us where to go.”

The American activists working abroad play directly into these fears, coming
from a place where so many institutions — the media, government, academia,
Hollywood — have, as they see it, been co-opted by the homosexual agenda. “The
only challenge was convincing them that that it could happen in their country,”
Lively says.

The threat is not that gay couples will have sex with each other and get married;
it’s that they’ll marginalize Christianity, fundamentally disrupt the social order,
and — most important — recruit your children. “European homosexuals are
recruiting in Africa,” President Museveni has said.

This all comes literally out of Lively’s playbook. “Had it not been for that
argument [about recruiting children], it was not going to come up,” Kaoma says.
“They’re doing these laws because they want to protect their children from the
international gay agenda.”

LGBT advocates see these fears as especially ironic because the laws in all the
Commonwealth countries, including Uganda and India, are relics of British
colonial “anti-buggery” rules. “We really still need to find a way to have a
conversation about basic rights that doesn’t bring in all the baggage of
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colonialism, economic imperialism, cultural imperialism,” lamented Mark

Bromley, chairman of the Council for Global Equality, an LGBT group based in
Washington.

That’s part of the reason India’s recent Supreme Court ruling that a sodomy law
is constitutional was such a setback. “It’s important for us in the greater dialogue
to say this isn’t just a North American, Western European thing,” Bromley says.

In Russia, Putin’s proudly homophobic, hyper-masculine posture is a way to

confront the West and foment nationalistic fervor. The country decriminalized
homosexuality in 1993 and saw some gains on smaller issues such as the
legalization of blood donations from gay men and the right to change one’s legal
gender. But, beginning in 2006, as Russia experienced a revival of the Orthodox
Church, which had been persecuted under Soviet rule, a dozen or so regions
passed laws banning “propaganda” of “nontraditional sexual relations” to
minors. The laws are often written so broadly they make it very difficult to
discuss or advocate for gay rights.

Things have only gotten worse for LGBT Russians since then: Moscow’s city
council passed a 100-year ban against gay-pride parades in 2012; TV personality
Anton Krasovsky was fired in 2013 after coming out as gay; and the parliament
approved a national version of the propaganda law, which had been
overwhelmingly rejected as recently as 2009. When gay Russians have tried to
demonstrate in recent years, they’ve been subject to violence from antigay mobs
and even the police, who often arrest LGBT activists and leave violent
counterprotesters alone. Putin’s government has encouraged the crackdown,
finding that strident social conservatism is useful in uniting his base and
building power internationally. “He’s saying essentially that to be pro Russia is
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to be anti-LGBTQ, and to be pro-LGBTQ is to be pro-Western and anti-Russia,”

says Cole Parke, who studies LGBTQ rights in Russia for Political Research
Associates.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the ongoing proxy fight between East
and West in Ukraine, a country split between joining the European Union and
maintaining ties with Russia. Pro-Russian activists hyped fears of the moral
decay if Kiev joined the West, and as mass protests roiled the capital, ominous
billboards appeared warning that “association with the EU means same-sex
marriage.”

The chair of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee tweeted that closeness with
the EU would mean “pride parades will be held instead of Victory Day parades”
in the streets of Kiev. And pro-Russian demonstrators marched with banners
saying, “Homosexuality is a threat to national security.”

Meanwhile, in nearby Latvia, Lively joined with a local mega-church leader, a

Seattle-based pastor, and a Russian-language media owner to found a group
called Watchmen on the Walls, which has been active around post-Soviet
Eastern Europe and believes “there is a war between Christians and
homosexuals.” “Putin is trying to build a nonaligned movement that can be
proudly homophobic, as opposed to mildly homophobic at the U.N.,” explains
Bromley, nothing that Russia’s veto power on the Security Council circumscribes
hope for progress at the international body.

Having been largely driven out of North America, Europe, Australia, and parts of
Latin America, American social conservatives will forge alliances wherever they
can, even when they admit those ties are less than ideal. From Putin to Robert
Mugabe in Zimbabwe (where the ACLJ opened an office that opposed the
addition of an LGBT equality provision in a new constitution), the Americans
have thrown their lot in with whoever will work with them. “At the United
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Nations, we find our allies where we can get them. We don’t support what
Islamic countries are doing to Christians, but at the same time, they support us
on the marriage issue, they support us on the life issue,” says Abramson of ADF.

Critics joke about a “Baptist-Burkha alliance,” but it’s proven to be tremendously

effective in defeating international declarations to support abortion and gay
rights. Austin Ruse, the head of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute,
which works mostly at the U.N. and opposes the criminalization of
homosexuality, even as it fights same-sex marriage, agrees. “On sexual identity,
our coalition is really huge,” he says, pointing to between 80 and 100 countries
as allies, depending on the specific issue. The big question, Ruse added, is what
China does. Beijing has largely abstained from international debates on sexual
identity. It tolerates LGBT social groups domestically as long as they’re not too
political, but if it reverses its policy, that could change the game in a big way.

The same goes for major Christian denominations, where American

conservatives often align with conservatives in Africa and elsewhere on key
social-policy votes against their fellow Americans. After Gene Robinson was
elected the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church in 2003, at least 30
congregations switched their allegiance to the archbishop of Kenya to avoid
being associated with the U.S. church.

American social conservatives realize that associating with these countries looks
bad, but they insist they “hate the sin and love the sinner,” as the saying goes.
“We really are not monsters,” Ruse says. “We really do not want to harm
anyone.” Indeed, they all distanced themselves from Uganda’s antigay bill when
it included the death penalty. Lively, perhaps the most extreme of the bunch,
calls even the life-in-prison version overly draconian and says it’s his “biggest
failure.”
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But for LGBT-rights advocates, that’s not enough. Even if the U.S. conservatives
don’t support laws that harm gays, they say, LGBT people are being harmed in
places where the Americans work. “The blood of African gays in places like
Uganda and other parts of the world is on the hands of the U.S. extreme Right,”
Kaoma says. “When you lie to people, when you tell Ugandans that ‘there is a
well-financed group that is coming after your children — defend yourself against
this movement,’ they will take the law into their own hands and you don’t know
what they’ll do.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly called Lively’s court

case a war-crimes trial. A gay-rights group is suing him for alleged crimes
against humanity.

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